Mike Jung's Blog, page 25

Shades of Denunciation

In my usual style, I’m feebly grappling with the Gordian entanglements of diversity-related criticism, and like everything else about this dialogue, I find it really, really complicated and really, really important to contemplate.I’ve been thinking about it in both specifically book-and-author related terms and larger industry-related terms, but I think in today’s brain dump I’m talking mostly about individual people.

I believe in personal, individual responsibility, of...

This Teenage Artist Was Bullied Off Of Tumblr After Making A Webcomic About White Privilege

This Teenage Artist Was Bullied Off Of Tumblr After Making A Webcomic About White Privilege :

lookatthewords:

tanukitsune:

abaffledking:

youarenotyou:

thiefofheartz:

:

headpeace:

whitepeoplemadatthings:

After death threats and hate mail forced her on a hiatus from the internet, the artist behind the white privilege comic talks about her anxiety and keeping it together.

And sometimes white people get mad at other white people. 

The comic in question no longer lives on her Tumblr page, but you can find a reprint of it (with full credit and her permission) here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/aaronc13/this-comic-perfectly-explains-what-white-privilege-is

My heart goes out to this young woman, and I hope that she eventually feels comfortable enough to come back to Tumblr, as she’s a smart and gifted artist. 

Her tumblr, if you want to follow it, is http://jamietheignorantamerican.tumblr.com/

It’s a shame that this happened.  Her comic was perfect and nobody deserves death threats.

I love her comic and its a shame she got bullied off for telling the truth.

that comic was great. jesus white people y’all need some serious humility and love in your life.

wtf 

White people need to chill.

Doesn’t this just prove her point? 

From her page:

Please do not send me any more messages about how awful it was that I received death threats. I am beyond pissed that everyone has taken my comic about white privilege and the effects of institutionalized discrimination, and has turned it into a rallying cry against online bullying. This was not the point I was trying to make. Stop making me the face of bullying, and do NOT make me the face of “White Allies”. ——————-THERE ARE COMICS AND POSTS LIKE MINE BEING MADE BY PEOPLE OF COLOR ALL OVER THIS WEBSITE, AND THEY DON’T RECEIVE 1/5TH OF THE ATTENTION THAT I HAVE GOTTEN. THE FACT THAT MINE GOT POPULAR SPEAKS VOLUMES TO WHAT EXACTLY WHITE PRIVILEGE IS. I may not have deserved this hatred, but I do NOT deserve ANY praise. I want you all to know that Education is NOT where oppression ends, it’s where it begins. Thank you all for your kind and thoughtful words, but it’s over now. There’s nothing left for me to say.

catagator:Didn’t even get to close the search string before I...

catagator:

Didn’t even get to close the search string before I was told I was wrong. 

This is appalling. What the hell, Google?

"In my seventeen years as a bookseller and three years as a school librarian before that, if there’s..."

“

In my seventeen years as a bookseller and three years as a school librarian before that, if there’s one thing I have noticed, it’s that we adults make all kinds of erroneous assumptions about what will and won’t interest children. Time and time again, at the bookstore and at children’s book festivals, I have observed white children picking up books with kids of color on the cover, and heard adults express surprise at the choice. “Are you sure you want that one?” they’ll ask. Or, “Wouldn’t you like this book instead?” It’s not the kids who are the problem. Kids really, really, really only care about a great story. In twenty years of connecting children with books they love, I have only seen one child—ONE!—balk at a book cover because the main character was a different race from her own. It’s the adults who underestimate a child’s ability or desire to see beyond race.

The good news is that those same adults will usually respond well to bookseller enthusiasm for titles and allow their own reservations (which they aren’t even consciously aware of) to be shifted.

”

- Great advice from Elizabeth Bluemle, co-owner of the Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, VT. For more great advice on how to book-talk diverse titles to customers and patrons (this applies to libraries, too!), see the full article: True or False? Multicultural Books Don’t Sell (We Are the Problem, We Are the Solution). (via tubooks)

Cognitive Dissonance

I don’t know if what I’m about to rattle on about actually does involve cognitive dissonance, because I think the “contradictions” I have in mind may not be contradictory in a true sense.

I’ve been actively, genuinely participating in the ongoing diversity dialogue for the first time, and this morning my attention was captured by a Twitter exchange between Kelly Jensen, Elizabeth Burns, Justina Ireland, and a number of other people. That exchange appeared to be sparked by Kelly’s Book Riot post about the need for bigger megaphones in kidlit diversity, and both the post and the ensuing Twitter conversation touched on the idea of being able to hold two very different, conflicting feelings about a book in one’s heart and mind. 

