My professional blog has moved to http://an-owomoyela.dreamwidth.org . For personal/sociological writings, check out http://magistrate.dreamwidth.org.

My short story "Abandonware" is up at Fantasy Magazine today!

Abandonware is a work of science fantasy, which was favorably reviewed in the June 2010 Locus Magazine.

I'll have an author spotlight up on Fantasy Magazine in the coming days. I'll also have a look at and excerpt from my first Write-A-Thon story on this journal (an_owomoyela, for those of you reading crossposted) soon, and you can definitely still donate to Clarion West by sponsoring me.

{Originally posted at http://an-owomoyela.dreamwidth.org/2687.html.}

(My attempt in arranging a dead horse's limbs.)

If you are white, in a white-dominant white-normative culture, you reap white privilege. There may be other privileges which you do not reap. That's not the point or topic of that sentence. If you are white in a white-dominant, white-normative culture, you reap white privilege.

If you are a white woman, you may still be discriminated against on the basis of your sex, but you will still reap white privilege. If you are a poor white person, you lack economic privilege, but you still have white privilege. White privilege exists for you because you are white.

I recommend reading Peggy McIntosh's essay, "Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack," if you would like examples on what white privilege confers. It's an incomplete list, but it's an enlightening one (emphasis mine):

17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.

18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.

19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the "person in charge", I will be facing a person of my race.

Note how it keeps coming back to race? That's because it's a discussion of racial privilege. If it were a discussion of sexual or economic privilege, it would keep coming back to that.

Saying "What about me? I experience this other type of disadvantage!" in a discussion about race is like telling someone who turns down a slice of lasagna because she's allergic to tomatoes "What about me? I'm allergic to dairy and that has ricotta in it!" It means that neither one of you will be able to eat the lasagna, but it doesn't mean you have the same problem or that you'll experience them in the same way. (As a corollary, saying "Yeah, but what about your sex or economic status?" is like saying "Yeah, but it also has pasta and sausage and ricotta in it!". The fact that she can eat wheat/gluten and meat and dairy products does not make her any less allergic to tomatoes.)

No, white privilege is not a be-all end-all ticket which guarantees you absolute equality in all life's dealings. What it is, is a freedom from an entire suite of cultural misapprehensions, expectations, and burdens which you would otherwise have to carry. Yes, in this society, being exempted from those burdens is a privilege.

As a person – white or not – you have burdens to carry. No one is disputing this. When people point out white privilege, they're not saying you would be burdened only if you were non-white. They're saying if you were non-white, you would have these additional burdens to carry.

When there's a huge, ongoing discussion about racism and a white person chimes in with "I'm not privileged, I'm a woman!" or "I'm not privileged, I'm poor!", they are wrong. They are privileged in a way which does not reflect their sex or economic status. Believe it or not, they can be privileged in one way and disadvantaged in another.

A wealthy man of color will still not experience white privilege. He will experience economic and male privilege. He will not experience white privilege.

If you want a discussion about womens' disadvantage or economic disadvantage, you're well within your rights to start a new discussion. But please, please, please do not see it as your fundamental right to bring the discussion of racism to a screeching halt so that you can repurpose the discussion to talk about a different set of privileges altogether. In a discussion about otherness, for example, or marginality, all these privileges should be examined as part of a larger societal ailment. Discussions of otherness are good and necessary.

A discussion of racism is not a de facto discussion of all cultural otherness or marginality, just as a discussion on tomato allergies (say, in the form of a blog of tomato-free recipes for popular foods like pizza, salsa, marinara) is not a de facto forum for all food allergies (and the author is under no requirement to accommodate those with, say, dairy allergies in his/her considerations). The fact that it's an inappropriate forum does not imply that it's an inappropriate topic. People with dairy allergies are more than welcome to find or start their own forums. But expecting to walk into a different discussion and be accommodated is unreasonable.

One of the things I learned early on was that childlike behaviour was not limited to children. Really, it's been my experience that differences between children and adults are often overstated. This seems doubly true on the internet.

That makes talking about serious issues hard, because rational discussion requires that people act rationally. It's easy to be irrational online. And that's not even the biggest problem facing large discussions, especially when they're a discussions about problems, which might suggest that they require solutions. A single answer requires a single, uniform problem. A discussion as large as racism, which examines everything from the formation of the culture to individual attitudes within it, isn't going to have a neat solution or a bottom line. It can only be challenged through an awareness of the issues, and that awareness needs to be fostered through rational dialogue. Back to square 1.

