I swore to the gods that I wouldn’t write about race again. It’s like sticking my hand in a blender every time. And the problem is that I can never forget the damage.
So … in the interest of sticking my hand in a blender in a different way, here’s an allegory of sorts for folks who wonder why people of color get so upset sometimes about cultural appropriation. I feel like I’m going to end up trivializing race here, but many people have a strong identity of themselves as being of Geek Culture, whatever that means to them, so perhaps this is a good starting point.
Remember that awful “I Am a Geek” video?
Yeah, that one, which involved Wil Wheaton and changed entirely from conception to execution. The end result, many people felt, was a betrayal of who they were as geeks. Exploitation, even, from mainstream media, shuffling off real geeks and replacing with celebrities who did not understand even the most basic things about being a geek—even shunned such things and put them down. Parts of our culture. Damn it.
As Wil Wheaton eloquently put it:
When you’re speaking to people who read TMZ and People magazine, getting contributions from MC Hammer, Ashton Kutcher and Shaq is a logical choice. But when you’re speaking to geeks, it’s insulting to us to pretend that they are part of and speak for our culture. Those people are not geeks; they’re celebrities who happen to use Twitter. Featuring them as “geeks” undermines the whole effort, because they aren’t like us. I’ve been a geek my whole life. I’ve suffered for it, I’ve struggled because of it, and I’ve worked incredibly hard to remove the social stigma associated with all these things we love, like gaming and programming. It’s like a slap in the face to be associated with these people who claim to be like me, and want to be part of our culture, but couldn’t tell you the difference between Slackware and Debian, a d8 and a d10, or how to use vi or emacs. In other words, they haven’t earned it, but they’re wrapping themselves in our flag because their PR people told them to.
In other words, mainstream appropriated geek culture and turned it into something that no geek would have been part of willingly. It gets worse, and hasn’t stopped; anywhere from TV shows and movies that claim to show geeks but don’t, to attempts to list, say, sexiest geeks, but almost nobody on the list is actually geeky.
This upset a lot of people.
This is what people of other appropriated cultures feel like. Well. Perhaps a proximity. But the outrage is there. The anger is there. The reaction of indignant is there.
Who are people, who’ve never been outside of mainstream, know about us geeks? What do people who’ve only gone on African safaris know about the black experience in America?
Of course, neither are simple black-and-white affairs, but perhaps you see my point here—or perhaps not. I don’t care. I just wanted to say this, because I’ve been living with seeing these parallel reactions and I wanted to get it off my chest before it drove me crazy, particularly with the current hubbub around Spinrad and cultural appropriation.
I give points to Spinrad for trying to express something about cultural appropriation. Unfortunately, like that video, he started with good intentions—probably—and it morphed into something that pissed people off instead, that was itself a gross misunderstanding. And people of course feel betrayed. Of course there is anger. Of course we felt that the people who created that video are tools; of course people of color feel that Spinrad was a tool.
And, you know, have you ever tried explaining geek culture and why that video pissed you off to someone who didn’t see a problem because they just didn’t know how much, say, D&D and tech and comics and fantasy and SF and Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica and on and on and on—they didn’t know how much that means to us. They also often don’t try to understand. Like talking to a brick wall, sometimes, eh?
That’s how people of color feel—or, let’s cast the net more widely and include people of cultures in general, like Irish who are pissed off about mainstream’s appropriation of their culture, starting with St. Patrick’s Day and going downhill from there; or Italians who are pissed off about having their culture shown off as being a mob culture; or Americans who are pissed off about how Europe doesn’t understand us in our diversity; and so on and so forth—this is how people of culture feel when they try to explain things to an outsider.
And that outsider thinks that because they use Twitter, or because they spent a year in Paris, or because they watched American reality shows, or because they read manga, that they know better than geeks, the French, Americans, or the Japanese, about how they live, about how they feel about mainstream culture misrepresenting them.
Plus, geek culture is quite varied. So are the cultures of other people. But mainstream doesn’t see us that way, they think we’re a caricature, a stereotype, and that’s that. And sometimes geeks don’t see people of color that way, they see a caricature, a stereotype. Oh, people can say that every stereotype has a grain of truth in it; but what stereotypes really are is a misunderstanding and over-simplification of an entire group of people.
There is one more thing I want to cover. And that’s the concept of safe spaces. I feel like this happens every time people talk about “safe spaces” for stories—you know, like all-female anthologies, or all-Asian anthologies, or suchlike. Why are these safe spaces, but white male anthologies, say, aren’t?
Well, when you were a geek in high school, did you feel like hanging out with the rest of the non-geeks and talk about D&D? Of course not. They would make fun of you. They would put things down. They wouldn’t understand. They’re mainstream; they didn’t need a safe space to discuss sci-fi or role-playing games or Linux distributions or what have you. We did. Sometimes individual parts of geek culture need safe spaces from all the other ones.
But we would never say that mainstream needed a safe space. They already have all the space they could ever want. They marginalize us, not the other way around. Many of them don’t mean to. It just happens. It’s how things are—at present.
This is similar to how white male writers marginalize—even if they don’t mean to—female writers, or writers of color, or transgender writers, or gay/lesbian writers, or indeed, anything that’s not the “mainstream” of SF and fantasy. And that’s why safe spaces are more important for the marginalized than they are for the mainstream—indeed, one could say that the mainstream doesn’t need it.
And of course, the fact that anthologies that are specifically all SF or specifically all fantasy, or even sub-genres of such, exist is because they are themselves safe spaces for us from the wider mainstream media.
Anyways, these are the parallels I want to draw. Maybe they’ll help you understand things better. Or not. After all, allegories aren’t perfect, and there are some things about race that run deeper than being a geek.
I could give up my geek habits—indeed, I have done so numerous times—but I cannot forget that I am Vietnamese, because that is simply part of my longer heritage. Or, more practically speaking, I look Vietnamese—I can never not look Vietnamese. Mainstream culture will treat me the way I look, not the way I am.
Of course, this is why I’m online so much. And why I tend to take on white male avatars and a white male identity. Because then I can forget, for a little while. This is not right to do. It’s kind of like melding with mainstream culture and throwing away your role-playing games in an attempt to “grow up” and fit in. Only perhaps kind of worse.
Anyhoo. Those are my thoughts on yaoi race.
And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can get my hand out of the blender fast enough this time. In fact, I’m turning off comments, though not pingbacks… probably. I just don’t want to deal with this stuff. I hate dealing with this stuff. I’m sure sometimes y’all hate trying to explain to non-geek overly religious people with crazy ideas why D&D is not the downfall of teenage morality. It’s kind of like that.
Thank you for reading, even if you hate me.
