It's slightly different than the previous draft, but not in any major ways, I think. Currently, it's at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. Only $2.99 US—cheap!
At Amazon.com: How to make a Social Justice Warrior, D. J. Anderson said,
Shetterly is a fascinating writer, and he covers a LOT of material here. He is consistently thought-provoking, and he is at his best here, struggling with complicated issues and walking through his thoughts and personal journey.I made an intro:
I may be the only person who has gotten death threats from racists and anti-racists.
In the 1960s, my family was part of the civil rights struggle. I was bullied in school—they called me a niggerlover. My parents couldn’t get fire insurance because the Ku Klux Klan threatened to burn down our home. Dad taught me how to carry our shotgun to him if he needed it. They never came, but that experience shaped my life.
I wrote a novel based on my childhood called Dogland. Ellen Kushner said it was "A masterwork. A particularly American magic realism that touches the heart of race and childhood in our country."
I also created Captain Confederacy, the first black female superhero who had her own series from a major comic book company. The story was about a black woman and a white man who became lovers in a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War. Though many southerners praised it, a Texan sent me a threatening letter about the fate of race traitors.
The Feminist SF Wiki said my work “features strong women characters and people of color”. But I got in a flamewar with people who understand power in terms of social identities—in that case, race—and got my first death threat from an anti-racist. Researching my opponents, I learned that:
They claim to believe in racial diversity, but they mobbed a Cherokee author and made a literary convention withdraw its offer for him to be their guest of honor.
They claim to believe in celebrating women, but they mobbed a woman writer who was a pioneer in two male-dominated fields, science fiction and the military, and made a feminist convention withdraw its offer for her to be their guest of honor.
They claim to believe in protecting women, but they exposed a pseudonymous young woman’s legal identity on the web, contacted her employers to try to get her fired, and left a threat in her office that was so scary she went to the police.
They claim to believe in free speech, but they try to censor, boycott, and black list anyone whose approach to justice is different than theirs, even—or especially—if their targets also want a world of equality for everyone.
I’ve forgiven everyone in those flamewars. The last and hardest to forgive was myself. Like everyone in every flamewar, I chose to fight when I could have stayed on the sidelines. All I can do to make amends is share what I’ve learned about social justice warriors.
1. Understanding Social Justice Warriors
• From Social Justice Workers to Social Justice Warriors
• Racism = Power + Privilege, so only White People can be Racist?
• Derrick Bell, the Father of Critical Race Theory
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Mother of Intersectionality
• The Problem with Privilege Theory
• Nine Problems with Identitarianism
• Quotes for Identity Traitors
• About this history
2. Diversity In Fantasy And Science Fiction
• Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina
• Parallel Lives
• Is it harder for black people to get a taxi in the US?
• Discussing the taxi test in the comments on my “parallel lives” post
• What fat social justice warriors don’t know about class markers
• Micole “Mely” Coffeeandink
• Elizabeth Vom Marlowe
• N. K. Jemisin
• K. Tempest Bradford
3. The Outing of Zathlazip and the Hounding of William Sanders
• The WisCon Troll
• The Powwow Dancer vs. the People of Privilege
4. Racefail ’09
• Whose voice counts?
• Comparing mobs to orcs is racist
• White women’s tears
• I fall into a burning ring of fire…
• Trying to reason in a flamewar
• Will Shetterly: Do Not Engage
• Deepad
• Liz Henry, aka Badgerbag
• Julia Sullivan, aka Icecreamempress and Sidhedevil
• Veejane
• I fell down, down, down as the flames burned higher…
• Baffled white writers
• Nithings
• Hate mail and threats
• Vom Marlowe objects
5. The Retroactive Pseudonymity of Micole “Mely” Coffeeandink
6. Racefail Burns Out
• Pseudonymityfail Burns Out
• A Farewell to RaceFail
• The Angry Bourgie Woman vs. Harlan Ellison
• What happened to Verb Noire?
• Mobbing Jay Lake
• Continuing Effects of Violations of Internet Pseudonymity
• Rape and the Righteous Community
7. The Female Marine Officer vs. WisCon’s True Feminists
• When scifi writers could disagree
• Even bigots must be free to speak
• WisCon and Elizabeth Moon: What Happened and What Can We Learn from it?
