stick out your tongue

I thought about IBARW sporadically over the weekend, trying to decide if I should make a post. I hate these things, these weeks or days that are compulsions to act, but they exist for a reason and I think it would lessen me to ignore them, to act like just because I will people to stop being thoughtless, or horrible, they'll just stop.

I wear my ethnicity on my sleeve; I write about little Chinese girls and Chinese traditions and I weave the pieces of me into the fic that I write, and as a result, I worry that I'm repeating myself, and I want my words to have impact, not for you to gloss over them because you've read them a hundred times before.

I've previously talked about inherent prejudice and racism, about the little things we never notice and the way we normalise what we do, and most of what I really want to say I already said there, and if you've not read that post before, please do. I'd much rather you read that post than continued reading this one, if you had to pick one.

I hate the way 'orientalism' is a theme. I hate the way thousands of years of a hundred heterogeneous cultures can be compressed into silk embroidery and fans with cranes on them, and I hate the way my wedding dress will be considered no more than a novelty, a fashion statement, whilst I look forward to the bright red and the gold and the luck it will bring my partner and I.

I hate the way people say, I was raised to be colour-blind, like it's something to be proud of, the way they try to mask their own prejudices by denying the things that make up the identities of other people. I know I spoke of this only recently, but whilst I suppose there are people who honestly cannot see the difference between people of different cultures, different backgrounds, I am Chinese-Australian, and I am different from my partner, who is Australian from a European background, and I am different from Claira, whose ancestry appears to be positively Colonial. And whilst that phrase is used as a defence, a suggestion that I cannot be racist because I am colour-blind, it's also an insult, and it's a denial of our identities, all of us. And it's a poor defence, filled with holes. Who are you to deny who I am, all the pieces that fit together to make me? Use of such a statement suggests, at best, a very poor grasp on cultural and racial issues; at worst, a denial of one's own prejudices.

I don't expect you to embrace all of your own prejudices. I am not proud of mine, and I will not tell you what they are, but I know what they are and I try to change them, and it is all that I ask of you.

I do not know what sorts of posts will come out of this week; I can only hope that they make you think. You can find a large selection of them here.