For the people who are not even aware of this drama, or who've heard people talking about it but have been overwhelmed by the information and don't know where to start:

There is a brief overview in a comment here. A longer and more detailed explanation of what happened is here. The full list of links in reverse chronological order is here.

I have been following RaceFail aka The Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom off and on since the beginning, and I have made comments in other people's journals but have not commented here up until now for a number of reasons. As haddayr said back in January, there were already plenty of white people talking, most of them had more intelligent things to say than I did, the whole thing made me sad because I honestly like lots of the people who were acting like idiots, and most of what I had to say was "me, too!" and there was already too much to read out there.

But in the last few days it has been clear that many of the people on the anti-racist side feel abandoned by the pro SF authors (/editors/other industry people) on LJ, and would really LIKE those of us who've been following this mess to say something, even if it's just, Me Too.

So: Me, too.

This is not a situation where both sides have behaved equally badly. There are people on the anti-racist side who've been critical and harsh; however, the response from the other side has included open threats to people's careers and a genuine attempt to silence people. Most recently, coffeeandink was outed repeatedly, even though she's stated a desire to have her real and online identities kept separate. This is appalling.

It needs to be okay, in the SF community, to raise the issue of racism and racist tropes. The fact that racism still exists in our society, and that we are a reflection of society, and that things are not going to get better if critics are silenced -- this is all pretty damn obvious. I can understand the impulse to be defensive. I can identify with the impulse to get defensive. (I hate finding out about stupid things I've done in published work, because it's too late to fix it. Ignorance is bliss!) But I can't understand the Internet equivalent of swearing a vendetta against someone who has, at worst, misread your book (or your friend's book) and been rude about it. Outing someone online is a punishment. It's what our community does with traitors and criminals -- Rachel Moss was outed because she was a threat to the community, and could not be properly shunned unless people knew who she was. It is a reasonable response to a genuine threat. It is not a reasonable response to criticism.

I have more to say, but I'm going to come back and do it in another post, I think.

My sister gave Kiera a DVD of the movie Oliver! as a gift in December, and last month, we sat down and watched it. Kiera loves musicals, and she very much enjoyed the movie. Afterward, I spent some time wandering around Wikipedia -- I think I started out wondering about some of the children in the movie, and then started reading some bits and pieces about the book vs. the movie. I read the unabridged Oliver Twist years ago, but it's been a long time.

Anyway, Wikipedia's entry on Fagin told a story I was not familiar with. Fagin is Jewish; this is unstated but obvious in the movie, and stated outright in the book, which calls him "the Jew" far more often than it calls him by name. According to the Wikipedia entry:

Dickens claimed that he had made Fagin Jewish because "that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew. He also claimed that by calling Fagin a Jew he had meant no imputation against the Jewish faith, saying in a letter, "I have no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public or private, and bear my testimony (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I have ever had with them..."

Fagin is a fence, and part of the criminal underworld of Victorian London. It may in fact be true that fences were generally Jewish. However, Fagin was the only Jewish character who had appeared in Dickens's work up till that point. In fact, he's one of the only Jewish characters in the English literature of the period. And while he is portrayed somewhat sympathetically in the movie (he's a criminal, and occasionally violent, but he's also much kinder than the law-abiding Mr. Bumble), in the book he is an evil man who embodies every single nasty anti-Semitic stereotype that existed at the time, from hunched shoulders to a nasal voice.

In other words, Dickens may have said that he was not anti-Semitic, but any modern person who reads the character, and Dickens's defense, is going to roll their eyes. If Dickens were on LJ and making this case for himself, people would mock him and his pantsless self all over the Internet. Even if we go all alt-universe and try to imagine an LJ with Victorian sensibility (where some degree of anti-Semitism is socially acceptable)...no one would buy his claim that he harbors no prejudice and it's just a coincidence that the only Jewish character he's ever written is a viciously stereotyped villain.

Here is where the story gets interesting. In 1860, Dickens sold his London home to a Jewish banker, James Davis, and became acquainted with him and friendly with his wife Eliza. In 1863, Eliza wrote to Dickens to call him out for the portrayal of Fagin, saying that Jews considered the character "a great wrong" to them.

Dickens responded (eventually -- I would be interested to know if he attempted first to justify his portrayal of Fagin to his Jewish friend) by trying to repair what he'd done. He started revising Oliver Twist, working backwards, and removed all mention of Fagin's Jewishness from the last 15 chapters. In one of his final public readings, he had removed all the aspects of Fagin's description that were anti-Semitic stereotypes. And, in 1865, in the book Our Mutual Friend, he apparently put in a number of Jewish characters, all sympathetic.

So, to recap: Dickens was, at times, defensive. (It's not anti-Semitism! My fence character is Jewish because all fences are Jewish! It's pure coincidence that there has never been another Jewish character in any of my books!) But when taken to task by someone who said, in so many words, that this character had wronged her and her people, he took the criticism to heart and took steps to try to do better.

I stumbled across this story a few weeks after RaceFail started and was frankly kind of boggled to find a discussion of controversy surrounding cultural appropriation and Writing The Other from well over a hundred years ago. Damn, these discussions have been going on for a long time. But -- I think it's worth noting that

(a) You can be a really good writer, good enough that people are still reading you a hundred years later, and you can be generally a decent human being with progressive political views, and you can still fail at this stuff.

(b) Being a good (or even a great) writer and a good person and all the rest doesn't excuse you from trying to do better.

And also

(c) This conversation has happened before. This conversation will happen again. The bad news is that the supply of clueless people seems to be endless, and this conversation is exhausting and disruptive and draining for the people who repeatedly find themselves drafted as educators. The good news is that these conversations do accomplish stuff. With each iteration, there are people who learn, do better, and speak out. And while the supply of clueless people seems to be endless, some of them will Get It, and be there to speak out the next time around.

Anyway. I am sharing this mostly because I found the historical perspective fascinating.

ETA: It is clear even from the Wikipedia entry that Our Mutual Friend fails in its own set of ways. Writing overly romanticized, saintly, sentimental depictions of The Other is its own variety of Fail. But I will cut Dickens some slack for being a Victorian, and credit for making a sincere effort, as I imagine his friend Eliza did.