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ETA: This post suddenly became more relevant recently at the publishing of a bandom fic set during the Holocaust, that managed to be not just another bit of privilege-soaked fail, but horribly inaccurate, entirely unresearched, and deeply disturbing in its blitheness about using a historical event that killed more than 100million people and left the survivors with gaping holes in their lives where friends, family, community, and trust in their safety and neighbors had been. There are still people alive who loved through it and can tell us exactly how horrifying. Never mind, that is just another bit of privilege-soaked fail. Here we go again. I'm a queer Jew with disabilities. The Holocaust is my people's tragedy. It feel absolutely different. Actually, given how many meta-writing Jewish fen are out there, this difference when it's us is the only way I can account for the near-total silence this fic has generated.
Warning, what follows is only tangentially related to the recent discussions about the the incredibly privilege-soaked, apoplexy-inducing 80 thousand word collection of fail of a fic posted in the Supernatural RPF fandom (A fandom I happen to know absolutely nothing about, as it happens, yay Metafandom!). I don’t wish to derail, and I only want to say I’ve been seeing an odd sidenote to much of the meta being written. Highly critical metawriters have been adding the uncertain caveat that maybe if the fic had been written so that it was about the two white guys learning about the essential humanity of the Haitian people they meet it would be possible to make the plot not horribly offensive. I’m not going to say it’s impossible to use the recent earthquake in Haiti as a setting for a fanfiction without being horribly offensive, because then someone will manage to prove me wrong (and given that all of fandom is offering this as an implicit challenge, I hope to see someone succeed spectacularly soon), but that sort of story moral has it’s own problems.
Obviously I can’t speak from the perspective of a woman of color, glowing, as I do under blacklights, but I do claim other minority statuses. I’m a queer Jew with disabilities, and you can bet that the same narrative is told about those minority groups too. When I was in my late elementary school years, (ages ten and eleven for those of you unfamiliar with the US school system) I had a morbid, and to my parents and teachers, deeply troubling fondness for Holocaust novels. Mostly I just wanted to understand what was going though the minds of the people who just let this happen to their country, who let their friends and neighbors be taken away to their deaths. None of the memoirs that I could find back then had an answer to that, so I eagerly hunted through the novels. I needn’t have bothered. There was rarely any indication that any of the stars of these novels, who were always perfect Aryans, had ever even met a Jewish person before in their lives until the events of the novel. Germany before the Nazis had left the ghettos behind a long time ago, and had Jews in almost every neighborhood and school, but when I was ten, I wasn’t clear enough on this fact to be angry. Of course there were Jews in these novels, to be rescued, or hidden away, and more importantly, to teach the Aryan star of the novel that Jews are people too.
The Aryan character and their journey towards understanding that Jews were people too was always the focus of the novel, not the horror, or the confusion, or the terror Jewish people must have felt at the time, and of course, the fact that the Nazis were exterminating other non-Jewish groups of people too was never mentioned. The Jews in these stories were devices. Even as the novels tried to preach that Jews were people too, they presented characters so bland that I never even considered empathizing with them or being interested in them more than I was in the Aryan lead, even though I nominally had more in common with them. It wasn’t just that the characters were so very stereotypical, (always dark haired, dark eyed, keeping every Jewish custom) it’s that they were always the perfect picture of a good person. They never were womanizers, or lazy, or grumpy, or flawed in any way. In fact, they were too busy being the ideal human being to show the Aryan lead and the assumed-to-be Gentile reader that Jews didn’t deserve to be killed, that they weren’t even allowed to be angry. They were too perfect to be angry that their lives had been torn apart, and they were being hunted down like animals. But the story wasn’t about them, and they weren’t really characters. They were just there to give the noble Gentile child a chance to save the day. For these novels, one of the greatest human tragedies was just a backdrop for the growth of a Gentile character. I never felt Jewish either, reading these novels, not like those Jews in the stories and I just accepted this sort of dislocation from my Jewish identity while reading about the freaking Holocaust was just the way it was. The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen was a revelation to me. For once, the Holocaust novel was actually about Jews. All of the Jewish characters, not just the heroine were well developed and flawed. They got to be the ones who did things. We were the ones who got to do things. Funny how that was the first Holocaust novel I found that was written by a Jew.
As I grew out of my macabre taste for Holocaust novels and started watching more TV, (these were unrelated; they just happened at about the same time) I saw another, similar narrative on dozens of Very Special Episodes. This time the sainted representative of a minority group that the show’s main character had to learn were people too was in a wheelchair. And yes, it was always a wheelchair. Just as the Jewish characters in the Holocaust novels were always stereotypically Jewish looking, the characters with disabilities in these shows were always in wheelchairs. These characters never got angry at the way they were treated, were never out of sorts, or anything but serene about it all, and they always needed the able-bodied star to be their champion. They never got to be the stars of their own stories or fight for their own rights.
I grew up and learned how to hunt down stories with people in minority groups as the stars. They’re just a lot harder to find, especially in children’s novels, which is another whole issue. Twice bitten, three times shy, I managed for the most part to avoid “LGBTQs are people too” narratives, but yeah, there are plenty of those out there too.
