1. There’s a certain painful humor in watching racists falling all over themselves to blame the people they think of as enemies. The Onion got it spot on.

2. Rather than being a victory for “indie” reporting–Reddit, Twitter, et. al.–this incident proved that the only people who should be trusted to report critical stories like this are trained, ethical journalists. And no, TV talking heads and/or people with generic “communications” degrees don’t count. Sadly, even a lot of J school grads don’t count, either, seeing as how so many of those schools in the ’80s/’90s got stuck in the “balance = objectivity” fallacy.

Journalism is about one thing: conveying accurate information to the public. Figuring out what is accurate information and who has it is something that only comes with training and experience. It’s also something that tends to go by the wayside when a given reporter/media outlet is focused too much on getting a story out quickly and/or trying to avoid the appearance of bias to pay attention to the facts. The public doesn’t care who had a story first; only who had it right. If you screw your reputation by getting it wrong, you’ll lose a lot more audience than if you hold back until you’re sure you have all the facts.

Opposite-sex couples run the risk of producing children, therefore the state has an interest in enabling these couples to be legally bound, else those children could potentially be a burden on the state. There can be no other reason whatsoever why the state might want to enable a given couple an easy way to bind themselves legally and financially to each other, ergo, there is no reason the state ought to offer such a contract to same-sex couples.

This, as you may note, is slightly different than the argument that marriage is only for producing kids, which is easily shot down by counter-arguments about opposite-sex couples who are infertile or choose not to procreate. No, they’re saying that marriage is there to cover the risk of producing kids, because gosh darnit, those straight people can’t be trusted not to make their crotch droppings a burden on the taxpayer.

But here’s the problem with that: if opposite-sex couples are so scarily at risk of producing welfare-sucking bastards at the slightest provocation, then doesn’t the state have an interest in FORCING opposite-sex couples to marry? Shouldn’t they be jailing straight people who have sex before marriage? Shouldn’t they prohibit divorce for anyone who has kids?*

Of course not. Marriage is voluntary. We understand that people are free to choose it or not as they wish. So, while we can recognize that one of the benefits of state-granted marriage would be ensuring legal and financial child support, we cannot say that that’s the purpose of state-granted marriage.

That being the case, if there are more state interests involved in marriage, then limiting it to couples at risk of procreation makes no sense.

So there.

*For the record: It’s not just potential bastard children whose legal status/expensive upkeep would be a consideration under that logic. Back when women were considered property of their husbands, a legal marriage was like having a license for your dog, proving that you had legal responsibility for it. The state’s interest, in such cases, would be the financial upkeep not only of the children born out of wedlock, but the unwed mother, too (because working mothers were more or less unheard of then.) As with feral dogs, a feral unwed mother and her pups would be considered a public nuisance. Ergo: marriage laws ensuring that men kept up their responsibilities as owners of their wives and children.

Thank goodness we no longer see marriage that way, right? Right?

The way entertainment is currently funded and distributed is seriously broken. This is mostly because traditional distribution channels are controlled by a very small number of very large companies, all of which aren’t interested in bothering with anything that doesn’t stand to make them a huge amount of money. Result: creatives who want to do something other than brain candy for the masses are stymied, as are audiences who might want the different stuff they’d produce. Smaller-scale distribution channels have sprung up here and there, helping to some degree, but they’re still problematic for various reasons.

However, crowdfunding and digital distribution have now made it possible for creatives to get their stuff to audiences with a minimum of middlemen in the way, and that’s revolutionizing the field. The big guys still have their purposes–large-scale works need large-scale funding and distribution–but a whole new landscape of indie entertainment is now coming to life. Yay for that!

Unfortunately, the big guys see their chokehold loosening, and therefore want in on this and are finding ways to horn in on what should be simple, direct transactions between creative and audience. I generally hate to make slippery-slope arguments, but if we don’t want the indie landscape to turn into the same old behemoths, said behemoths need to be shown the door, and reminded that they already have their own, enormous sand box in which to play.

Again, I want to stress that I’m not anti-corporation. They have their purposes. But if they control all means of funding and distribution, niche markets simply don’t get served. That’s as true for someone wanting to sell allergen-free baked goods at a farmers market as it is for someone wanting to write books about LGBT PoCs. Underserved markets are ignored by the big guys because they’re not lucrative enough. It’s therefore critical, if we want those markets to be served, to ensure that alternate means of funding and production remain untainted by the involvement of mass-market corps.

Now that that’s out of the way …

Today’s Tweetstorm was about the aforementioned Kickstarter project, and a subsequent article in the Atlantic grousing about the idea in a ridiculous way. In among the blather about art for art’s sake (Really? How about journalism for journalism’s sake, Sparky?) he did have a point: Warner Brothers has no business at all being involved in this, even just on the distribution end, and Kickstarters involving other corps or big-name folks who have access to other kinds of funding are really missing the point of crowdfunding.

