[Links]
[links] Link salad can’t touch that
The comment thread in my post of yesterday on language etymology and word choicse is quite amazing — Go check it out.
A Whiff of Colonialism —
Syphilis: Menace to Industry — Classic poster art. Somehow I never quite thought of industrial productivity as a primary motivator for safe sex.
Constructing a marble machine — Impressive (and obsessive) as all get out. (Thanks to
Habitable Planets: Working the Odds — Drake, Drake, duck!
Still Taking Exception — Daniel Larison on American Exceptionalism, Obama, and his critics on the Right.
?otD: What color are your parachute pants?
3/11/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1 hours
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.5 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: 231.4
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10
Currently reading: [between books]
Posted: 5:50 am Thu March 11 2010 |
Where am I?
You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
Learn more here.
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« [writing|process] Language, language, and the temptations of etymology | [photos] Your Thursday moment of zen »
Jaws
March 11th, 2010 at 3:12 pmJay, it could be worse. You could have a surname — courtesy of Ellis Island — that totally masks your non-Angloness. You could have a substantial part of your ethnicity arise through something that the government (but no one else, and in particular not ethnologists and/or biologists) calls “caucasian.” And you could have stood up, in military uniform, at an MLA panel on gender issues to ask a clarifying question because you couldn’t quite hear everything the speaker said.
Sadly, none of that is hypothetical, and just reinforces my conclusion that the reason that alternate sexual preferences are so threatening to so many is that one can’t tell who the “enemy” is just by looking. (And that goes both directions.)
Cora
March 11th, 2010 at 6:07 pmSince according to the other post, at least some of your ancestors were German, you’re probably better off with an anglicized surname. Because otherwise you’d be stuck being a representative of one of the few ethnicities it’s still okay to mock and insult and the only time you’d see someone with a name like yours in books, films, TV, etc… would be as a villain.
What strikes me most about the racism/othering debate that has been breaking up again and again for the past two years or so is how utterly American-centric it is. Because outside the US, the conflict lines are not necessarily between white people and people of colour (which is what the US discourse frequently tends to boil down to, viewed from an outsider perspective) but often between ethnic groups which are the same race to an outside observer.
This – along with having seen how quickly such race debates can get incredibly ugly – is why I largely stay out of the various reiterations of the racism/othering debate. Because it’s very much a US-centered debate. When writing, I do my best to include characters and worlds of diverse backgrounds, well aware that my notion of diversity may not necessarily match that in the US and elsewhere.