Non-Privileged White Men: Marketing Fandom: HUGO AWARDS!
29. Jul, 2009 
6 Comments
Mary Kowal (among many, many others) is participating in International Blog Against Racism Week.
I only mention Kowal because I recently reviewed one of her short stories (the first I’ve read by her) and I’m very impressed. (She also friended me on Facebook and is a frequent mention of Scalzi’s – so why not help her get around?)
I’m personally very sensitive to race/gender/religious/&etc other forms of bias and discrimination, having been subjected to it from a very young age: my personal tale of woe runs the gamut from ‘too smart’ discrimination, to ‘ageism’ (I’ve always looked far younger than I really am), to ‘heightism’ (I was almost always the shortest boy in class and yes, suffered through insensitivities like always being at the end of the line (line up tallest to shortest), never being picked for teams when playing basketball (hate that stupid game anyways…) and being picked up and stood up on a teacher’s desk so she “could hear me” and anti-semitism (you wake up at the age of ten to find swastikas drawn on the sidewalk in front of your house; kids rolling pennies at you in the cafeteria & etc. btw – when handled properly, pennies make EXCELLENT anti-personnel projectiles – thanks for the ammo, Dicks!)
The ‘argument’, if you can call it that, that has always been used to diminish my personal experiences has always been (when one is comparing discrimination sob stories) but you’re white and everyone just assumes…
Except for two things: my early indoctrination into being the object of prejudicial attentions sensitized me. I acquired an understanding, at a very early age, that prejudice does not have to have a ‘reason’ to occur. Being victimized unjustly, I promised myself that I would never be guilty of committing the same – nor would I ever avoid being subject to it just because I could ‘pass’ as a member of the so-called privileged white class.
One of my proudest achievements is having gotten the residents of a Florida ‘cracker’ town to stop using the expression ‘Jew him Down’. (I’m non-practicing, non-believing and have been for ages. Doing the above required self-identification and getting in the faces of some pretty influential townies – a situation that could easily have been avoided.)
AND – you can’t hide height. Like many non-whites, I understand being singled out just because of the way you look. I could say, like many non-whites – ‘you don’t know what it’s like until you’ve been in my skin’ (males of average or greater height do not know and can’t ‘appreciate’ what it is like and women can’t even begin to approach an understanding) – but, while not denying the personal experiences of non-whites, I don’t think that its a true statement that you can only truly understand prejudice if you’re a member of the group being singled out.
I think – at least in the ‘hurt’ department – there’s very little difference between a kid being teased and bullied because they’re black or because they’re short, or belong to a different religion, or because their mother dresses them funny, or any one of a number of other things that kids pick on. Yes, some folks do have the luxury/escape/comfort of being able to claim membership in the accepted majority – but many don’t. How much of a difference is there between being pulled over for ‘driving while black’ and being pulled over for ‘driving while looking suspicious’?
It’s all about rejection and exclusion from the tribe – and I don’t like being told that I can’t be a member of the tribe of folks who have been discriminated against for their physical appearance, just as much as I didn’t like being excluded from the mainstream for looking different.
So yes, this is Blog Against International Racism Week (not blog against international anti-semitism week or blog against international height-disadvantaged males week) and I can claim some victim-status by dint of folks lumping Jews in with ‘other races we think it’s ok to pick on’, and I’m content with my own personal actions in this particular arena, but I do disagree with the conceit that it is not possible to appreciate the plight of someone who finds themselves an ‘other’ in the greater society. That is, in some sense, an additional wall against understanding. ‘You can’t understand what it is like’ kind of shuts the dialogue down, does it not?
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From the LTSNBN comes the revelation that the WSFS business meeting at 2009’s Worldcon – Anticipation – will include resolutions that would require a con committee to ‘get more involved, in a promotional way’ at mainstream/commercial-cons like ComicCon and and Dragoncon and to create lower-cost ‘youth’ memberships.
Yay! Two concepts discussed here regularly over the past year and a half or so – though the versions of the resolutions I’ve read seem a bit watered down – but that may just be me.
Getting ‘proactive’ at mainstream cons does not mean standing around and telling people about ‘real fandom’: it means getting a booth, filling it with some big names, twisting whatever arms are required to get a couple of scheduled events/presentations/panels and, in a positive way, making the attendees of those commercial-cons feel that they are ‘missing’ something if they’ve never been to a Worldcon.
Tap Roger Ebert, an astronaut, a couple of well known and truly geeky actors; a few popular writers who inhabit both worlds and get the message out that they attend all of the cons, because they love the fans, but when they really want to get intimate and the place they hang their hat, is Worldcon.
Youth membership? Sure, why not – but they’re still not going to really vote and attend until there are programs offered they are interested in and someone does a good job of explaining why ‘membership in WSFS is not just paying a poll tax to vote on the Hugos’.
These are all well and good proposals, necessary ones, but they do not address the fact that there is a whole panoply of things that need changing and adjustment before any of these good ideas will really be effective.
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I’ve now gotten up to 1980 with the Hugo Nominee Novels page – and will finish it out later today
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OMG! You leaked something that was discussed on LTSNBN!!! Heresy!!!!!
I would love to discuss this stuff, but it is secret and private to SMOFdom so I shall have to wait until the BM agenda is published.
I thought I just heard someone saying, “Run with it now, Steve, before the Worldcon Business Meeting can mess up your great idea!”
I don’t know who you people are or why you think this blog belongs to someone named ‘Steve’ – and Cheryl, using words like SMOF is inappropriate in a public setting – no matter what some liberal may have told you…
“I think – at least in the ‘hurt’ department – there’s very little difference between a kid being teased and bullied because they’re black or because they’re short, or belong to a different religion, or because their mother dresses them funny, or any one of a number of other things that kids pick on.”
Whoa, I can’t begin to say how dumb I think this comparison is.
Yes, being picked on for any number of reasons makes you sensitive to the concept of being an outsider, but no, it doesn’t give you the experience of being treated in a racist way, and the knowledge of what a lifetime of that means, in the context of American cultural discrimination, in short.
“How much of a difference is there between being pulled over for ‘driving while black’ and being pulled over for ‘driving while looking suspicious’?”
Quite a bit. And it’s really not a sensible thing to lecture POC on how they’re basically the same as you, and how they should feel about it.
“‘You can’t understand what it is like’ kind of shuts the dialogue down, does it not?”
It can, at that, but neither is “I understand just how you feel” a more accurate response.
“Tap Roger Ebert”
Roger has a conflict with Worldcon, the famous Toronto International Film Festival, which he never misses if possible. You also do realize he can’t talk any more, but only type to produce an artificial voice, right? But, anyway, you can’t get him to a Worldcon unless the dates don’t conflict in a given year for some reason, and are then willing to pay all the way for him and Chaz. In other words, you’d have to make him a GOH, and the dates would still have to not be a conflict.
“an astronaut,”
Been done a bunch of times; gets much less excitment than you’d think. Unfortunately, actors are who produce the larger crowds, and presentations from producers of tv shows and popular movies and franchises, and you have to convince them, and usually convince them it’s worth spending a lot of money, as in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars they spend for a ComicCon production.
This sort of thing, for example. And for fewer than a couple of hundred thousand dedicated people, they’re not apt to be convinced. A few individual actors and producers maybe.