I'm glad that all made sense!! And I would still love to read your post, if you feel like finishing it! It's really interesting stuff to think about.
it seemed like JKR wasn't really taking ownership of the fact that she didn't do great with representation. <-- this, this, exactly, so much this!! Way to be so much more concise than I am remotely capable of being.
OTOH, Maggie Stiefvater's position on this sounds amazing, and I think that point is so important. Both of those points!!! (A) Very interesting (and sad and angry-making, if not shocking) that they would make the angry kid (and, the internet tells me, boy kid) black, and that that would be the most popular racebending. That's some fascinating insight into a collective subconscious/implicit bias. (B) The whole idea of accountability and wanting to be held accountable is HUGE. And I think makes things so much better than JKR's tweet because it acknowledges that the lack of representation is a problem that needs a proactive solution and provides a model for people to, instead of getting defensive, admit that they're not doing it entirely right. And we need those models! We need social scripts for people to say "I'm not doing as well as I could be, I want to do better, you calling me out is one thing that helps me do better and I appreciate it." And when she just says it - "The books are shamefully white-washed...there is no point sugar coating the present," that's really big!!
And to borrow a couple of those words, sugar coating is a lot of what JKR's tweet feels like to me. It does feel like "I wish I did better, but I didn't, but let's pretend." Not that useful, especially when it's changing the label and not anything else, re: both race and sexuality. And if she can get that far, I wish/hope she could get the rest of the way, from knowing something should be done to thinking more about how to do it.
(Also, thank you for pointing me to/linking to that post!!! Super interesting. And that might've been the tipping point on wanting to read The Raven Cycle...)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-12-22 03:27 am (UTC)it seemed like JKR wasn't really taking ownership of the fact that she didn't do great with representation. <-- this, this, exactly, so much this!! Way to be so much more concise than I am remotely capable of being.
OTOH, Maggie Stiefvater's position on this sounds amazing, and I think that point is so important. Both of those points!!! (A) Very interesting (and sad and angry-making, if not shocking) that they would make the angry kid (and, the internet tells me, boy kid) black, and that that would be the most popular racebending. That's some fascinating insight into a collective subconscious/implicit bias. (B) The whole idea of accountability and wanting to be held accountable is HUGE. And I think makes things so much better than JKR's tweet because it acknowledges that the lack of representation is a problem that needs a proactive solution and provides a model for people to, instead of getting defensive, admit that they're not doing it entirely right. And we need those models! We need social scripts for people to say "I'm not doing as well as I could be, I want to do better, you calling me out is one thing that helps me do better and I appreciate it." And when she just says it - "The books are shamefully white-washed...there is no point sugar coating the present," that's really big!!
And to borrow a couple of those words, sugar coating is a lot of what JKR's tweet feels like to me. It does feel like "I wish I did better, but I didn't, but let's pretend." Not that useful, especially when it's changing the label and not anything else, re: both race and sexuality. And if she can get that far, I wish/hope she could get the rest of the way, from knowing something should be done to thinking more about how to do it.
(Also, thank you for pointing me to/linking to that post!!! Super interesting. And that might've been the tipping point on wanting to read The Raven Cycle...)