Comments on: Rhetorically Constructed, or: We All Write Like White Men, Part 2

By: Antagonia.net - Tits.

Antagonia.net - Tits. — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:39:21 +0000

[...] dealing with unwanted male attention, and it made me revisit a draft of a post I started writing after the I Write Like meme stuff I posted. The original post wasn’t about the story I’m sharing here. This was originally [...]

By: Tea Berry-Blue

Tea Berry-Blue — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:43:20 +0000

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.

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:14:23 +0000

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.

By: numol

numol — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:21:03 +0000

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.

By: brandi

brandi — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:13:53 +0000

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.

By: Tea Berry-Blue

Tea Berry-Blue — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:05:50 +0000

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:17:12 +0000

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.