{"id":24744,"date":"2011-10-23T22:20:05","date_gmt":"2011-10-23T22:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/racism-and-science-fiction-by-samuel-r-delany\/"},"modified":"2011-10-23T22:20:05","modified_gmt":"2011-10-23T22:20:05","slug":"racism-and-science-fiction-by-samuel-r-delany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/racism-and-science-fiction-by-samuel-r-delany\/","title":{"rendered":"“Racism and Science Fiction” by Samuel R. Delany"},"content":{"rendered":"

tokenblkgirl<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

In the Dealers\u2019 room was an Autograph Table where, throughout the convention, pairs of writers were assigned an hour each to make themselves available for book signing. The hours the writers would be at the table was part of the program. At 12:30 on Saturday I came to sit down just as Nalo Hopkinson came to join me.<\/small><\/p>\n

Understand, on a personal level, I could not be more delighted to be signing with Nalo. She is charming, talented, and I think of her as a friend. We both enjoyed our hour together. That is not in question. After our hour was up, however, and we went and had some lunch together with her friend David, we both found ourselves more amused than not that the two black American sf writers at Readercon, out of nearly eighty professionals, had ended up at the autograph table in the same hour. Let me repeat: I don\u2019t think you can have racism as a positive system until you have that socio-economic support suggested by that (rather arbitrary) twenty percent\/eighty percent proportion. But what racism as a system does is isolate and segregate the people of one race, or group, or ethnos from another. As a system it can be fueled by chance as much as by hostility or by the best of intentions. (\u201cI thought they would be more comfortable together. I thought they would want to be with each other \u2026\u201d) And certainly one of its strongest manifestations is as a socio-visual system in which people become used to always seeing blacks with other blacks and so\u2014because people are used to it\u2014being uncomfortable whenever they see blacks mixed in, at whatever proportion, with whites.<\/small><\/p>\n

My friend of a decade\u2019s standing, Eric Van, had charge at this year\u2019s Readercon of the programming the coffee klatches, readings, and autograph sessions. One of the goals\u2014facilitated by computer\u2014was not only to assign the visiting writers to the panels they wanted to be on, but to try, when possible, not to schedule those panels when other panels the same writers wanted to hear were also scheduled. This made some tight windows. I called Eric after the con, who kindly pulled up grids and schedule sheets on his computer. \u201cWell,\u201d he said, \u201clots of writers, of course, asked to sign together. But certainly neither you nor Nalo did that. As I recall, Nalo had a particularly tight schedule. She wasn\u2019t arriving until late Friday night. Saturday at 12:30 was pretty much the only time she could sign\u2014so, of the two of you, she was scheduled first. When I consulted the grid, the first two names that came up who were free at the same time were you and Jonathan Lethem. You came first in the alphabet\u2014and so I put you down. I remember looking at the two of you, you and Nalo, and saying: Well, certainly there\u2019s nothing wrong with that pairing. But the point is, I wasn\u2019t thinking along racial lines. I probably should have been more sensitive to the possible racial implications\u2014\u201d <\/small><\/small><\/p>\n

Let me reiterate: Racism is a system. As such, it is fueled as much by chance as by hostile intentions and equally the best intentions as well. It is whatever systematically acclimates people, of all colors, to become comfortable with the isolation and segregation of the races, on a visual, social, or economic level\u2014which in turn supports and is supported by socio-economic discrimination. Because it is a system, however, I believe personal guilt is almost never the proper response in such a situation. Certainly, personal guilt will never replace a bit of well-founded systems analysis. And one does not have to be a particularly inventive science fiction writer to see a time, when we are much closer to that 20 percent division, where we black writers all hang out together, sign our books together, have our separate tracks of programming, if we don\u2019t have our own segregated conventions, till we just never bother to show up at yours because we make you uncomfortable and you don\u2019t really want us; and you make us feel the same way \u2026<\/small><\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

tokenblkgirl: In the Dealers\u2019 room was an Autograph Table where, throughout the convention, pairs of writers were assigned an hour each to make themselves available for book signing. The hours the writers would be at the table was part of the program. At 12:30 on Saturday I came to sit down just as Nalo Hopkinson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-6r6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}