As I’ve mentioned before, just because a given creative sort has had a measure of mass-market success doesn’t guarantee that they’re rich and can bleed money for their next project. The actor/filmmaker I mention above has quite a few credits to his name, but none of it was huge blockbuster stuff; he’s not swimming in cash, and therefore asking fans to help fund his filmmaking is reasonable. Likewise, it’s reasonable for a well-known name to crowdfund small-scale projects that aren’t in line with their usual area of work: Say, a TV writer going in on a graphic-novel project, or experimenting with a web series. It’s also reasonable for big names to lend their higher profile to indie artists for a given project. A well-known actor agreeing to do some film student’s senior project for next to no pay is perfectly fine. But that’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening is that WB is abusing a system meant to fund indie artists because they’re seeing entertainment dollars flow away from them and other large-scale middlemen, and they want it back.

Unlike the doof at the Atlantic who babbled about art for art’s sake, that’s not what this is about. It’s about art for money’s sake: money that indie artists desperately need to do what they do. Crowdfunding is a way for audiences to play investor on a very small scale–a scale that wouldn’t remotely be achievable by larger investors who require everything they fund to bring back a lot of cash. Remember my explanation about how TV shows get funded? The reason that awesome little cult show you liked got cancelled is because it didn’t appeal to enough people (of the target demographics) to make advertisers pony up for commercial time. Not enough ad money to support production costs = the show gets killed. Scripted TV is very expensive to make, so it has to appeal to a very wide audience in order to even get off the ground. If it doesn’t make back enough to cover that, plus a reasonable profit margin for the distributors, then it doesn’t get funded anymore. That’s basic business, and there’s no way of getting around it. Networks are in the business of making money, not making art, and because they’re so huge, they need to make a lot of money.

Mass-market art distribution is all about pleasing the lowest common denominator to get the largest return. It’s about making brain candy for the millions. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, unless that distribution method is the only path from artist to audience and you’re a) someone making something else or b) someone who wants something else. Until recently, mass-market was the only way artists could get their work to audiences in a way they could get paid for, so niche art just never got made. But that’s finally changing. Traditional distribution channels–book and record stores, TV networks, movie theaters, etc.–are no longer the only option, and digital file formats are more or less eliminating costs for manufacturing, warehousing, physical storefronts and shipping. Add in freelancers helping with the details (graphic design, for instance), and the barriers between creator and consumer are finally down. A great deal of that is thanks to alternate means of funding production, and distribution channels that don’t have a mass-market gatekeeper making sure they only buy stuff for mainstream audiences.

Now, there is the fact that those gatekeepers traditionally also filtered for quality. One of the big issues remaining in self-publishing is that many authors really shouldn’t quit their day jobs, or at the very least need to hire editors. Self-published works got a rep for being crap because literally anyone, however dreadful, could get published. But along the way, crowdsourcing has sort of ended up working out for this, too. Some readers do have to take a leap of faith based solely on blurbs and cover art for new authors, but once reviews start coming in, readers start knowing whether they should invest $2.99 and their time in something otherwise untested. It’s basically a more formalized version of viral marketing. Granted that the review system can be abused–review buying, etc.–but it’s still acting as a decent filter, and one that doesn’t skim stuff right off the top just because there’s no proof it’ll, as they say, play in Peoria.

Indie authors, like any other indie artist, rarely make the kinds of money that artists with mass-appeal work can, but they were never going to anyway, no matter how their work got distributed. If you’re making something that only 10,000 people on the planet might be interested in, you’re not going to make billions unless those people are all millionaires willing to give you a large chunk o’ cash for what you’re making. But there’s nothing wrong with that. I haven’t yet even made back my production costs on my book, but I don’t care. It’s out there, the kind of people who want to read it can, and they’ve given me money for that experience. It’s a toehold that I would never have gotten if I’d had to run the gauntlet of traditional publishers, especially as the market tightens. Feminist YA SFF with gay characters and a protagonist who isn’t traditionally pretty would be a very, very hard sell, especially from an untested author. This way, I don’t have to do that hard sell to the suits; I can do a soft one to readers instead. Yay for that.

I can understand the impulse of the fans who want to see this movie. I can’t describe how excited I’d be to see a Primeval/Primeval New World movie finally get made to tie up that universe’s maddening loose ends, and the other shows I like that died before their time number in the dozens. But the way to get something like that made is to do petition campaigns, not to abuse the way indie artists get paid for their stuff. Serenity didn’t get made via crowdfunding, but by popular demand from Browncoats. If large-scale production companies want to prove to bean counters that they’ll make back their investment, they can start different kinds of crowdfunding schemes. For instance: they could set up a site where people pre-buy a DVD for a movie that hasn’t yet been made. Yes, that’s sort of what Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, etc., do, but they’re intended for smaller-scale stuff, not funding goals that start at $2 million. If you’re a bigger dog, find a bigger hydrant to piss on so you don’t hose down the Pomeranian in your way, is all I’m saying.

