Graarrghhh
You know, people go on and on about pile-ons and heartless raging PoC and wah wah feelings and wah wah why can’t they be nicer in their criticism and whatnot. Right? Right.
What they don’t get is that it is FUCKING HARD to call a friend out on the racist bullshit in their fiction. It’s hard. I’ve been sitting here feeling vaguely ill for the last hour or so wondering if I should tell this person that this story of theirs is full of racist tropes, but I keep getting overwhelmed by thinking about how they’ll react and how their friends will back them up and is it worth it when they won’t learn anything and here are my principles but reallly whatever people will read it and react as they will but I keep seeing it get praised by other friends and I think WHAT REALLY AM I THE ONLY ONE and I know I’m not and augh whatever.
It’s out there. It’s available. I have as much right to my reaction as anyone else. But because it’s a friend I have to measure my honesty against how much energy I have to deal with the fall-out of critically discussing this friend’s story in public and I am so busy and it’s probably not worth it but goddamn it I can’t think of anything else.
In short, bah.
And what kind of gets me about that argument—you should be nicer when you tell me I said something racist!—is that it is, once again, NOT THE WHITE PERSON’S JOB. It’s not their fault they’re racist! It’s not their fault they don’t know any better! And of course it is, and always should be, the non-white person’s job to suck up the anger and resentment and be polite and calm and reasonable and in a very reasonable and loving way tell someone something they don’t want to hear.
Educating someone about their exercise of privilege, their racism or sexism or homphobia or transphobia, is teaching. I love teaching. I’ve taught for pay and as a volunteer, I’ve taught people from the ages of 6 to 60. (Mostly in the 7-10 range and in the 18-25 range, but still.) Teaching is a JOB. It is HARD. It is emotionally draining and mentally challenging. It involves staying calm, retaining patience in the face of whatever crap your students are pulling—even wonderful students will pull crap, even mature students will act like children, sometimes intentionally but sometimes unintentionally doing things that require an extra level of serenity to deal with—and there is a reason I limit how much I do it. I do not want to have to ramp up and get my game face on constantly.
So what I’m saying is this: on top of expecting this friend of yours to have their own life, with their own stuff going on, you want them to put down whatever it is they’re doing, get their game face on, and be a teacher? You want them to do a job, for you—don’t forget that, that teaching is a job, that educating is hard work. You want them to teach you, for free, getting nothing out of it other than a splitting headache and backlash from people they thought were their friends and maybe some sense somewhere that they did some social good? And you’re still surprised when maybe the people you expect that from (because you deserve to be handled with kid gloves, you deserve their extra energy and time and labor, because you’re special and important and a unique snowflake) would rather just say “That’s racist” and leave it at that?
If you did something racist, it is YOUR PROBLEM. It is YOUR job to figure out how to be less racist. If people of color want to help you out with that, even if they’re just pointing it out to you, you should thank them, and you should be aware that they do not owe you that. They do not owe you anything. It is not their job to teach you about racism any more than it is your job to tutor their kid in French, no matter how well you speak French, no matter how familiar they are with racism. People of color do not exist just to be a resource for you. Even when your intentions (to be less racist!) are good.
Another thing to consider is that, according to the latest research when I was in grad school (a year and a half ago, now), confrontation—even unpleasant confrontation, the mean kind, the “You’re a racist jerk” kind, not the nice kind—makes people who are willing to say racist things, less likely to say racist things in similar situations in the future. So, whether being confronted about your racism makes you feel good or not, it is making you a better person to be around.
Why can’t people of color be nicer? I’d rather ask why white people are so goddamn bad at educating their children about privilege before they get to the age where they can embarrass themselves by doing racist things.