I love Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park. It moved me tremendously, and there were moments when I was flabbergasted by the existence of a character whose inner life so closely resembled mine, in ways I’d never found in a book before. I’m not mixed-race (although both my children are), but I spent my middle school and high school years as one of the very few Asian kids in an overwhelmingly white community. I was, and in many ways remain, deeply alienated from my Korean ancestry, and I became as thoroughly assimilated into the privileged culture of white suburban America as I probably could have been.I was confused, and I grew more psychologically distanced from my extended family by the day.

My feelings of self-loathing weren’t rooted solely in my disengagement from my racial and ethnic heritage, but they weren’t separate from it either. I think Park is a character with more than a little self-hatred, a deep sense of alienation from his own racial and ethnic roots, and a very compartmentalized, incomplete understanding of himself. And some part of me fell back and sang out in relief that a book had captured those old feelings of mine so truly and so well. 

Then I started seeing the critical response to the book’s depiction of Korean characters, starting with Wendy Xu’s blazingly smart assertion that Eleanor & Park is a racist work (I won’t link to the other posts I’ve read since Kelly did a very thorough job of doing so in the Book Riot post). I read more, I opened a halting dialogue among my Facebook friends, and I realized with more than a little dismay that my perception of the book was becoming a much more complicated and difficult thing. 

The aforementioned Twitter conversation really made me think about the issue of loving a book, really loving it, while also feeling genuinely troubled by it. It’s always deflating to realize that I’m simply not any less human than anyone else when it comes to such things, but there you have it - a very large part of me simply wanted to dismiss the objections to E&P so I could just go on loving it in the relatively uncomplicated way I did after first reading it. 

I’ve expended some time and energy learning how to unpack my feelings about such things, so I made that effort, and was both unsurprised and unhappy to realize that once again, my difficulty in really absorbing the criticisms of this book I love were rooted in defending my self-defined identity. Acknowledging the troubling aspects of Rowell’s Korean characters couldn’t be done without acknowledging the fact that I simply hadn’t perceived those aspects on my own, which made me feel:

Stupid
Clueless
Uninformed
All of the above
All of the above plus a bunch of stuff I don’t even really understand 

It was (and remains) painful and exposing to realize that I completely whiffed on perceiving racially problematic aspects of a book that had become so important to me. It’d be easy to go spiraling down the emotional rabbit hole in a self-destructive way - believe me, I’ve done it before - but there’s no denying that seeing, hearing, and reading a viewpoint that so powerfully disrupted my psyche forced me to engage in a heavy round of self-examination. 

I still love Eleanor & Park. I’m also increasingly troubled by it. Can those two feelings coexist inside of me? I think it’s possible, although the evidence thus far clearly shows that it’ll be an uneasy coexistence, at least for a while. And I’ve started thinking it’s not only possible for those two feelings to coexist - it might actually be vitally, desperately necessary. 

I intend to keep engaging in the diversity dialogue, because I believe in its importance. We live in a world that’s bafflingly, messily, gloriously complex. The ongoing process of simply being alive in this world is endlessly multifaceted, and how can authors and publishers truly serve the needs and desires of all our readers without creating books that are equally complex? The fullness of that complexity can’t be addressed by each individual author or in each individual book, of course - that’s just not possible - but on a global scale, is there any other way?

But if I’m going to keep my commitment to being a part of that effort (and I intend to), I’ll have to contain a seemingly endless supply of contradictory feelings inside my harried brain. That includes respecting the intent of authors who confront matters of diversity in their work, but honestly addressing their shortcomings, if only in the recesses of my mind; supporting dissent, critical analysis, and necessary confrontation by people who are my allies, but also safeguarding and expressing my own feelings and opinions that might differ from theirs; honoring and valuing my own life experiences, creative intentions, and finished work, but accepting the reality that I will learn things that force me to examine my own biases and blind spots; and on and on and on. 

I’m worried about being attacked by racist trolls who’ll hammer at me with all the same vile garbage I’ve heard all my life. I’m actually even more worried about being attacked by people who might perceive me as oblivious, witless, or actively complicit in acts of disrespect and disenfranchisement. I don’t know if I can continue engaging in this dialogue without feeling terrible about myself on a regular basis. I don’t know if I can refrain from engaging in this dialogue without feeling terrible about myself on a regular basis. So I guess I’ll carry on, because despite my lack of a really colossal megaphone to speak through, I feel a spicule of hope that I can contribute to shoving our industry further along a more inclusive, equitable, reality-embracing track. 