8. The Metaphor Police
• “Brown bag lunch” is racist
• “Slavery” and “Holocaust” are racist
• Fried chicken is racist
• “Death March” is racist
• Kilowog in Green Lantern is racist
9. Imaginary Indian Fails
• Mammothfail
• Graveyardfail
• American Indian or Native American?
• Real Indians and Wah-na-bes
• In support of race traitor stories—regarding Avatar and District 9
• Was Deep Space Nine racist? or, More on Avatar
• Watching Avatar While Human, and a note about John Carter of Mars
• Dances With Wolves
• A Jewish Dances With Wolves
• The Education of Little Tree: where is the racism?
• Is Little House on the Prairie racist?
• Whiteknightfail, or The Education of K. Tempest Bradford
10. Weird Tales of Fails and Shaming
• Rose Fox
• Those Who Require Hate Instead of Love
• Outrage Culture: the World of Social Justice Warcraft
11. Diversity of thought vs diversity of identity: the SFWA Kerfuffles
• The right to offend is the heart of free speech
• Chain Mail Bikinis
• The Reminiscences of Old Men
• When you think social justice warriors can go no lower
• N. K. Jemisin’s Continuum Guest of Honor Speech
• On the female gaze, Vampire Diaries, gothic romances, and SFWA
• On Vox Day and N. K. Jemisin, the feuding heirs of Racial Realism
• Do gun laws make it safe for white people to kill darker-skinned people?
• SFWA’s Petitiongate
12. Class and Fandom
• Class, Race, Fandom, and Dr. Who
• Damien G. Walter and “class envy”
• Are poor people invisible in fandom?
• The hardest panel for an f&sf convention
13. How to make a Social Justice Warrior
• The cult symptoms of Social Justice Warriors
• Ten Points About Conformity
14. Reclaiming Civility
Addenda: Social Justice Warriors
• Unpacking “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”
• The Killing Rage of Bell Hooks
• Gendered language and sexism
• How to survive an online mobbing
• How to talk like a Social Justice Warrior, or The thought-terminating clichés of radical identitarianism
If you don't know me, here's a video introduction that might explain why I really don't like mobbing and bullies:
You cover an awful lot of ground in search of once easily available principles no longer there because SJWs have turned everything into an insulting sneer of oppression.
ReplyDeleteSJWs have polluted American thought and sucked the fun out of life. Now the simplest comparisons are a perceptual trap for the life of them the SJWs can't escape from. The obvious tie-breaker to escape that trap is to look at our Constitution, a thing SJWs despise with their comments about law being for whites.
Anything that gets in between the insane and the focus of their hatred is despised, any solution despised. Have you never once asked yourself why these people don't dedicate thousands of words in blog posts on how to build bridges and get along? The easy answer is they don't want to. They want Orwell's eternal war.
I think the entire thing is much simpler than people imagine. At the end of the day, don't underestimate pure stupidity, ignorance, unhealthy obsessions, mental health issues and sheer racial and gender animus all being sold as "reasonable," wisdom and even nobility.
There is no consistent logic or reason behind PC - none. It is hate, and hate is inherently self-contradictory when applied to the larger world.
SFF fans used to retro-engineer Niven's Ringworld. Now they talk about QUILTBAG, which is not innate to SF. That should be a wake-up call to what is at work and that some people will drag weird obsessions into the most inappropriate places.
In this Ross affair and the Truesdale petition before that, you are starting to see the merely politically correct enablers like Gaiman, Picacio, Gerrold and Brin step back and realize their "allies" are nothing more than bigots crying "bigotry" in order to hide that bigotry.
People are starting to wake up. Books like yours are the same thing as saying "Hey, wait a minute." And you're right: no one fought the KKK merely to install a KKK with a different mask.
This Ross/Hugos affair is a seminal moment for the SFF community. The PC are still blustering but their ranks are noticeably thinned. All that's left are the fanatics and a few enablers like Scalzi, Hines and Stross. Mostly this is driven by third wave intersectional bigots and their unceasing war against all of humankind. That's not fun and it's not a literary movement nor is it justice - it is sheer hatred.
