xaara

About a week ago, a woman came through my line at Borders with platinum blonde hair, long lavender nails, and two deep purple bruises around her eyes.

And I said nothing, even though I assumed all the things I've been taught to assume--her husband's beating her, she's afraid for the kids, she's afraid for herself, some part of her believes he loves her. I treated her just like I would have treated any other customer, asked her whether she had her Borders Rewards card and whether she'd like a bag. Wished her a good day.

Maybe she really did fall down a flight of stairs. I hate making assumptions about people I don't know.

But maybe someone hit her and what she really wanted was for me to ask if everything was all right, if there was anything I could do. I know there have been times when I've sat on the Metro, lips tight, and wished someone would ask me if I was okay. And I've never had two black eyes, except when I opened a car door into my face when I was a kid. (I also fell going up stairs and left tooth marks in the wood floor at the top and closed my pinky in a door that year--it was not my most graceful period.)

Maybe everything was all right. Maybe she has some sort of weird skin disease that makes it look like she has two black eyes when she's really fine. Maybe. Maybe.

I will never know. I don't regret not asking her. It wasn't my place. But some fundamental human part of me wishes I had.

(Pudgeball kitten has decided that he loves All Things Shiny. His best friend at the moment is a crinkly foil Christmas ornament that he carries around with him and stashes in various places. Also: all of the tin foil has disappeared from the recycling and reappeared in corners around the apartment.)

I just finished reading J. M. Coetzee's Foe. It is superficially a retelling of the writing of Robinson Crusoe. That's interesting, but not the part I was interested in.

Because really, it's an exploration of the inherent darkness of writing, its seductiveness, the loss of fact in pursuit of truth, the loss of truth in the pursuit of a beginning, middle, and end. About how storytellers are always a little in love with their stories. About how authors warp and bend to fit their needs, starting with a stolen grain of truth and finishing with a masterpiece of fiction. About substance.

And I wonder: am I that author? Is writing inherently a process of theft, each one more clever than the last, until we are left with nothing but hollowed-out shells of the truths we have used?

My aunts constantly reinvent family stories. Each Christmas, they bring out the whole repertoire, each time making themselves the centerpieces of others' experiences. When I was young, my mother told me never to take what they said as truth without asking her first.

This fascinated me. Not that they lied, because I lied then and lie now, as does everyone. Not that they lied, then, but rather that they perceived their lies to be truth. That they could tell a different version of the same story each year. I began asking for the same stories, noting dissimilarities between each person's telling and the various tellings of a single person.

The project of documenting my family's inherently incomprehensible past thus became instead a project of understanding the mind of the storyteller.

What I post here is as true as I can make it. Yet I constantly resist the urge to invent myself, to tell stories that never happened, to embellish those that did. I don't want my sister to pull aside her children, ten years from now, to tell them not to trust me. And I live in a subtle but constant fear that one day I will not be able to know the difference between the stories I have lived and those I have lived only in my mind.

I'd like to preface this by saying that I don't know anything about SGA or its fandom. And that this is therefore not really about the recent wank concerning racism in AUs. If you want to read about that, many of the posts have been collected in metafandom's most recent post. That series of posts, however, started to make me think about how we view race and racism, of how we think about what we say, how we contextualize our relationships with other people

What I'd like to address is not so much the issue of racism in fandom. Or anywhere, for that matter. I won't deny that it exists. In fact, I would argue that in many ways, it has become more subversive and more damaging as the institutions supporting it have been forced underground.

I won't deny that minorities in the United States have to deal, frankly, with a lot of shit. I know the statistics about high school drop-out rates and poverty rates and immigration. Minorities have trouble in this country.

I'm white.

Just putting that out there, because what I have to say has simultaneously nothing and everything to do with the color of my skin.

In a reply to a deleted post, which was in turn part of a discussion of the SGA fic that inspired this race discussion, scarletts_awry quoted the original poster (OP) as having said, "Well, I can't really comment on the racial aspect -- I'm a white girl, so I've never had to deal with that societal flaw."

Which is absolutely the crux of the race problem from several angles. First of all, the original poster felt that she could not comment on racism because of her own race. Secondly, the OP seemed to think that being white created a buffer between her and the world in which people are racist. Third, this comment implied that white people are somehow impervious to racism, and are never on the receiving end of racist comments or actions.

Each of these three points is one I've encountered over and over, and each one makes me wonder, every time, why racism is considered so separately from any other form of discrimination. I'd like to take the time to come up with an organized, elegant essay on the subject, but I'm tired. So, point-by-point rebuttal:

1. Racism is discrimination. And everyone knows what discrimination feels like. You have been ignored in a classroom because the teacher likes the kid in the back more; you have been passed over for a promotion because your boss doesn't like you; you've tried to sit with a certain group of people at lunch only to be summarily shunned as they return to their self-referential conversation, ignoring you. These are smaller instances of discrimination, to be sure, nothing like the deep and often subconscious discrimination of racism, but they provide at least some common ground, somewhere we can all meet and say Yeah, I know what you mean.

White people are therefore no less able or qualified to comment on racism than anyone else.

2. White people have to deal with racism. All the time. I have to deal with it on a daily basis here in Wisconsin, an intensely white state; I had to deal with it on a daily basis when I lived in Washington DC, which was majority black. These two opposite experiences gave me some interesting contrasts to work with

3. It is entirely possible for someone to be racist against a white person. I'm sure it doesn't happen as often as it happens to minorities, and I know I've had very specific experiences that don't represent those of most Americans. But believe me, I'm speaking from experience in saying that it is very possible to be discriminated against as a white woman. Racism is not a one-way thing. It's a web. It's a white person discriminating against a Hispanic person discriminating against a black person discriminating against an Asian person discriminating against a white person.

As a sort of addendum to that: "white" is a race. The United States does not consist of "white" and "race."

I suppose my real point, which could probably be substituted for everything else I've said here, is stop telling me that I feel guilty about racism and start understanding that I sympathize.