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:ikkimikki:the-feminist-fangirl:c...

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

ikkimikki:

the-feminist-fangirl:

chandra75:

George Takei,

You rule. 

George Takei is a beautiful human being.

I love George Takei!

George Takei being amazing and mocking these sad, pathetic bigoted idiots in his glorious style

It is the best thing

LOOK AT ALL THIS STAR-SASS RIGHT HERE :D

When You Don't Look "Right"

When You Don't Look "Right":

nataliewhipple:

With all the talk about POC representation in publishing, I’ve been thinking a lot about this post I wrote a while back. I still find myself so turned around, with a million questions and insecurities in my head. I still wonder, “Do I count? Where does a ‘white-passing’ person fit in all this? I don’t look right, so maybe I don’t count though I wish I did and I don’t even know…”

I’m starting to realize I’m so much weirder than I thought I was. I have read about some POC talking about how they saw blond hair and blue eyes as the symbol or beauty, while I spent my childhood wishing I had dark hair and brown eyes and tanned skin. Because to me those were the things that I was missing, my blond hair made me different from my family and cut me off from my heritage in the minds of so many people.

I still remember so vividly when the American Girl dolls came out with those ones you could design yourself—the ones it seemed to imply you would design to look like you. I wanted one so badly, and my mom promised I would get one for Christmas. That magazine…I poured over all the faces and hairstyles, trying to decide on the doll I wanted.

Long, dark brown hair. Brown eyes. Tan skin.

That’s what I picked for my doll, because I think in my little kid mind that was the ideal—that was what I wanted to look like, and if I couldn’t then by golly I’d at least let my doll look like that.

When I took my choices to my mom, she was rather surprised. I think she even asked me something like, “Don’t you want the doll to look like you?” And I shook my head with determination. No. I wanted her to look beautiful. Not like me. And my mom, because she’s awesome, just said okay and let me get that doll exactly how I wanted her.

I thought that was all very normal when I was little, but as I grew up I realized it was pretty much the opposite of the classic American culture/media that glorifies the blond bombshell. I was one weird duck, but that was my honest experience as a child who “didn’t look right.” I just wanted to belong to my family, instead of getting asked if I was my aunt’s kid (she is blond), or the neighbor kid, or get jokes about being adopted or being “the milkman’s.”

At age ten, I very seriously asked my mom if I was adopted. I had concocted this elaborate story in my head of being secretly adopted and no one wanted to tell me—because I didn’t match and everyone knew it. My poor mom, she pulled out photo albums of my birth and told me stories of my babyhood in an attempt to soothe my wild imagination.

It was that big of a deal to me as a kid, and those tiny “joking” comments did impact me. They quietly whispered to me, without saying it directly, that I didn’t belong.

So where do I fit? I’m not sure I’ll ever know, or if there will ever really be a “place” for me. All I know is that diversity is something I care about, and I contribute how I can, whether or not I “count.”

yaflash:I know this is going to blow some minds, but did you...

yaflash:

I know this is going to blow some minds, but did you know that lady YA authors ALSO write poignant literary contemp novels about recovery in the aftermath of a friend’s suicide?

SO WILD, I KNOW.

Jay Asher's 13 Reasons Why is one of the top selling YA novels and it's for a reason! And John Green would beat out ANY of the women on your lists, half of them I've never even HEARD of. You sound like you're just jealous that your book didn't break into A

well for one i don’t have any books out so i don’t think that’s true.

but also, if you’d read ALL OF my posts, you’d have seen where i noted that i choose to recommend books by authors who need those recommendations.

you not having heard of them? pretty much why i recommend them in the first place. if you had been following this blog, or my old YA book review blog (which is now defunct RIP), i rarely jumped on reviewing or recommending books that were getting a ton of press. my biggest joy was...

Jay Asher's 13 Reasons Why is one of the top selling YA novels and it's for a reason! And John Green would beat out ANY of the women on your lists, half of them I've never even HEARD of. You sound like you're just jealous that your book didn't break into A

well for one i don’t have any books out so i don’t think that’s true.

but also, if you’d read ALL OF my posts, you’d have seen where i noted that i choose to recommend books by authors who need those recommendations.

you not having heard of them? pretty much why i recommend them in the first place. if you had been following this blog, or my old YA book review blog (which is now defunct RIP), i rarely jumped on reviewing or recommending books that were getting a ton of press. my biggest joy was...