Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

shweta_narayan has posted some useful and interesting thoughts on category structures and oppression, starting with the idea that, for most people, a robin has more bird-ness than an albatross does. Weirder, apparently people think that an albatross is more like a robin than a robin is like an albatross; intuitively, I would have thought that "A is like B" was reflexive. And if you ask people
"is this a bird?" they'll say yes faster about a robin than about an albatross or an emu.

That's interesting when it's robins and eagles and albatrosses, or whether 4 is a "better" even number than 4,278, but it extends to different groups and kinds of people. And it may be part of why people "just happen" to think of white men more often than nonwhites or women when they're looking for contributors to an anthology, or speakers at a conference, or candidates for city council.

The annual meeting of SF³, Wiscon's parent organization, was on October 3. According to the SF³ blog, the meeting passed two resolutions, one saying that "it is the sense of the SF3 Annual Meeting that rescinding Elizabeth Moon’s GoH invitation would best serve WisCon’s goals and community." and the other a vote of confidence (and chocolate) to the troika for their handling of the situation.

This has been mentioned on the Dreamwidth and LJ Wiscon communities; the post at the SF³ blog is closed to comments, but there's an email address for feedback about these statements. Not having been at the meeting, I have no further information.

Prompted by a long, anti-Muslim and strongly pro-assimilation post by Elizabeth Moon, shweta_narayan wrote about the pressure to assimilate and how it has affected her.

This is hard stuff, but worth reading. It's not everyone's experience, but it's real, and difficult, and seldom seen by those of us who are, at least mostly, part of the dominant culture. Because one of the demands, often, is that people should pretend that assimilation was straightforward.

(I may post about what Moon said later, but Shweta's post is worth reading even if you've never heard of Elizabeth Moon.)

I was on Size Acceptance 101 Friday night; that went pretty well, though not perhaps as focused as I'd have liked. I mentioned this to Adrian, who said that 101 panels tend to be like that. But I think we said some useful things, and nothing really stupid, and the audience seemed to think we were being informative. One of my fellow panelists did complain about an ex-coworker who walked every day at lunch and cycled to and from work, and seemed disdainful of the panelist for how fat she was; someone else pointed out how problematic it was to criticize someone else for her body choices (and cycling 20 miles each way to work is a serious distance but not an absurd one), especially in the context of that panel, and she backed off, saying it was about her interactions with that coworker. Still a little problematic, but we went on to other things. One of those other things was people's attitudes toward exercise, both in terms of how it helps us connect to our bodies, and the ways (good and bad) that others react to a fat woman exercising, or wanting to exercise. [The panel was all-female, as was the other I was on and I think two of the three I have attended; this is Wiscon.] We talked about some health things, including the destructiveness of weight-loss surgery and of insurance industry attitudes toward it: in particular, people who have had that surgery because the insurer would pay for it, and insisted on it as a precondition to paying for treatment they actually needed or wanted. I felt a little off balance right at the beginning, because the moderator asked us to talk about our journeys toward fat acceptance and where that had started, and I don't really organize/remember things that way. It's not an unreasonable question, even though I don't have a good answer for it; wild_irises suggested that if this happens again, on that or some other topic, I just say "I'll pass, that's not how my memory works," (Other areas I can see that coming up would include "how long have you been poly?" and "when did you realize you were queer?"; I can say things that might be relevant on either, but I suspect not briefly or as an introduction to the discussion.)

My other panel was "Would you let your daughter…?" which I had offered to moderate thinking it was going to be mostly about guiding children through choices of books, movies, etc, and the reasons for why we might advise children (from small kids through teens) to not read/watch certain things, or want to discuss the implications of the material, and which wound up having a bunch of more general parenting choices, and some parenting venting/pitfalls stuff (including feeling judged by other mothers). The audience wasn't much larger than the panel, and it wound up being a pretty open-ended discussion; at the end, I addressed the audience and said "Thank you all for agreeing to be on this panel." So, not what I expected or really planned (to the extent that I did plan), but I think successful.

"Revenge of Not Another F*cking Race Panel" was a lot of fun: six panelists, all women of color, answering questions on audience-posed questions in categories including "We Welcome Our Robot Overlords," "Apocalypse A-Go-Go," "_________ in Space!", "Khaaaaan!", Super Michael Jackson Ballerina, and "Sparkly Pony." Questions in the last included "tell us about your bad Mercedes Lackey fanfic"; about as serious as it got was "Tell us about a time when you adapted a recipe to be vegan or gluten-free and it went really badly, or really well." The ground rule was that the panel could/would discuss anything except race; a few times panelists said "or is that about race?" and got a pass. (The origin of this panel, I gather, was people complaining that if there was more than one non-white person on a panel, they would be asked to talk about race or about a writer of color, and that they were tired of it: not that we shouldn't be talking about race, but that they wanted to be asked about as wide a range of topics as the white panelists are.)

