Signal Boosting

One of many comments that’s stuck with me over the past few weeks is how certain voices are getting drowned out while others are amplified. So I wanted to signal-boost some folks.

  • Tade Thompson has created a blog for PoC to express themselves. The first post is “Why Are We Here?” “Recently, there have been a number of ructions in the SFF community involving PoC … In all these discussions one constant refrain has been the lack of PoC-led spaces for discussion and exploration of these matters. I think that’s a fair point. ‘Safe‘ is a direct response to that.”
  • Solace Ames on Requires Hate/Winterfox (Guest post on Foz Meadows’ site): “I hope the takeaway from all this is for writers of color to support each other in more organized ways. Criticize each other, YES, because a healthy critical culture helps everyone, but we need to stick together in the face of our overwhelming disadvantages. And I hope white people will think twice about using PoC pain to act out their psychodramas and engage in internet battles with us as the footballs…”
  • On POC/WOC as an identity category: it’s different from the inside, by VacuousMinx: “And even today, after all the revelations, not everyone is having that conversation in public. It’s still too painful and too dangerous for a lot of the involved parties. There are a lot of locked-down twitter feeds right now, which means that outsiders aren’t seeing anything close to the whole picture.”
  • Athena Andreadis: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Wrecker:
    • To those who are still trying to gaslight, discredit and silence BS/RH’s victims, I can only say, as Joseph Welch did: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
    • To those who were led into the trap of complicity, I say: come back to us. We all make errors of judgment. Humans are tribal, we want to be liked and to associate with success.
    • To those who were targeted and hurt, I say: you are not alone. Others know about the bullying and lies that almost broke you.
    • To those who stood in front of this wrecker, despite fear and real consequences, I say: you are the pillars who hold up the world.
  • Rochita Loenen-Ruiz: Standing Up and Speaking Truth: “Finding out about the stories of other victims has made me realize that to keep silent would be to do them a great disservice. The incident that took place between Alex, RH and myself was not pleasant, but there are those who have been silenced far longer by fear, there are those who have been ostracized and left out of conversations, there are those who have been shoved aside, dismissed and devalued.” (Alex Dally MacFarlane has a response here.)
  • Rachel Manija Brown: Not a Fun Post to Write: “This is why people found her so frightening, and why so many of the stories about her are only told anonymously. It’s not because she told everyone that they should be raped by dogs or have their hands broken with a hammer. It’s because she made those kinds of threats frequently enough, and was so vicious in general, that they became the subtext of everything she said. Another thing that frightened people was her tendency to harass people for months or years after a single encounter, pursuing them from platform to platform, long after ordinary trolls would have gotten bored and moved on.”
  • Kameron Hurley: On Becoming What You Hate, Redux: “Though I have scaled back those honest reviews, I miss them sometimes. I miss saying what I really think. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t occasionally consider creating another persona, a pseudonym, who could speak the raging, blinding, ballsy truth I want to piss all over the internet some days. But I realize this is my career. I’m a grown up. I suck it up. I save the pseudonym for another day. I carry on.”
  • Victor Fernando R. Ocampo: A Massive Disappointment: “As many before me have pointed out, this is not literary criticism, this is silencing. Those of you who enjoy hate as entertainment should take a long hard look into your mirrors. You may not like what you see.”
  • Chelsea Gaither: Thoughts on the Requires Only That You Hate drama: “I also know how incredibly easy it is for abusive personalities to lie their way out of a jam. Because I’ve seen it happen over, and over, and over, and OVER IRL. It creates an intensely damaging cycle that allows the abuser to continue to abuse their victims of choice. So if this really is a genuine apology from RH … good for you, girl. Please understand that it’s gonna take the rest of us a really, REALLY long time to trust you, but that’s because a lot of us have been badly hurt by you and we don’t want that to happen again.”
  • Tobias Buckell: May I draw your attention to the posts… “I do not call on anyone to ‘not publish’ the person’s current pseudonym that they are writing under. That is the tactic they have used, I will not stoop to that. But I damn well sure will draw awareness to the accounts of people speaking up and documenting how they were ill-treated. That shit’s gotta stop. Criticism and disagreement are one thing, this is another.”
  • Polenth Blake: Requires Only That You Trust: “…people in privileged positions, who rarely received death threats, constantly minimised it. It can’t be that scary, she really doesn’t mean it, etc. Easy to say when you’ve never been the target. Or you’ve only been the target in a few cases like that, where there’s never been a real risk of it being followed through, so it’s not that worrying. That meant the criticism was a lot harsher on anyone marginalised – usually women of colour – than it was for the privileged authors, with their legions of fans ready to defend them.”