A brief note

[megwrites]

I think it's valid to examine, in public, and for those reading, why it is that I have made the decision to be a good ally as best I can, and why the cause of anti-racism is important to me.

It comes out of compassion. As a woman and a bisexual, I know what exclusion and prejudice feel like. I know what the feel like in doses large and small, on the social and individual level.

I know it feels like to watch Star Wars and realize that there are no female Jedi or female pilots and that if you're a girl in that universe, you're either a princess or a go-go dancer. And I remember how it hurt. And I remember, being an eleven-year-old, watching those movies and loving everyone one of those people, but also protesting, "But why can't I be a Jedi, too? I believe in everything Luke Skywalker does, and I'd be great with a lightsaber. I'm tough, I'm strong, I want to run around a swamp with Yoda. Why can' I be a Jedi? Why do I have to be a princess?"

I know it feels to see a show where, finally, there are two lesbians on TV and it makes you feel better about the fact that you have all these feelings about girls that aren't going away, feelings that are equal to your feelings for boys - but then to see one of those lesbians die. I know what it's like to feel horror, to feel the creeping, gross feeling suspicion that she died because, somehow, being a lesbian is a sin, and loving women if you're also a woman is a sin.

I know how it feels to want to get into Dungeons and Dragons and to get your friend to invite you to a game, only to go into a room where you're the only female there and to have the person running the game openly resent you being there and talk to you like you're an idiot while some of the other guys at the table are staring at your breasts and there are pictures on the wall of scantily clad women and it's clear that as a woman, you purpose in their minds is to give them sex and pleasure. I know what it is like to feel physically afraid.

I know how it feels to wish you could have a Dungeons and Dragons game for just women, or a club of Jedi for just women, or a club just for queer people so it's okay if you like girls.

I know how those frustrations and disappointments have felt to me. I know how it feels to really feel unsafe.

And if my feelings are anything akin to what people of color have been feeling, then I don't want them to have to feel it. Because it's horrible and not fair, and I don't want anyone to have to experience those feelings, ever. I don't want them to have to keep experiencing it. I know what it feels like to hurt, to be hurt, to keep getting hurt even when you tell your attacker to "please, stop, you're hurting me". I know what it's like to keep screaming it, and for your attacker not to stop one little bit. I know what it's like when your attacker decides they were justified, and starts listing all the reasons why you deserved it or they had a right or that it wasn't wrong or that you weren't really hurt. God, do I know.

I would never in five billion years wish that on other people, even if I disagree with them so much it makes me angry. I don't want anyone to have to go through that.

It's easy when you have pain of your own to become petty and vicious. Because all most people learn of pain is to pass it on to someone else.

But I just can't make that work in my head. Not anymore. Once upon a time, that seemed reasonable to me. You get hurt, you make sure someone else feels it. But now, I see how wrong it is. I've learned that it doesn't make you feel better, not in the long run, not in a way that matters.

I don't want people of color to hurt just for being people of color. Just like I don't want to hurt just for being a woman or being bisexual.

And yes, all those things are happening. All of them could stop.

I believe in the SF/F genre, because I love it. I love it to bitty, bitty bits. I think it's one of the great gifts of modern literature to the world. I think our ability to think about things that aren't, and might never be, is part of the ways in which we extend ourselves as people and as a society. I believe in dreaming and imagining and impossible things.

So why can't we imagine an equal world? Why can't we imagine letting other people sit at the table and have their fair share?

Dammit, SF/F, you're better than this. I know it in my soul. No group of people who can imagine aliens, vampires, elves, kingdoms long ago and far away, can lack the imagination for compassion for their fellow human beings.

You're the genre of truths that we can't tell, you're the genre that illuminates the inside by going far outside, you're the genre that says what others won't. You're the genre of Asimov, of Butler, of Clarke, of Farmer.

You're better than this. We're better than this, but we're not acting it.

We could do this, you know? We could make things better. We could be freaking extraordinary, if we just tried harder, did better, got more honest with ourselves. I see the genre we could be, I see the genre we are, and I see that the gap between them is wide but can be crossed if we could just start walking in the right direction.

I see all the people who are fed up with SF/F, who won't submit, won't participate because it's clear they're not really wanted, and I think of all the stories we've lost.

I think of deepad and her post: I didn't dream of dragons. I think of the story she couldn't tell, and the story that I now can't read. I think of a tale of "a cross-dressing princess on the run" and I think that I would give my eyeteeth to read that story, and never will.

I think of all the other stories that are exactly what I've been longing for that have been utterly erased, forced out of existence because we told their creators that they weren't welcome.

We're losing stories right and left. We're losing people and talent and new thoughts and great ideas. We're just throwing it all away. I just keep seeing the future Asimovs and Clarkes and Gaimans of Color who we won't have. I think of great drought we're creating down the road.

I think of the writers and editors who, in the end, are cheating themselves as much as anyone else by doing the wrong thing.

We can stop this. We can take positive action. We can do something wonderful and beautiful and true. I won't stop believing it, ever.

These are my motives, this where I stand. I know where we are. I know where we need to be. I know we can get there.

From here forward in this journal, I want to have a dedicated focus in discussions of race, racism, and cultural appropriation of positive changes that can be made, and positive changes that are being made where they occur. This does not mean I want to pretend everything is sunny and nobody is being hurt. But I want to focus on solutions, on being better.