Rhetorically Constructed, or: We All Write Like White Men, Part 2
on July 14, 2010 at 8:30 pmThanks, ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
fourzoas, for the subject line :-P
I wrote to Dmitri of Codingrobots, the site responsible for “I Write Like” yesterday, after I posted about it, and linked him to my post.
I would feel remiss to share his response as it was a private email and I did not ask to, but he replied swiftly and promptly.
His response was in two parts. The first part disheartened me, as he said that the software couldn’t tell what race or gender the authors were. He seemed to think that my complaint was that *I* didn’t get a woman of color as my response to the meme.
He also said that he thinks men and women are stylistically similar so he didn’t see the big deal.
However, he closed by saying that if I wanted to recommend him some authors to add, to please do so.
I’ve sent him a list. If you want to send him one, his email address is dmitry [at] codingrobots [dot] com.
intrepia compiled a list of authors in the meme as of yesterday afternoon. If Dmitry’s estimate that there were 40 authors included is accurate, this is a complete or near-complete list:
Douglas Adams
Isaac Asimov
Margaret Atwood
Jane Austen
L. Frank Baum
Ray Bradbury
Dan Brown
Raymond Chandler
Lewis Carroll
James Fenimore Cooper
Daniel Defoe
Charles Dickens
Arthur Conan Doyle
Ian Fleming
Harry Harrison
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
Stephen King
Rudyard Kipling
Jack London
H. P. Lovecraft
Vladimir Nabokov
George Orwell
Chuck Palahniuk
Edgar Allan Poe
Mario Puzo
J. K. Rowling
J. D. Salinger
William Shakespeare
Iain Sinclair
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bram Stoker
Jonathan Swift
J. R. R. Tolkien
Leo Tolstoy
Mark Twain
Kurt Vonnegut
H. G. Wells
Oscar Wilde
PG Wodehouse
That list contains 37 white men and three white women. There is not a lone single author of color anywhere on the list. If I’ve somehow mistaken someone’s racial background, I apologize, and please correct me.
In other news, this post has gotten me a +1 for the day and a -1 for the day.
In +1 news, Margaret Atwood retweeted my tweet!
Pix, because it happened:
That sort of makes me feel like I’ve entered a magical alternate reality!
But in bad news, I had to screen a comment on my blog because someone actually left hate speech! With words I don’t care to repeat in it and everything. I was somewhat shocked. Fortunately, that is what screening is for.
ETA:
The (once again prompt) reply I got from the creator of the meme is so frustrating that I’m no longer feeling that I owe his privacy any respect. Here you go:
Tea,
Thanks for your reply. I’ve added more writers into the database
recently. But I *absolutely* will not add people into the database due
to their race or gender. I will not search for lists of white, black,
Asian, Hispanic, or any other types of people that you _took care to
differentiate_. All people are equal to me, and equality means not
looking at skin color or different types of chromosomes.
I think the question is closed.
–
Dmitry Chestnykh
I Write Like
I got my keys to my apartment, so next post will be empty!apartment pics!
Kudos to this man for his refusal of your ludicrous request. The point is to spotlight the most famous authors, not to compile a feelgood list of authors of all creeds and genders. Because truly, a writer should be without color. Being told your style is like Shakespeare is being told that your style is similar to that of a great and respected poet, not that your style is that of a white man.
If the point is to spotlight the most famous authors, why were none of the authors of color on the Project Gutenberg top downloads list that he used as the source for his meme included? If it was really the most famous authors, then all the top names on the list would have been added, and not just the ones who were white.
Yeah, Agatha Christie is not famous at all. With her selling four billion books, second to the bible. Alice Walker isn’t discussed at all in school readings, neither is Chinua Achebe.
Like most people who tout the value of color- and/or gender-blindness, your logic would seem to dictate that White men are simply more talented (otherwise why would they be so over-represented?). I’m sorry you can’t see the epic flaws in your “reasoning”, but in the real world, race and gender do factor into who gets recognized and who doesn’t — because of the persistent bigotry you’re ignoring.
Sorry, but Dmitry is absolutely right. The only way you can accuse him of being racist and sexist is if he had deliberately taken out authors that weren’t white males, but you can see in his email that this wasn’t the case: that factor rightly wasn’t taken into account during the selection process.
Why bring just gender and race into it? What about authors with disabilities? Author with different sexual orientation? Author writing in a different language?
Why not include authors of varied abilities? That’s terribly unfair to bad writers…
I’m sorry that most famous authors are mostly white male, I assume this is probably mostly for historical reasons, but there is a better way than imposing some arbitrary quota… All this has achieved is to make any woman or non-white author included from now look suspiciously like it wasn’t on merit, but only to appease the feminist harpies… Terribly unfair to them.
Racism and sexism are, by nature, not things that the people who practice them are aware they are practicing. They are not a judgment of the moral character of the person who practices them, but a judgment of the society in which those people who practice them were raised. There is something morally questionable about a society which creates a person who can look at a list of forty people and not notice that only three of them are female and that none of them are of any racial background but the dominant one.
When we create media that only recognizes the merits of the dominant group, we reinforce the idea that only the work of that dominant group has value, even if we are only unintentionally enforcing it. It is damaging to society to continue to permit that sort of blase and wholly unintentional deference to a racist and sexist society. The only people who see names of women and people of color and assume that they did not get somewhere on their own merit are people who do not share their experiences. The only people who see nothing wrong with even unintentional exclusion of representatives of a majority of the world’s population are the people who have been excluding that majority for time immemorial.