That Feminist Dyke

When people talk about their pets, one of the first things they mention is the color. There are all kinds of elaborate and non-judgment inducing names for the colors of pets: tabby, smoke, calico, brindle, fawn, grizzle, merele, chinchilla, tortie, and of course any combination of the above.

It doesn’t stop there: in addition to the basic black, white, and brown that people come in, cats and dogs also come in blue, orange, lilac, pewter, apricot, cinnamon, chocolate and golden. It’s really quite a lively range of descriptors. People unapologetically choose their pets by their colors. “I really want a black lab.” We’ve all heard it.

We’re not as comfortable when it comes to people. A popular complaint about identifying people of color is this, “I don’t know what to call them. They keep changing what they want to be called, and if the I say the wrong thing, I’m going to offend someone, and I’ll be called a racist.” In an effort to curb this fear and potential offense people often modify racial descriptors with flattering adjectives to soften the blow of identifying race in the first place. People fear that pointing out race makes them racist. They forget to consider that it is their intention in pointing out the race that matters.

My gallerist did this just the other day. He said, “My daughter is getting a place with…(pause) one of her nicest, (pause) African American friends.” I’m sure he didn’t mention his daughter’s roommate’s race to everyone. He made a point of telling me this because I, like the roommate, am black. To cover up for the obvious “connecting two black people is fun” game, he added how nice this roommate is, as if this was the most important part of his sentence.

Alternatively people will insert the phrase “who just happens to be” in front of the racial identifier: “My daughter is moving in with a really nice woman who just happens to be African American.” This strikes me as odd. Did the roommate accidentally turn black? Now that’s a story. Tell me about that. How did they “just happen” to be this race?

Why is it that we describe pet colors and breeds so easily but when we talk about people we stumble, stutter, and prepare for battle? Is it because dogs never fought for their rights in our society? Is it because cats never asked to be called one thing or another? Is it because we choose their descriptors for them, and they have no say at all in the labels we assign them?

If you apply a biological approach, the color of pets and the race of people is pretty much determined by the same mechanism: genetics. So what makes race such a drastically different and difficult conversation among humans? We have to admit, finally, that race is not just a matter of genetics, it includes our historical interactions.

Facing a person’s race means facing the history you have with them and their group, not just facing a difference in “skin color” as people often try to oversimplify it. We carry our collective history with us everywhere, and the first reminder of that is our skin. It is our discomfort with and denial of our history that tensions around race invariably arises.

It’s not enough anymore for people of color and members of the LGBT community to be presented as the Special Guests, or the (x) Friends of the Host, or the Supporting Players. There’s more than enough proof online that our experiences as fans are not automatically divorced from our experiences as members of minority groups, and that there’s many of us looking for more safe spaces in which to discuss them. If some geeks of color don’t want to discuss sensitive topics, that’s fine; that doesn’t mean none of us ever should.

Because while it’s all too easy for people to distance themselves from those racist Hunger Games fans, those viewpoints don’t appear out of thin air, either.

When woman-oriented sites like The Mary Sue don’t report on Issa Rae getting assailed by racist tweeters after winning an industry award, that contributes to the problem. When a sci-fi heavy site like IO9 is content to let Jezebel report on the Games controversy, that contributes to the problem. When Marvel Comics would rather publish stories about the umpteenth version of Dark Avengers than about a group of black Avengers, that contributes to the problem. And when only 11 percent of someone’s YouTube channel talent is made up of people who are not white, that contributes to the problem. Unintentional marginalization is still marginalization.

We are way past the time when Day or Hardwick–or any party wanting to bill itself as a representative of geekdom–can hide behind the explanation that “we couldn’t find anyone” or couldn’t spot content online that might deliver a more inclusive version of geekdom to viewers. Does Hannibal Tabu need to wear Sith t-shirts? What does it say about gaming and that fandom when gamers who aren’t hetero white cis males are made to feel like they should hide their identities? Should the folks at The Border House start podcasting in Klingon to get consideration for a shot in one of these channels?

The near-dogmatic focus on “staying positive”–code for avoiding the topic entirely–does no one any good when it’s just Cheryl Lynn Eaton pointing out that Marvel Comics currently has no black writers while sites like Newsarama and Comic Book Resources keep quiet. That silence, intentional or not, sends the same kind of message to our subcultures as it does to the world at large…

Over and over again in “Bully,” we see adults who feel bureaucratically paralyzed, who look the other way, who are unwilling to make judgments between perpetrators and victims, or who actively condone vicious and sadistic behavior as the Darwinian natural order of childhood. In many cases you can feel considerable sympathy for these people. After all, the schools must try to educate bullies as well as victims (and the latter often turn into the former), the distinction between normal horseplay and bullying can be hard to parse, and no adult can protect a child from all possible harm.

Declaring that underage kids can’t even see this film without a grown-up to hold their hands, however, falls somewhere near the nastier end of that spectrum of indecision. With the stated goal of not offending anybody, the MPAA has essentially told the bullied teens in the movie and outside it — gay and lesbian kids, autistic kids, disabled kids, fat kids and nerds and Goths and plain old weird kids who don’t fit in — that their very existence is too upsetting for normal kids to see, and they should crawl back under their rocks.