sigelphoenix

Bujold is ... well, she entered one of the conversations here (anonymous comments but signed with her name) and apparently she's going to back off and do a lot of thinking. Which ... sure, whatever, I don't much care. (I am disturbed that various things keep making me twitchy about trying to read her books, which I largely enjoy, though.) I'm trying not to follow her too closely, because I want to keep from getting fixated on one prominent fuck-up, and the fuck-up-er's personal trajectory of enlightenment. It's why I stopped reading what Elizabeth Bear was saying during RaceFail '09 (v. 1.0?). I hope the attention doesn't get fixated on Bujold the way it got on Bear.

The first reason is that it's problematic to have one famous white person as the masthead of "the bad ones," when the opposition is necessarily made up of less famous, "faceless" brown people (+ white allies). The fuck-up-er still gets the privilege of being named, of identity, while the anti-racist forces don't (and there are direct consequences of this, such as the labelling of the anti-racist voices as "hordes," "mobs," and such). Secondly, it's an easy way for that person to become "The Racist," the other, not-one-of-us person who gets to be the scapegoat so other white SFF people can say, "whew, not me," or even worse, join the anti-racist criticism as a way to disclaim their own culpability and proclaim that they're on the "right side." Yes, having vocal support from allies is great, of course, but I worry that this might allow the (white) SFF community to dismiss this as The Thing Patricia Wrede and Lois McMaster Bujold did. And then SFF itself doesn't actually learn from it or change.

... which is my long-winded attempt, I think, to start formulating an answer to your question. I think this dynamic is at least partly responsible for why people are still committing the same mistakes individually, and why the community as a whole supports/allows for these mistakes.

/tl;dr