Like many similarly problematic narratives, there’s nothing inherent in this narrative that makes it unacceptable. It’s the context in so many tellings of this narrative and a comparative absence of other narratives. But in this context, the “___ are people too” narrative is the most insidious kind of oppression, the kind that masquerades as acceptance.
Warning, what follows is only tangentially related to the recent discussions about the the incredibly privilege-soaked, apoplexy-inducing 80 thousand word collection of fail of a fic posted in the Supernatural RPF fandom (A fandom I happen to know absolutely nothing about, as it happens, yay Metafandom!). I don’t wish to derail, and I only want to say I’ve been seeing an odd sidenote to much of the meta being written. Highly critical metawriters have been adding the uncertain caveat that maybe if the fic had been written so that it was about the two white guys learning about the essential humanity of the Haitian people they meet it would be possible to make the plot not horribly offensive. I’m not going to say it’s impossible to use the recent earthquake in Haiti as a setting for a fanfiction without being horribly offensive, because then someone will manage to prove me wrong (and given that all of fandom is offering this as an implicit challenge, I hope to see someone succeed spectacularly soon), but that sort of story moral has it’s own problems.
Obviously I can’t speak from the perspective of a woman of color, glowing, as I do under blacklights, but I do claim other minority statuses. I’m a queer Jew with disabilities, and you can bet that the same narrative is told about those minority groups too. When I was in my late elementary school years, (ages ten and eleven for those of you unfamiliar with the US school system) I had a morbid, and to my parents and teachers, deeply troubling fondness for Holocaust novels. Mostly I just wanted to understand what was going though the minds of the people who just let this happen to their country, who let their friends and neighbors be taken away to their deaths. None of the memoirs that I could find back then had an answer to that, so I eagerly hunted through the novels. I needn’t have bothered. There was rarely any indication that any of the stars of these novels, who were always perfect Aryans, had ever even met a Jewish person before in their lives until the events of the novel. Germany before the Nazis had left the ghettos behind a long time ago, and had Jews in almost every neighborhood and school, but when I was ten, I wasn’t clear enough on this fact to be angry. Of course there were Jews in these novels, to be rescued, or hidden away, and more importantly, to teach the Aryan star of the novel that Jews are people too.
The Aryan character and their journey towards understanding that Jews were people too was always the focus of the novel, not the horror, or the confusion, or the terror Jewish people must have felt at the time, and of course, the fact that the Nazis were exterminating other non-Jewish groups of people too was never mentioned. The Jews in these stories were devices. Even as the novels tried to preach that Jews were people too, they presented characters so bland that I never even considered empathizing with them or being interested in them more than I was in the Aryan lead, even though I nominally had more in common with them. It wasn’t just that the characters were so very stereotypical, (always dark haired, dark eyed, keeping every Jewish custom) it’s that they were always the perfect picture of a good person. They never were womanizers, or lazy, or grumpy, or flawed in any way. In fact, they were too busy being the ideal human being to show the Aryan lead and the assumed-to-be Gentile reader that Jews didn’t deserve to be killed, that they weren’t even allowed to be angry. They were too perfect to be angry that their lives had been torn apart, and they were being hunted down like animals. But the story wasn’t about them, and they weren’t really characters. They were just there to give the noble Gentile child a chance to save the day. For these novels, one of the greatest human tragedies was just a backdrop for the growth of a Gentile character. I never felt Jewish either, reading these novels, not like those Jews in the stories and I just accepted this sort of dislocation from my Jewish identity while reading about the freaking Holocaust was just the way it was. The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen was a revelation to me. For once, the Holocaust novel was actually about Jews. All of the Jewish characters, not just the heroine were well developed and flawed. They got to be the ones who did things. We were the ones who got to do things. Funny how that was the first Holocaust novel I found that was written by a Jew.
As I grew out of my macabre taste for Holocaust novels and started watching more TV, (these were unrelated; they just happened at about the same time) I saw another, similar narrative on dozens of Very Special Episodes. This time the sainted representative of a minority group that the show’s main character had to learn were people too was in a wheelchair. And yes, it was always a wheelchair. Just as the Jewish characters in the Holocaust novels were always stereotypically Jewish looking, the characters with disabilities in these shows were always in wheelchairs. These characters never got angry at the way they were treated, were never out of sorts, or anything but serene about it all, and they always needed the able-bodied star to be their champion. They never got to be the stars of their own stories or fight for their own rights.
I grew up and learned how to hunt down stories with people in minority groups as the stars. They’re just a lot harder to find, especially in children’s novels, which is another whole issue. Twice bitten, three times shy, I managed for the most part to avoid “LGBTQs are people too” narratives, but yeah, there are plenty of those out there too.
Like many similarly problematic narratives, there’s nothing inherent in this narrative that makes it unacceptable. It’s the context in so many tellings of this narrative and a comparative absence of other narratives. But in this context, the “___ are people too” narrative is the most insidious kind of oppression, the kind that masquerades as acceptance.
