(no subject)

Race Fail 2009 (This year it seems like we're having the energizer bunny version.)

About two weeks ago, Elizabeth Bear posted about "writing the other without being a dick", which she seemed to find actually pretty simple. Because she had been Other all her life, and she knew that even the people who were not just like her were still people and were still her (so brown people like me would be her with cows and curry and weird-ass notions of karma sprinkled on top? I'm still not clear.)

Some people thought that there might be more to it, that Bear's own work was problematic. But we can ignore them, because they are terrible readers and not so good with the subtext, being oversensitive and paranoid and seeing problematic depictions of race where there is only an intent to illuminate and ~enlighten~. And if they wanted to do something constructive (for a change), mac_stone was there to lead the way.

But strangely enough, there were all these dumb uneducated abusive nutty PoC with their sycophants allies that just would not let it go and persisted in bringing their own views to the table.

But never fear, to Elizabeth Bear it was all just an *awful* lot of noise, which got tiresome after a while so she moved on (and her book sales were up because of the noise YAY).

Yet people persisted in talking about this, and that was just not on, because hadn't the caravan left?

So Teresa Nielsen Hayden has just stepped in to lay down the law.