Cultural Appropriation and fandom vs authors & critics

[deborah]

I've just been catching up on a month of old ChildLit messages, and current context is making me notice something unpleasant. When there's an accusation of cultural appropriation in LJ fandom, fans immediately fall on the side of saying "How dare those of you with white privilege tell PoC their claims of having been harmed are false?" Whereas on ChildLit, accusations of cultural appropriation lead to a massive pileup on -- well, pretty much always on Debbie Reese. I don't always agree with Debbie, but the constant claims over there that her understanding of Native appropriation is wrong leave a vile taste in my mouth. Especially when contributors hit multiple bingo squares:

• You're telling us what we can't write!
• You're telling us what we can't read!
• It's just fiction.
• No, it's different when it's a non-Native [in this case Jewish] story that's mistold; that's BAD.
• Isn't it racist to say you need Native clearance to tell this story?
• But the author had anti-racist intentions!
• You say that the characters are portrayed unrealistically as members of their culture, which means you want a sterotypical portrayal, which is racist.

steepholm, diceytillerman, fjm, other ChildLitters, am I wrong? I know I'm a month out of date with my reading, but it really seems sketchy, how that conversation usually goes. And it happens again and again. Is fandom really that much more capable of seeing its own white privilege than ChildLit (which I know is not monolithically white any more than fandom is)?

Comments

[writinghood.livejournal.com]

This is NOT encouraging me to catch up on *my* ginormous backlog of unread child_lit digests.

So, speaking from a position of ignorance of the current child_lit dust-up (but familiarity with past ones) as well as pretty much total ignorance of the incidents in fandom you're thinking of, and to make a vast generalization... could it have something to do with age? Not that there aren't plenty of young people on child_lit and plenty of mature people in fandom, but the general impression is that the former would be an older community than the latter, on average. I'm trying not to be ageist (ugh, a phrase that usually precedes someone doing exactly that), but the longer you've had certain habits of thought, the harder it is to overcome them...? I wouldn't try very hard to defend it, but the thought did occur to me.

[deborah]

When you catch up, basically skip any post with the subject line "darkness across the water" or "Kanell". And there are plenty of them.

As for age, I don't know. Certainly the people I've met personally on ChildLit who were on the less attractive side of the dustup over there are people I know have been in academia for quite a long time. I'm not sure they are necessarily older than some of the fans, but they have certainly been thinking in the ways they been thinking for longer.