For related reasons, I went to a panel called "White to White," on ways white people can talk to/educate each other about race and racism. It was a lot about ways of pointing out when a statement or action is racist or problematic without eliciting the sort of defensive "am not! How dare you!" reaction that gets in the way of conversation: if someone reacts as if they've been accused of treason, they're not going to think about whether they should change what they're saying or doing. (A large part of what was suggested—and I agree it's useful, but it's far from sufficient—is to try to emphasize the statement/action rather than label the person, and if you're not sure, say that you find something problematic, rather than that you are sure it's racist.) This connects to stuff about choosing your battles; when do you say "that bothers me" and when do you say "How about that local sports team?" or "I need to go say hi to cousin Jay"? (There's no single answer to that; it depends on your energy levels as well as on the ongoing relationship if any.) They talked a little about the value, when listening/talking in a group, of making it clear that someone disagrees with the prejudiced statement: that even if the speaker doesn't change their mind, it's worth making clear that not everyone, maybe not anyone, agrees with it. And to remember that it's usually not a one-off: the person who dismisses an idea now may think about it later. (And that may connect to what I was saying above about often not being able to identify when, where, or how I started thinking about something.)

It is International Blog Against Racism Week. I don't have a lot relevant to add right now, so I'm reposting (with slight revision) a comment I left in truepenny's journal:

As far as I can tell, there are at least two things going on here and called privilege. One is the things that in a better world, everyone would have: it should not be a privilege to decide whether, or who, to marry, or to say no to sexual advances, or to be able to choose your religious practices or lack thereof. And one person having those rights doesn't take them away from someone else.

The other is the things that really are part of oppression, because they involve some people getting stuff at the expense of another. If group A has the socially accepted right to interrupt group B, and not vice versa, A has something taken from B. If women, or black people, or members of some other group are only considered for a class of powerful, well-paid, or otherwise desirable jobs after all the white men have had a chance to apply, the privileged group is getting those jobs at the expense of the less-privileged.

There are important places where the two kinds of privilege overlap. It should not be a privilege to walk down the street without being harassed, or to have the law enforcement system treat you as innocent until proven guilty. Nor should it be a privilege to have the police help you if you're the victim of a crime. However, if law and/or custom say that whenever there's a dispute between an X and a Y, the X's testimony will be taken as true, that both hurts Y's and helps X's.

These include stuff from DW, and this will be cross-posted. ( resistance to change, obligations--and lack thereof, choice of terminology, gender, 'natural' )

Another collection of comments. ( resolutions, sexual orientation and relationships, clothing and perceived gender, names and use-names, awareness of race, sleep and waking )

It took Rupert Murdoch's New York Post about a month to go from putting the oath of office on the front page of the paper to publishing a stupid, racist cartoon about President Obama. I'm not linking to it here, because it's ugly, offensive, and not remotely funny. I can't boycott the post, because I stopped reading it years ago for reasons only partly political. (When I was growing up, before the Murdoch days, my parents got it as well as the NY Times, because the Post had late sports results and cartoons.)

I was reminded of this by a friend who posted, comments disabled, but with a link to a story that included the cartoon. She expressed surprise that it wasn't all over her friends list; I suspect this is a combination of people figuring it's been mentioned in the regular press and doesn't need to be discussed here, and a weary "yes, it's run by obnoxious right-wingers, big surprise." The president's press secretary settled for a remark to the effect that the NY Post isn't very newsworthy.

More saved comments. (  'straightness' and what counts as attractive, history, silliness, reactions to other people's emotions, guilt as a motivator for anti-racist acts, passing time and old t-shirts, packrat tendencies )

threeringedmoon pointed to a story on how few Americans are eligible to give blood by current rules. I got to poking around to find out what those rules are. The Arizona Red Cross goes into lots of detail, including that if you've had injections of radioactive materials, you must wait eight weeks to donate. There are lots of discussions of things like malarial regions and medication, and then the disconcerting one, with regard to HIV/AIDS:

Their defined risk factors include "If you are a male who has had sex, even once, with another male since 1977.…If, you have had sex with anyone who, since 1977, was born in or lived in [Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Niger, or Nigeria]" and "If, in the past 12 months, you have had sex, even once, with anyone who has had AIDS or tested positive for the AIDS virus."

In other words, they're treating heterosexual intercourse more than a year ago with someone who actually has AIDS as lower risk than male-male sex 20 years ago, or than heterosexual intercourse with someone who isn't known to have AIDS but comes from Central Africa.

It would be nice to believe that they're being more careful at the actual donation centers: the chance of having HIV cannot be higher for a randomly selected Cameroonian than for someone who has AIDS. I'll see what, if anything, they say to my email.

Addendum: The New York Blood Center seems a bit saner: their exclusions include anyone who has had a positive HIV test, or anyone who has had sex with such a person. They still have the "sex with a man since 1977" clause, but not "sex with someone who has lived in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Niger, or Nigeria", at least according to the Web page. And one that I strongly suspect was handed to them by a state government: there's a 12-month deferral for tattoos in New York, and no deferral at all in New Jersey. This is in large red letters. [Their list of what does and doesn't cause deferral is incredibly detailed, including Fifth Disease, World Trade Center Cough, smallpox vaccine exposure, Hanson's disease, and schizophrenia--"accept if donor is legally and mentally competent." That one makes sense.]