don't forget to watch the movie

[bantha_fodder]

So I've been reading these posts by hederahelix, parts one and two, and she's thoughtful and she's made me think about all sorts of things. She talks about privilege, and listening, and in a post inspired by race it really made me think about my own heterosexual privilege (which I'll talk about another time), but the first thing I want to talk about is this:

If there’s anything I’ve learned from my fen friends of color, it’s that I’m more likely to get listened to when I say something about race than they are.

You can't look at my lj, or at my style of typing, and tell that I am fen of colour over the internets. So I wear my colour on my sleeve: I post stories about little Chinese girls, encourage people to learn about Chinese New Year and the things that I find important, talk about racism in my life. And I'm clearly not hiding my ethnicity at all, and in fact I'm actively encouraging people to look at my ethnicity, because if I didn't, then you couldn't see it.

So now I'm wondering how much hederahelix's point applies in an internets only context. Ignoring whatever Fan A's argument is, and whatever Fan B's argument is, is either one more likely to be heard because of the colour of their skin? I want to say no, because how can you tell? But I don't want to say yes, either, because who am I to make these sweeping judgement calls? I'm just some chick on the internet.

Comments

[hobviously.livejournal.com]

I think what she's saying is that *within discussions of race,* a self-identified (because we volunteer our identities) FOC is more likely to be dismissed as biased, reactionary, overly emotional, angry to the point of confusion, and so forth. Whereas a white fan is given credibility for looking beyond her own circumstances and speaking "calmly" about issues on an empirical level, having gone the extra mile to acknowledge her privilege and try to do something about it.

Like if you and I were to both make posts about the lack of Chinese characters in Firefly, your post could be written off with "well, Bantha Fortune Cookies is always on about being Chinese, it's an obsession with her and she's clearly not objective" and my post could be read with the subtext "that Hobo sure is using her brain and being an ethical fan to be thinking about this stuff when HER people are already well-represented in the text."

And I suppose that if the discussion were about Willow's Jewish identity on BtVS, and I declared myself, in that context I would become the Fan of Ethnicity and it'd be interesting to see what kind of reaction I, an American Jew, would get as opposed to you, a Chinese Aussie, or Carrie, an American WASP. Maybe there's a bell curve to credibility, where having some experience with the minority issue makes you worth listening to (in the eyes of fandom), but too much personal investment makes you easy to dismiss?

If the discussion were not related to racial issues, I'd like to think you and I would be equally listened to. I haven't consciously encountered any overt racism towards fans in non-racial discussions. But I have been reading race-related meta and watching deadbrowalking long enough to know what she's talking about, as far as race discussion goes.