On Racism.

Posted as a comment to this article on white privilege.

I enjoyed your paper, and what struck me is that with a gentle twist, it could have been about a lot of other topics. The situations you discussed certainly were prime examples of ignorance and fear, which are two important ingredients of racism, but it seems to me that the authors in question could have been in any other group and come up against similar challenges.

I guess what I'm saying is that even if the person getting victimized by ignorance and fear belongs to a racial/ethnic minority, I'm not sure that it's actually racism unless their race or ethnicity is the deciding factor.

What if the picture on the cover of Liar had instead been of a man? Would the publisher's excuse be any more acceptable? Having not read the book, I can only imagine that the character could also be lying about her gender. Would it have been worse if it had been a white man? Black? Latino?

With regards to DeShawn Days, the removal of "crack vials" sounds like a white-washing of a minority's childhood experience, but would a children's book detailing a parent's alcoholism or violent abuse of a spouse be published without any of the less-friendly imagery being edited out? I assume the same reasons--teachers and children's librarians wouldn't buy it--would be cited.

And Ahmed's struggle with the title is poignant, but it seems to me that the industry is rife with stories like this; mistakes from the people who run the presses which, fearing the cost of correction, they refuse to change. I remember a scene in Taxi Driver where Albert Brooks is at a campaign office complaining to a vendor that the buttons they sent said, "WE are the people" instead of "We ARE the people". I'm not saying that it does not matter, but neither the mistake nor the follow-up were necessarily racism even though they can clearly be deconstructed as such.

I don't think we've moved beyond race here in America or anywhere else, any more than we've moved beyond sexism, classism or any number of isms. But I do think that in some cases, the root causes of behaviors that seem racist (or *-ist) are of more importance than the perceived -isms.

The publishers are afraid that people won't like it if kids see a book of dark poetry including drug imagery. Maybe there's room for a publisher who is not afraid. If that latter publisher makes a financial killing, then the more staid publisher will follow.

I assume that authors have contracts with regards to publication before those proofs come out. From what I hear, JK Rowling has had complete creative control since day one of the Harry Potter franchise. If an author doesn't like what a publisher is doing, they should be able to take their work and walk.

I don't have a solution for everything, but I think it may not be constructive to assume that, when there's a conflict between two people of different races--even when cultural differences exacerbate the conflict--that the core problem is racism and racism alone.

Sam I Ain't

Y'know, I was reading Green Eggs and Ham to my son (see icon) the other day, and I realized that the most important message wasn't one of being foodventurous (cool term, BTW). It's a message of identity and attachment.

We all know the name of the guy pushing the GE&H: Sam I Am, right? And everyone else in the story is identified as *something*, at the very least--box, fox, house, mouse, train--except for our protagonist. He's got no name. His species is indeterminate. We don't know anything about who or what he is, only that he won't eat GE&H, and the fact that he's annoyed by SIA.

And of course, we learn through the story that he is deeply, strongly identified with the fact that he hates GE&H, even though he's never tried it. It's an attachment that keeps him from living his life, because he spends all but two of the pages of the book--the beginning, where he expresses his disdain for SIA, and the end, where he expresses his love for GE&H--defending that (non-) identity.

And at the end, after wasting time and energy, after causing a train rain boat moat disaster, he ends up not only trying GE&H--and look at the defeated look on his face when he does so--but actually LOVING it, declaring all that had been true to suddenly be untrue. It was a total personality shift.

Except for one thing. He doesn't say that he loves SIA, and based on the fact that he hated SIA right from the start, this isn't the first time that they've had this interaction, and it won't be the last. And based on the fact that SIA never loses his faith in his ability to convert no-name, my guess is that other interactions have ended up the same way, with no-name clinging to some shred of identity which still, pages later, slips away.

The lesson, I told my son, is not to be willing to try anything, but to know himself and to be wary of the motivations of others who are trying to influence you. Sam I Am could have been a pusher, saying that no-name needed to try Giggly Extacy and Heroin, or God, Ecclesiastes and Heffalumps and no-name let himself be worn down. Of course he was happy with the new experience which turned out be not as bad as he had made it out to be (how could it have been?), but having lost that last shred of identity, his soul was that much more empty and easy for SIA to claim the next time around.

Why a Blog?

So many blogs are started and left to go fallow, why should I start a new one?

Well, vanity, really. I participate actively in a Portland-oriented on-line community, and I happened to post something in a food-oriented thread about the San Francisco restaurant Le Colonial. Here was the post:

But part of what I miss was the ambience. If you're ever in SF with SisterMary and a hundred bucks to blow, go to Le Colonial. It's hidden away amongst a forest of tall buildings, and once you've tossed your keys to the valet parker, you walk in the main entrance and... *poof* you're in colonial-era Vietnam, in a French-style villa, and the city around you has disappeared. Go upstairs and out to the balcony, where the wicker fans turn lazily in the summer air, and you can you can have a cigar with your bourbon while you wait for your appetizers to come. Sit on a couch with your main squeeze and delight in delicate flavors delivered to you by wait staff who--to a one--have the gift of making you feel like nobody else in the room matters while they're helping you.

While you're eating, you might have a fleeting thought of the city outside, but it'll be fleeting, as if the city were just a bad dream of a place very, very far away. But just in case, you might want a little glass of port after dinner to keep your palate sweet as you rejoin cold, dirty reality.

Sigh. As I say, that restaurant is the best thing about San Francisco.

One of my esteemed forum-mates complemented that post and asked if I write like that in my blog, and I thought, well, why not? So here goes!