I've wanted to contribute, but I've been hesitant to for a number of reasons. One of them I'll put forth here as a grain of salt, though ( be warned that it's a large one... )

TL;DR? Despite some things which might suggest otherwise, I do not speak from a position of authority. And I understand that the only way I can get a grasp on what's going on is by listening and accepting people's experiences as real and valid. And, perhaps most importantly, by recognizing that I have come from a background which has sheltered me, and that my personal experiences should not inform my opinions of others' experiences. I want others to recognize that in speaking my opinions, I can only speak for myself and my own experiences, which includes the experience of privilege. I am not and cannot be the spokesperson for any race. I'm just zis guy, you know?

A friend asked if there was any benefit to taking writing classes in college. I thought I might as well post my disorganized thoughts here as well as in the comments to the entry. What do the rest of you think?

In my experience, classes fall on a long spectrum between the pointless (or worse than pointless) and the revelatory. The absolute best classes will give you guidance not really on how to write, but how to analyze the parts of your own writing; they'll give you tools instead of rules. (Passive voice, for example? Is an excellent tool for when you *want* to pull the actor out of the action, which can be used to very haunting effect. To continue the tool analogy, you can say that a kitchen knife is better than a scalpel, but that only applies when you're trying to cut food. If you're removing a tumour, go for the scalpel every time. A tool's usefulness can only be measured against its desired effect.) They'll teach you to look not at what you're doing so much as how what you're doing affects the story you're writing.

Another thing a writing class – well, a workshop class – will give you is the chance to see how your writing affects people who aren't you, and to get feedback on what people think worked and what didn't. Feedback and the chance to engage in a dialogue are wonderful things, and also hugely useful, if the people involved take time and care in discussing it and if they're somewhere around your target audience. (In my weekly crit group, we had someone who comes from a literary background critiquing an urban-fantastical story, and some of the advice she gave was perfect for a literary story but potentially damaging for a speculative fiction story. It was apparently common-sense things like "You need to explain that this is a fantastical world right off the bat," which – no, because a reader of speculative fiction is going to assume that it is. It'd be like explaining that the main characters were people instead of bricks.)

The most important thing, in my opinion, a class or workshop can do for you is to give you a community you can later draw on. My writing group now evolved from a class I took here at university. I'm in a lot of contact with my Clarion West class, who provide not only help with stories, still, but also advice on a lot of the rest of my life (like where good job markets lie and how to construct my CV.)

The thing is, all of these can be found outside of a class. You can develop those analytical skills on your own, you can find or form your own community, especially online where the cost of gathering is basically null. Classes offer it all in one convenient location and give you a structure to make things not fall apart, but they're not 100% necessary, especially as so much depends on the teachers and the classmates. I would not be where I am now without attending Clarion West, because it was a focused and intense workshop with 6 instructors and 18 students, each of which brought their own perspectives, theories, and toolsets to be picked through. But I've had workshops where the only really valuable thing I got was the encouragement (in fact, the requirement) to write.

Web designers and developers can do a lot worse than reading A List Apart regularly anyway, but there's an especially fascinating article on designing for readers up in Issue 278. It's especially interesting to me, as I'm very slowly moving toward working on my own website, which may eventually archive fiction as well.

This is about how I feel about Clarkesworld's online submission tracking. It's extraordinarily useful! It also gives me license not to forget about my submissions and let them go with grace.

I have written a short story this week! It's a 3300-word soft-SciFi piece about a boy who discovers a piece of prophetic abandonware. So far Abandonware is the working title, which I don't like, but I'm not sure what a good title would be. "I, Prophet"? "Burn This Disk"? Oh well.

I'm hoping to write or revise at least a short story a week, and submit or revise at least a short story every two weeks. Should be good exercise, at least...

Well, I finished a short, experimental-form mostly-mood-driven piece tentatively named Year of the Rabbit today. Next up: workshop it!

And revise a few things and get them looking for homes. I have two stories being shopped out right now, and I'm sure I can do better.

There's this truism which says a story is finished when the thought of revising it one more time makes you cry.

I'm about at that stage with Jessamine, which is on its fifth draft and was my Clarion West application story, but since I last looked at it, I know I've improved as a writer and my CW instructors did have a few things to say about it which could nudge me in the right direction toward revising again. So now I have to decide: is it finished, or not?

Questions, questions. I may just try to finish Year of the Rabbit and possibly rename that, and come back to Jessamine when I've developed a taste for wine.