stop. start. stutter.

Yesterday, I wound up heading down to the rental office to be That Tenant -- you know, the one who's always shouting "get those damn kids off my lawn!" (In this instance, replace "those damn kids" with "those people who think that lifting and slam-dropping 200-pound weights for like two hours a day is okay" and replace "off my lawn" with "out of the exercise room that shares a wall with our apartment".) While I was down there, I got into a really interesting conversation with the lady who runs the office about science fiction and race/gender issues.

We both agreed that part of the fascinating thing about sf is that it allows us the opportunity to postulate a post-racist/post-sexist society and speculate about what it might look like. We also agreed that -- because we-the-audience are reading in the context of having been acculturated in a racist, sexist society -- we have to be really careful about how we present it and how we read it. In other words: writers have the chance to postulate what a post-racist society might look like, which is cool, but we have to be really (really) careful, thoughtful, and aware of all the connotations and baggage that arises from a really long history of racial and gender inequality.

(Have I mentioned I love the building I live in? How many of you can stumble upon conversations like that in your rental office?)

I'm always fascinated whenever International Blog Against Racism Week comes around again, because it's done more for me -- as a middle-class, suburban-raised white chick of a certain age bracket -- to increase my awareness of the very real issues and facts of our society than anything else I could think of. Reading those posts is often uncomfortable, and I wind up feeling guilty and upset and angry -- not at the posters, but at the world we inhabit, the people who perpetuate and encourage power imbalance, and at myself for wanting not to think about those issues most of the time.

But my commitment to myself -- made a long time ago -- is along the lines of Spider Robinson's asshole theory: in Lifehouse, one of the characters realizes that not only is everyone an asshole, the greatest acts of assholery result from the conviction that somewhere out there are people who aren't assholes, and the burning desire to be mistaken for one of them. The trick, the character and his wife realize, is to give up, accept that you're an asshole, and do your best to be an asshole possessed of a certain amount of tact, grace, and class -- an Ethical Asshole, as it were.

I've been trying to do that for a while. And part of being an Ethical Asshole is sitting down, shutting up, and listening when someone tells you that you, or a group to which you belong, is being an asshole -- and then nodding, saying that you're sorry, and doing your best to modify your behaviour accordingly.

(You can read the round-up of IBARW posts on del.icio.us. In fact, I really recommend it.)

At the end of last month, John Scalzi -- an author I respect considerably -- wrote an entry commenting on an article in the Boston Globe called Race: The Final Frontier. He made a bunch of statements that all added up to the fact that he -- as a writer -- was trying to make it clear that his universe was one of those post-racist, post-sexist societies. It prompted a pretty rollicking argument in the comments, plus a vehement response from Kameron Hurley: Why Writing Colorblind Is Writing White, which pointed out that Scalzi was failing to do the other half of that equation: being aware that a constructed society like that is still going to be read in this society, which is neither.

This is a topic that's been on my mind a lot lately, from discussion on LiveJournal to IBARW -- because of the three protagonists of Sixteen Tons, two of them are people of color. (Although one of them only informed me of this about ten thousand words into the book. I wish they'd clue me in on these things earlier.) Joey's half Chinese, half Puerto Rican; Kit is half African-American, half white. These are basic facts about the people I'm writing: they walked in pre-constructed, really, and I'm more or less just taking dictation. I couldn't change these facts about them if I wanted to.

But I'll confess: for a few minutes, I wanted to. I wanted to make these people into people whose experience of society more closely matched my experience of society, or the experience-of-society I was more familiar with. Why? Because I, like so many middle-class, liberal, suburban-raised white chicks, am desperately terrified of getting it wrong -- of doing or saying something, out of ignorance, that will hurt or anger or offend someone whose experience-of-society is drastically different than mine.