Gaiman was targeted earlier. He apologized, the apology was rejected, and he then apologized with a much deeper bow. The memory of that ludicrous experience may be affecting his reaction here.
DeleteI don't believe this is a seminal moment, though. Every time one of these lynch mobs forms, a few people resist and a few others hope that the resistance means the end of the lynch mobs. It hasn't been true so far, so my hopes are not high for this one.
Anon, I'm a little more optimistic, but I generally agree. The hardcore SJWs will double down, and young idealists will continue to fall for their explanation of justice.
Delete"SFF fans used to retro-engineer Niven's Ringworld. Now they talk about QUILTBAG, which is not innate to SF."
ReplyDeleteVery odd. Much of SFF has been about the alien or the other. I'm not sure what 'innate to SF' really means, but QUILTBAG to most of society (including most SFF readers) is alien or the other. The problem is not that SFF can be used to explore these issues, but that these issues are used by some as the only exploratory schema for a work of SFF.
Yep. Science fiction has been exploring these themes at least since Sturgeon.
DeleteThe content has always explored QUILTBAG, but some would like to see it featured more aggressively.
ReplyDeleteThere are also complaints that there are not enough officially diverse people in fandom. Trying to control the composition of fandom strikes me as a bad idea. One POC SJW actually suggested that people already in fandom should be removed for her comfort. Paraphrase: "Do we really have to accept some guy who hasn't showered in days?"
Yes, madam. Yes, you do. It doesn't matter that expelling one indivudal you find repugnant might attract several others. SFF fandom is founded on acceptance, and particularly on accepting those who have been rejected in wider society. There's a reason why someone like that isn't widely liked, and it isn't her skin color.
Some of these people -- not all, but some -- are all about the surface. What kind of person you have sex with? What part of one planet your ancestors are from? These things are details. All of these differences seem trivial when compared to the differences between humans and sapient reptiles or sapient plants. I miss "the literature of ideas."
Well said. It is sad that warriors who talk about acceptance define acceptance in very middle-class ways.
DeleteAre you comfortable saying which POC SJW said that?
Nope. :)
DeleteI hear that.
DeleteI hope we can close the door on this, leave it confined to the obscure howls of increasingly-sectarian social media squabbles, but I've got this horrible suspicion intersectional discourse, in some form, is going to haunt us for some time. Marxist critics are right that it's totally compatible with neo-liberal capitalism – which is obvious from its intellectual progenitors, who never had any radical aspirations – and I have a certain cold dread we're going to see it at work it at work in politics (the US Democrats, UK Labour, etc.) and industry (marketing, diversity seminars, etc.) for some time. I have this horrible image of President Hillary Clinton demanding people 'check their privilege' for criticising her re-introduction of child labor (ageism!).
ReplyDeleteAs for the left, their presence in the west doesn't extend much beyond increasingly-sectarian social media squabbles so possibly they'll fellate the intersectional gun-barrel for some time. If the left is dead, seeing this shit makes you suspect it was a suicide.
The Clinton line made me laugh. And, yes, it was suicide, because whenever the upper middle-class is scared, they move to the right with the upper class. Most Americans are, on most issues, to the left of the Democrats, and all I can conclude is that's how the Democrats like it.
DeleteCongratulations on your book. Dogland sounds fascinating too.
ReplyDeleteThanks! There are free copies of Dogland floating around the web, but even though I support having free copies available, I don't keep track of the links for them.
DeleteThanks!
ReplyDeleteWondering if you mention in your book the incident that made Keisha Thomas famous, of whom she was protecting from who?
ReplyDeleteIt would certainly be a good opening deconstruction of the myth of being the good guys, of having a just cause, making you actually good or just. How justice groups can quickly turn into hateful mobs, and how proponents of justice can as easily be proponents of evil.
Might help explain to people why criticism does in fact need to be leveled at social activists, and that they are in fact capable of horrible acts in the midst of agitating for justice.
I didn't, but she's on my list of heroes, along with the ACLU, because good people protect everybody.
Delete