And Nalo, a permutation of your question resonates discomfitingly with a whole political dilemma bouncing around in my head now since the insanity in Toronto the other week. (Well, what I saw of it online, that is.)

Not in the question of deserving of course — nobody deserves racism, continued or otherwise — but in terms of strategy.

The political analogy is:

The Right (let’s simplify) tends to STFU and become a monolith, because it’s strategically useful. Neoliberal economic policies are good! Globalization as we’re pursuing it is good! (etc.)

The Left tends to be more diverse by nature, which is important — there needs to be room for a great diversity of opinions — but this also makes a concerted, unified response difficult.

Obviously I don’t think the Left deserves to be ignored; but does the Left need to find a way to develop a consensus in order to convince the Right of that? I worry that until it does, the Right will find it much easier to dismiss the diverse things that they say.

But I also worry that if the Left does develop consensus the way the Right does, similar disenfranchisement will follow for some who currently do fit into the broad and semi-unified opposition to the Right.

Can any consensus reached be inclusive, decisive, and succinct? (I fear we can have at most two out of those three, because of the nature of the left, and that weakens the consensus approach from the outset… but at the same time, I don’t see a viable alternative to consensus, either.)

Is it wrong to imagine there might be an analogy to Racefail in all this?

One reason I mention succinct is because while Google is my friend, time is not. That link you provide, Nora, is to three pages of links… which is a lot of links, and all the postsI clicked through to today — and on a number of past days — have loads comments, some pertinent and some puzzled.

I was vaguely aware of Racefail at the outset, tried to pay attention, got busy, came back to catch up, and found a kind of ocean of material out there. There was just sooooooooo much, it was dizzying.

I surely can’t be the only person who can’t imagine a time when he’ll have gotten through all that.

Honestly, I don’t long for a single consensus, but maybe something a little concise: a collection of essays on the topic summarizing different arguments and issues that came up, epitomizing different views across a range, and so on? I have a post I want to make on Ian McDonald’s books set in India, and would love to be able to refer to this set of discussions, but it’s so damned much! (And some percentage of it seems to be in a foreign language — lots of fandom vocab and acronyms for which I have no idea of the meanings.)

(And so, maybe, on some level, I’m wondering whether the debate was the destabilization, and now we’re in the stage pf pushing changes through — in a more coherent, coarse-grained, and generalized form?)

Huh, actually, I betcha the whole discussion would make a fascinating PhD thesis topic. Especially on the question of why (if your observations are broadly shared, Nora) SF/F is so far behind the rest of the world on this subject. (Especially when we fancy ourselves ahead of the world in other areas, and probably did so in this one too until RaceFail.)

One wonders to what degree Geek Social Fallacies play into it. The first two or three seem prime ways of shutting down discussion of anything of a political nature, for example.

Unfortunately, according to some of the people in the whole RaceFail thing, doing that is patronizingly racist.

(It’s a particularly interesting story, and now I really want to see what kinds of critical (ie. academic) responses have been made to it… and it’s also interesting to me that Du Bois wrote SF. I wonder whether he’s responding in some way to the HG Wells novel In the Days of the Comet, from only fifteen years before, in which the vapor trails of a comet that near-misses the Earth transforms humanity — turning them suddenly very rational and “sane” but somehow, quite incongruously, without wiping out their deep-seated racism or sexism; Wells manages to use the “N” word quite uncritically (in the mouth of an “enlightened” proto-posthuman) and have a proto-posthuman Jewish character accept collective guilt for what amounts to a stereotypical of putative Semitic avarice; this, in a setting where humanity is supposedly cleansed of hate, viciousness, and too-emotional judgments and actions.)

I suspect the two stories could be held side by side for fruitful comparison, since Du Bois seems to point at the very impossibility of the kind of utopian change that Wells demonstrates (to a critical reader) he himself couldn’t imagine; I also wonder if somewhere in Du Bois’ papers there might be some hint at whether he was indeed responding directly to Wells or only more generally to ideas of transformation, utopia, and so on. (Du Bois wrote his comet story a decade after Halley’s Comet had come and gone, while Wells was writing a few years before; it’s possible Halley’s more recent pass and the interest it generated was an independent inspiration for Du Bois to use a comet as the catalyst for a major social disruption and for the discussion of utopian possibilties; but Wells was famous in the US by 1920, and well-regarded as an intellectual, and it seems they did meet (or at least correspond) in 1923 when Du Bois was in England — and that Wells was also aware of Du Bois, or wanted to appear thus in his letter to him — so one wonders whether Du Bois was indeed responding to and critiquing Wells’ earlier text.) Sadly, I can’t find much online that suggests anything more definite either way…

As for Racefail… I’ll save my comments on that for my own blog, though I’ll likely link here, if you don’t mind.