IBARW 2!

[oyceter]

Guess what? It's almost time for Intl. Blog Against Racism Week again!

Yes, I am making this a yearly thing.

Since it started around mid-July last year, I want to keep it around the same time. But since my birthday is in late July, and I am entirely selfish and really don't want to be dealing with potential race-related stupidity around my birthday, I am making the first full week of August officially the week of IBARW.

So that's August 6 to August 12!

This year, I want to a) read through all of last year's entries and pick my favs, b) blog more about POC reactions to racism (internalized, denial, acknowledgment, anger, etc.) without having it turn into "But POC are racist too OMG WOE!", c) actually do something about the "international" part, and d) continue to post about it the rest of the year too.

What Can I Do?

Well! I'm glad you asked! (or, uh, didn't, but whatever, I'll pretend that people did.)

1. First, I'd love volunteers to be Icon-Makers of the Revolution!
   
   I made some icons last year, which are still up for grabs, and I will make more this year. But I am singularly uncreative and am running out of icon ideas, and my icon skills are passable but really not the best. Also, for people who want customized personal icons or whatnot, it'd be nice to have more icon-makers to go to.



2. Second, I need a Record-Keeper of the Revolution!
   
   You'll be compiling all IBARW posts during the week, like rilina did last year in the handy link compilation. I think mostly people comment with a link to theirs, so you don't have to search all over the internet to find things. The link compilation will include all posts for IBARW, including sporktastic ones, though I encourage people to create their own recommended posts lists too!
   
   
   • Alternately... since IBARW generated over 200 posts last year, I think it'd also be cool if there were a Programmer of the Revolution who wrote up a link-compiling program that would have people input the link, title, poster, time posted, and summary of their posts and spit out a handy-dandy list. I think I do have webspace for something like this, although I'd need to re-investigate, as I have completely forgotten what I can do with it.



3. Thirdly, post!! If you're a white person and don't want to take attention away from POC bloggers, I respect that a lot. But if you still want to contribute without taking attention away, you can also post links to posts POC have made as well, or drive traffic, or search for IBARW links that people may have missed.

And while I'm asking for things, I so want an Anti-Racism 101 blog a la Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog. I would very much contribute and possibly even be able to create the blog, but I don't think I have the time to post to it often. Maybe I will think about just compiling links and whatnot for the FAQs section or something. Hrm...

Thoughts? Questions? Bueller?

Comments

(frozen) (no subject)

[oyceter]

On LJ, my impression is that there is a central core of, primarily American, well educated left-wing thinkers who talk about racism all the time in public, another group who link to various race related articles with or without comment, and everyone else will only touch on the subject directly in private and that only occasionally.

I suspect that our meters for discussion of race may vary or we aren't in very similar circles. I found in my four years on LJ that race was almost never touched upon, or if it was, it would lead to a giant wankfest, a la SGA. Sometimes people would critique shows on race, but the comments would get increasingly virulent. And I think this is where experiences differ; ever since I have been on LJ, I have been painfully aware that the main fannish world is extremely white and extremely uncomfortable with being called out on that fact. This is, of course, not noting groups like deadbrowalking that make themselves spaces for fans of color. But in general, if people just stumble into fandom, they stumble into a very white space.

Well, it is always hard to quantify non-participation and even harder to find out the reasons for it. My general impression is that fandom as a whole hates wank and will avoid wider meta issues because they are perceived as leading to wank. (They may have a point about that last one.)

To be honest, I think fandom avoids race in a way that cannot be explained by the desire to avoid wank. I think the desire to avoid heated topics is a part of it, but after having seen multiple conversations being drowned out by protests of "We are colorblind!" or "Why must you talk about race?" I find it hard to believe that it's just the desire to avoid wank-potential. Of course, there's the fact that fans see race as a wanky issue to begin with, which I would argue is because the climate is very unfriendly to those trying to seriously and continually discuss race. Also, fans generally don't seem to have much of a problem looking closely at slash or LJ social dynamics.

As regards active attempts to shut conversations down, I didn't see any of that myself in the SGA debates, although I have seen a lot of people say it happened so I assume that was mostly in the SGA-specific discussions, which I never saw. In the wider meta discussions I never saw anyone who was clearly attempting to shut the conversation down except for when tempers had already got really heated.

By "shutting down," I generally mean the trend of being shouted down for being racist whenever someone mentions that a show's racial politics are dodgy, the immediate attempts to direct the conversation to whiteness, the attempts to not look at white oppression of POC but to rather focus on red herring topics like "reverse racism" and "But POC are racist too!" I don't think everyone does it consciously; I in fact think many people have such a knee-jerk reaction that they do it subconsciously. I think fandom as a whole is extremely uncomfortable acknowledging white privilege and as such will go to great extremes to avoid it in conversation. Of course, I don't think everyone in fandom is like that, and I do think things have changed in the last year (when I started noticing), but there is still a long, long way to go.