Hey Fenrix, I don't know whether to answer you here or on Facebook.
Let's go with here - more conductive to long-windedness!
(For all the rest of you,
I blogged about the Classics Cafe metaphor specifically yesterday, mainly because I've been looking for a way to explain this particular problem for so long that I wanted a convenient way to link to it in the future. It's not nearly as in-depth as this conversation is here, but limitations of blogs and all that.)
Obviously, the metaphor's just a metaphor. If we actually went a place where a racist chef served our friends shit, we 1) wouldn't expect anyone to eat that and 2) we'd never go back. But I used something that outrageous because I think discrimination is a shitty, shitty thing to experience. Even a little bit is too much, and furthermore, it has a tendency to
feel far worse than it
looks.This kind of stuff is so, so hard to explain. I've been trying for
years to find words for it, because the word "privilege" itself is extremely loaded. I would imagine people who fall into the "straight white male" category have their own visceral reaction to it, because it's a label that describes something completely outside of anyone's control.
What I do like about the crap/food metaphor is, at least for me, it allows me to separate the artist from the work. So Lovecraft might not serve crap
every week. even if we all know he has a tendency to do so. When he writes something that lacks racism, he has served zero crap to the people of color. Conan the Barbarian is not
always rapey, and the stories that aren't don't require a discussion of what the author hasn't served up. Lovecraft definitely held racist beliefs, but that doesn't mean all his stories are racist. By the same measure, an author like Ken Liu seems to me like a class act all around who doesn't hold sexist beliefs, but I wasn't impressed with his treatment of sexual assault in "Maxwell's Demon", so having detected a hint of what tasted like crap to me, I brought it up in the story discussion.
How much flagellation is required? I'd prefer just "acknowledgement". That's all. To use my example of "Hyperion", if I were recommending it to a friend, I'd say, "Hey, read this great book! Don't expect good female characters, but otherwise the book's amazing!" If it's a Lovecraft story with racist elements, "Hey, you've got to read this great HPL story! But just so you know, fair warning, the story's a bit racist because HPL was utterly terrified by non-white people." Just let your friends know what they're in for, and let them make their own decisions.
And unfortunately, even given the warning, sometimes friends and fellow forumites won't be able to move past dismissal. Which sucks when you're in the group that really enjoyed the story and wanted to discuss the merits. But it might be helpful to note that the people who truly dismiss something will probably never show up on the forums to discuss it (or read the book). Those who DO show up to say how much they hated a story because of the racism/sexism/etc are really only trying to show their friends their plates and point out they got served a portion of crap. They're just looking for acknowledgement. If we all just acknowledge the crap without trying to explain it away, there's no argument. Unfortunately that's not how these conversations tend to go down.
I went back and read the "Gods of the North" feedback thread after DKT and Scattercat brought it up in this conversation. I remembered the episode, but it predated my lurking days. That thread is a great example of the problem we're discussing here. There were a couple of people on the thread who basically said, "There is a giant serving of crap in this story, and I'm not able to enjoy it as a result." And instead of just nodding and saying, "Yeah, I see why you tasted that," people wanted to argue about whether the crap was really on that particular person's plate or not. That's not helpful. If a person says they tasted crap, it's not suddenly going to taste like chocolate just because we tell them it's all in their head. It's possible for the crap to be on their plate and not ours. The wrong assumption is that because we all heard the same story, we all got served the same thing. It seems like this should be the case, but it's not, because we don't live in a vacuum, and the circumstances of our lives shapes the meaning of the story. Otherwise we'd always agree with one another 100%.