serakit

I am, apparently, someone who copes with existential terror by writing villanelles. (It is surprisingly helpful. Villanelles are so complicated that fighting through it is a good distraction .)


Watchful waiting has a cost
Meet peril’s ambush unaware
This is how the war is lost.

Stay your course, let fear exhaust
Claim it’s delusion to prepare
Watchful waiting has a cost.

Thoughts and prayers with blood embossed
Empty words meant not to scare
This is how the war is lost.

Illicit power is not crossed
Deny, avoid, ignore, beware
Watchful waiting has a cost.

Blood-fed petals will be tossed
Maintain denial if you dare
This is how the war is lost.

Peace shall fade in killing frost
With enmity beyond compare
Watchful waiting has a cost.
This is how the war is lost.

Why could this not have been the popular anti-racism book, if what we're looking for is "white woman talks about the process of becoming an ally?"

The book in question is Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving. I think I would only use it as a first introductory book with white people who have themselves had privileged enough lives that the mention of a country club doesn't cause some kind of instinctive disdain, because the first part of the book is her journey of coming to racial awakening and that starts with a very privileged childhood. I don't think it will land the same way for anyone who grew up poor. She does discuss race-versus-class a bit at the beginning, but I do think people who didn't grow up with money are going to have a ready excuse to be dismissive.

However, for people who did grow up with the kind of privilege she describes, the book is potentially incredibly valuable. There no heavy academic theory in this, and no intense performativity. Instead, she starts with an explanation of her own childhood and how she was encouraged to brush anything even vaguely unpleasant under the rug, and mistakes she made with her early zeal to "help the less fortunate" and the resultant seeing herself as savior/rescuer. Then she was late registering for classes during her master's degree and the only thing that had spots was the racial justice class... and it appears to have been a very good racial justice class, one aware of the effect it was having on the participants. But she's also very clear that having been woken up wasn't the end; it was the beginning-- she goes on to describe a lot of learning experiences she had later, including some truly cringe-inducing mistakes.

From there, she goes to broader questions of "what immediate behavioral changes can you make," with sections for both inner work (reflection and changing your thought process) and outer work (start thinking about ways you can contribute positively to changing society). She still keeps it focused, though-- broad patterns are discussed, but they're discussed in layman's terms and illustrated with anecdotes from her life.

The chapters are short, and each one a question to answer at the end, or  a couple of related questions. It took me so long to get through it in part because I was writing my answers down and some of them required time to think about.

At the end, there's a section called "Tell Me What To Do," which includes further reading, ways to engage with the people of color around you, ways to evaluate whether the anti-racism you've found is helping or further perpetuating the problem, and places to donate to.

(Some of you might remember my scathing review of White Fragility back in July, and I haven't been able to stop myself mentally comparing them as I read, since they're both introductions to racism written by privileged white women. To my mind the biggest difference between the two books is the focus: DiAngelo wants to make sure you feel bad-- and indeed seems to consider making you feel bad to be the entire point of the exercise-- while Irving wants to make sure you're equipped to help, and I know which one I think is more useful to enacting long-term change. But Irving also wants to make sure you can understand what she's saying; she's well-educated but she's not actually an academic, and it shows-- she's careful to use clear, plain language throughout.)

So this one is highly recommended! It's practical, it's focused, and it acknowledges that everyone will make mistakes but also that those mistakes aren't the end of the world if you learn from them.

No one ever mentions that the first step is not learning how code works, but failing at installing your development environment.

A while back, I posted about circling and there was a discussion of encounter groups in the comments. Specifically, that encounter groups aren't around so much anymore because putting a bunch of people in a room to have feelings at each other with inadequate facilitation tends to end badly.

Apparently circling isn't the only place they've made a rebranded reappearance. No, there's now something called "racial healing circles" which I spent an hour chasing down specifics on today. As far as I can tell, they are slightly more focused encounter groups being put forth by a number of social-justice-oriented foundations where you're all supposed to sit in a circle with a facilitator and talk about your racial feelings. They're explicitly not about dealing with systemic injustice, but rather are supposed to be a place where you all sit in a circle and talk about your racial feelings and promote *understanding* each other.

I don't have to describe all the obvious ways for this to go horribly wrong, right?

ALA-- yes, my very own professional organization-- has trained some people to facilitate these in libraries as a way of getting libraries to participate in more social justice stuff. Just a two-day workshop with some preparatory webinars, and you can be qualified to facilitate racial healing circles too!

The thing is, because the way this sort of disaster manifests is in the form of quiet lasting damage to the individuals hurt by it, the people running the workshops are never going to know the harm they're doing.

As a general observation: if you are doing a study on the subject of keeping secrets and you're using a questionnaire to get people who have recently committed an infidelity, it would be a *lot* simpler and probably more accurate to add a question to your questionnaire about whether they've told their spouse about their infidelity and exclude the ones who have than it is to do what they apparently did, which was conduct an entirely separate study about whether people who've committed infidelities usually tell their partners about them and assume that the "roughly 80% keep it a secret" that you get holds true for your other sample size. Like, this is REALLY OBVIOUS bad research design.

I just saw an article talking about how Q-drops are functionally creative writing prompts-- their followers take whatever, look for "meaning", and create things out of the whole cloth based on the prompting.

I am now extremely tempted to *actually* use Q-drops as fiction prompts and write some dystopian short stories based on them.

I have a story in an anthology, which is now live for Kindle preorder, with the physical copies soon to come.

The anthology is called We're the Weird Aliens and follows the premise of "What if humans are the species considered really *weird* by the rest of the galaxy? Not just 'indomitable spirit and endure when the chips are down', but are really *weird*?"

My story is called "Variations" and is my "aliens discover service dogs" story: the human delegation to the ship Starleaf includes someone with a strange creature no one mentioned, and a young alien aspiring to the job of Intercultural Liaison sets out to find out both why it's there and why no one mentioned it was coming. But asking straight-out would be rude... and so misunderstandings ensue.

That's just one of the stories, of course; there are several others by other authors.

You can preorder the ebook on Amazon here, or when preorder for other formats and stores goes live it will be posted here.

Dichroic Glass Dice

No dice shall ever be prettier. Someday, when I have money, I shall acquire a set of these. (I have comparatively few sets of dice-- just one set of ace pride dice and one set of jewel-toned sparkly red metal ones-- but the ones I have, I treasure.)

I hate the "OMG YOU USED THE WRONG WORD" thing in general-- not the "don't use slurs" part, slurs are totally reasonable to be upset about, but the thing where something was the correct term a few years ago and *now* the social justice establishment has decided that the word is Deeply Offensive. The constantly-evolving terminology is a way of excluding those who don't have the in-group connection to keep up, and to anyone who's not deeply immersed in the movement it makes the movement look petty.

As in this instance, where there are about a thousand reasons to object to Amy Coney Barrett, and yet the one certain circles seem to have decided on is "She used 'sexual preference' when the correct phrase is 'sexual orientation'!"

Whether or not that's a dog-whistle (and I'm not totally convinced it is given the number of people *within* the community I've seen use the two phrases interchangeably) do you realize how that makes you look to *other* people? People who are probably going to look at that and go "Oh, the people objecting to her are petty people fussing over language" and use that to dismiss all the legitimate human rights stuff?

(Sure, the deep-red people are going to dismiss it no matter what you say, but there actually is a decent chunk of the country that just doesn't think too hard about this stuff either way.)