On the tempest around the Tempest challenge

The other day, Tempest Bradford wrote an article challenging readers to stop reading white, straight, cis, male authors for a year. Naturally, there's been a lot of fussing about the article from the usual corners, and from some unusual ones. The most typical right-wing bellow has been that the challenge is racist—"What if she said not to read any black authors for a year!!!" I'll call that bluff and say that those people who only ever read black authors would probably do well to try some white, Asian, etc. authors for a year.

Too stupid to even critique are the cries of censorship—it's a challenge, you can say no to challenges. Indeed, complaining about the challenge is a way of saying no to it.

More humorous are the Neil Gaiman fans who object to their hero, who is a feminist "ally" or something, being used as an example of All Things Bad and Wrong in the image accompanying the article. Gaiman tweeted that he likes the challenge idea and doesn't mind his book being used in the picture, but...what if he secretly does? I tweeted my impression of him crying over it:

And now, my impression of Neil Gaiman crying because @tinytempest put a red line over his book: pic.twitter.com/yCpJsapHYb

— Nick Mamatas (@NMamatas) February 24, 2015

Not to say that there aren't some problems with the challenge. For example: how do you know who is straight and who is not? Who is POC or not? I am not speaking of colorblindness or sexuality blindness here, nor do I take all that seriously the the claim that people "just read for the story" and "don't look/care" about the gender/race etc. of the author—that is what leads to cishet white (and middle-class, obvs) male as default author choice.

I am instead suggesting that even people on the lookout for demographical diversity sometimes get it wrong, or fumble on the margins based on their own local racial scripts. Most obviously, it's comical how frequently people—especially those who became political fifteen minutes ago and just learned to chant "cishet white male"—don't realize that they may be wrong about someone's sexuality. I remember someone complaining about one of my Five Books I Loved This Year posts, saying that it was full of straight white men—the punchline is that my favorite book of the year was by Somerset Maugham, a gay icon. Chaz Brenchley, aka desperance , was declared straight by some critic of a panel he was a part of last Nebula Award weekend, which likely surprised the hell out of him. The assumption of straightness always strikes me as bizarre, especially given how the politicized folks likely to presume the straightness of the propaganda opponents right in front of them are often the first to point to the ubiquity of subaltern gay/trans identities in the historical and pre-historical past. So, don't assume that some Neanderthal dug up in France wasn't trans, but of course any dude you happen to be cross with right now is straight and cisgendered until proven otherwise.

Race is also, like the kids say, "problematic." There was some recent public fuming about the four brave white men "deciding" the future of publishing. Leave aside the fact that they were "deciding" in the same way Tempest is "censoring", had any of the complainers agreed with what Matt Yglesias was saying, he would have been allowed to be a Latino* again.

Then there's the question of personal interest to me, as the New York Times asked in 1903: Is the Turk a White Man? And if not, what does that mean for people whose families were "Turks" in 1903? Like, say straight-outta-Smyrna Anatolian Greek-American Alethea Kontis?** The remaining Greek population of Turkey is oppressed unto the verge of extinction, so the suggestion of determining whether or not Greek-Turks are white (Like Turks? Unlike Turks?) based on their exercise of white privilege*** as a minority doesn't fly. There were significant population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, to put it politely, but of course borders are a tricky thing. See, for example, the island of Samos, which is very close to the island of Ikaria, from which my parents are from. And which is also very close to Turkey:



A titch less than a mile. Swimmable. People used to live in one country and keep their goats in the other country. Because they were the same country.

Then there's long-lost cousin
Then there is the ethnicity that often remains secret. Indeed, many Roma in the US have a secondary identity for public consumption as Greeks, Turks, Eastern European Jews, Slavs, or Latinos. *shifty eyes*

These are all marginal cases...except that one thing that is very interesting about Tempest's challenge is that it allows for the opportunity to explore and read the margins. It is often some form of alienation from the mainstream that leads people to become writers, after all—marginal endeavors attract marginal individuals. Even all those cishet white male middle-class writers experience alienation.**** But exploration of the margins requires perception of the margins and not just huge population blocs. This doesn't mean that the challenge is bad—if anything it's good if it allows for some good-faith examination of identity as it is lived and as it is overdetermined by performance and even the power of the state*****.

This all seems to be a roundabout way to post a link to Haikasoru for any SF fans interested in the challenge, or the work of Japanese writers, but there you are and here you go. I'm not taking the challenge myself—I literally read fiction by non-whites for a living—but I think it's an interesting one and that most of the criticisms of it are stupid. Anything that makes people think a little bit about what they stuff into their eye-holes is a good thing, but there's more thinking to be done than has been discussed thus far.


*Which demographic box to tick is a big deal among Cuban-Americans.

**Fun fact: it's Alethea's copy of American Gods Tempest is holding in the infamous picture.

***See, for example, the way a white American living in Japan is treated versus the way a black American living in Japan is treated. The ability to sustain privilege as a minority group is frequently a handy measure of "whiteness." Not always though.

****Booze. Late in her essay, Tempest suggests other vectors of identity through which to direct a year's reading. One was disability—if alcoholism counts as a disability, you can likely take the challenge without having to change a thing about your reading habits, baby!

*****Which is often excluded in these discussions, thanks I think to the uncomplicated middle-class statist politics of people otherwise deeply concerned with identity. The simple test is this: if American, do people very interested in the political implications of identity vote for the Democrats in Presidential elections? If so, then there is necessarily almost always a hard and invisible limit to how deeply they're ready to pursue these implications.