It's been proven that if you go through a piece of text and carefully strip out all markers or indicators of race or gender, and present that text to a group of people -- any people -- the reader will read the protagonist of that piece as a straight white male -- whether the reader is a straight white male or not. (It's also been proven that even when those markers still exist, readers will bull right over them to assume straight-white-maleness; it's embarrassing how many years it took me to realize that the protagonist of Heinlein's Tunnel In The Sky is black, despite near-annual re-readings.)

And you know, that infuriates me. We shouldn't oughta do that. I know why we do it, and I know why it's going to take a very long, very messy time until we can stop doing it at least a little. I very much, as a writer, want to combat those textual assumptions as much as I can, even if I have to step outside my comfort zone to do so. But oh, God, I know that I'm getting it wrong in places -- and that no matter how many person-of-color friends I consult to say "hey, take a look at this and tell me if my white privilege is hanging out here", I'll never catch all of it.

There's the description question: How much description do you give? Which sets of words are respectful, and which signifiers are semantically neutral or semantically positive as opposed to semantically charged or negative? Where's the line between making people aware of the description of these characters, and subconsciously promoting the fetishization of the Other?

There's the characterization question: To what extent does race and racial identity permeate a person's worldview? Does Kit think of himself as "black" -- and, no matter what his answer is to that, how has the inarguable physical fact of his skin color shaped and defined him? Does Joey, whose family has been in the US for three generations, consider himself "Asian"? "American"? "Asian-American"? How can I be respectful to the people who struggle with these issues daily, when I don't? (Not those issues, at least. Most of my Other-ness is far less visible than skin color, and I know that I can't parlay all of it, or even in a lot of cases most of it.)

There's the narrative question: what happens when my characters need to express opinions or make statements that are less than supportive of these issues? How can I balance the need to remain true to character with the need to avoid promoting privileged readings of the text?

And then, of course, there's the authorial responsibility question: shit, how much harm am I going to accidentally cause in my earnest desire to deal with complicated and messy issues in an Ethical-Asshole manner?

There's a lot of unconscious racism, sexism, and homophobia in classic sf canon, and most of it can be chalked up to the fact that much of classic sf canon was written by people who were raised in a racist, sexist, and homophobic society. When I go back and read some of it now, I wince -- the same way that I wince when I hear someone around me making racist, sexist, or homophobic statements, or statements that are informed by the racist, sexist, or homophobic programming that -- no matter how liberal you are -- we all carry around with us.

There's a lot of unconscious racism, sexism, and homophobia in current sf canon, too. Whether it's in the text itself, or in the packaging. (No, really, go to your local bookstore and pick up a sampling of a hundred different books from the sf shelves, and tell me how many people of color you see on front covers. Even of books written by people of color.)

I'm uncomfortable by that. I'm angry at that. I want to speak out against that, and I want to write things that will challenge those default assumptions -- not because I have any sort of silly notion that I can "fix" it, but because I think that science fiction as a genre has some of the most stunning potential for social commentary, and social commentary that doesn't deal with race issues (or gender issues, or class issues, or sexual orientation issues) is pretty piss-poor social commentary indeed.

It's just really hard to know where to start -- aside from listening, and thinking, and being willing to challenge your own default assumptions when they're pointed out to you. Which is something I'm working very hard to do. For that reason, I'm grateful to International Blog Against Racism week, and all of the people who have shared their own experiences and their own experience-of-society -- because those posts have gone a long way to educating me.

I'm still going to get it wrong. But I think that white authors have been worried, for too long, that our lack of direct personal experience means that there's no way we can ever write a protagonist of a different race, because we're going to get it wrong -- and that's dissuaded us from even trying. And I think that's silly, because a good writer can write protagonists who are different without making them cariactures and without stripping them of any individual traits that are different than the author's own. (I mean, fantasy authors aren't elves or hobbits, and historical romance authors don't live in the sixteenth century.)

The trick, I think, is the same trick any author should be using for any character: protagonist, antagonist, or just walk-on red-shirt. The trick is to find the commonalities and respect the differences, and to educate yourself as much as possible about the environment that would have shaped them.

And treat your characters like you should be treating everyone you meet face to face: with respect.