Now, there is one caveat to all this I’ll admit to, which is the fact that some mid-scale stuff can fall through the cracks this way. Something without enough mass appeal to please big distributors, but which would be too big to truly be called indie doesn’t really have an easy way to go. This movie might well sit in that no-artists’ land, though WB having a hand in it makes me think otherwise. But the solution for these mid-scale projects isn’t to go stomping around in indie territory, abusing the privileges they have of a higher-profile name and bigger starting pockets. It’s to use that privilege to shill for funding in other ways that aren’t accessible to true indie artists. What the people making this film are doing is the equivalent of big movie studios trying to pass off prefab Oscar bait released by their arthouse arms as “indie.” Sorry, folks: Focus Features is not an actual indie studio. It’s a subsidiary of Universal designed for films that appeal to the circle-jerk awards circuit. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re supporting indie film by seeing things under that imprint. (You can see it if you want, of course. Just don’t think you’re on higher moral ground for doing so.)

If WB wasn’t involved and they were planning to do direct-to-audience distribution (online, individual DVD sales, etc.), this project wouldn’t bother me half as much. But the fact that money that people might otherwise spend on a true indie project will instead be going in part to an old-boys’ corp really bugs the crap out of me. Unlike new large-scale online distribution like Amazon, Netflix and Hulu*, WB isn’t doing anything to change the industry paradigms that fill their pockets. In co-opting indie funding channels, it’s actually working against that change. Think of this like Ticketmaster getting in the business of handling cover charges for underground clubs, or Wal-Mart selling “locally made” goods. They’re not doing this because they support indie artists. They’re only getting their fingers in that pie because they see money flowing away from them as people skip the big middlemen, and they want it back.

*Side note: Yes, I used Amazon’s self-pub subsidiaries and distribution. Yes, they are a big corp, and are taking a portion of my sales, and would do so even more if I managed to sign on with their in-house pro-publishing op. Yet, they’re still doing better for indie authors than a traditional publisher ever could, because they don’t have the upfront risk that the big guys do, and therefore can take chances on small fry like me. They and other online-only distributors are democratizing how entertainment gets to audiences in a way traditional mass-market distributors can’t do, because their upfront costs are so much lower. There’s a reason a Netflix exec got cocky at the TCAs this year.

And to put a cherry on my point: Had this VM movie project gone through Netflix or Hulu, I’d have been quite supportive of it. The fact that they’re doing WB instead is an investment not in the future of entertainment, but in a system that’s irreparably broken, knows it, and is trying to take down indie artists with them just out of spite.

Parenting will undoubtedly inspire plenty of thinking about media, politics and culture, too, so I’ll be back on this side eventually. Will also be doing more novel writing, as I have one that just needs a bit of polish before I send it off to my editor. Hoping to get that one published late Spring or so. Until then, however, if you can’t stand the idea of not reading my sparkling prose, and don’t shrivel up like a raisin when thinking about kids, please join me on my other blog. :)

Say hello to the reason I’ve not been posting lately!

Our new son was born Sunday afternoon, and just came home with us last night. Needless to say, we’re both sleep-deprived and zombiefied, but happy.

Lots I want to post about related to this: gender stuff, adoption stuff, etc., but will need to wait until I’ve caught up a bit more. :)

Back-cover blurb:

Young Mirya Thunderstone, like all Dwarf women, has lived her entire life inside her people’s mountain home. Frustrated by her confinement, she longs to take up her family’s legendary axe, and follow in the footsteps of her late, war-hero brother. But when an accident strands her outside the mountain, she finds there’s more to being a hero than wielding a weapon.

Joined by a playful otterkin couple, a deadly Elf warrior, a laid-back Native hunter and an outcast orc, Mirya must use both her axe and her wits to find the truth behind the war that claimed her brother’s life.

Thunderstone is vaguely YA-aimed, but younger and older folks should like it, too. In terms of kid-friendliness, it’s probably on the high end of PG: Some violence–not terribly graphic. It’s possible the social and philosophical issues might be a bit dense for them, however. If your kid can handle Narnia or Harry Potter, she can probably handle this.

While the story uses familiar fantasy structure and imagery, it is a bit different than most of the Tolkien-esque stuff you may have seen. The setting is a fantasy/alt-history version of the Pacific Northwest, and the characters’ cultures are loosely modeled on those of middle-ages Russia, Japan and Salishan tribes. In addition to the strong, feminist-minded protagonist, the story also features gay and PoC main characters, and a less-common take on the traditional hero’s journey.

I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about it, and if you enjoy it, please do leave a review at Amazon!

Ouch. Every network suit in the room probably had an anxiety attack.

Being in the media biz, I understand well the reality of ad-supported content. (Please, go buy something at Amazon, wouldja?) However, the current status quo for running video ads during breaks in TV content is rapidly becoming Jurassic. First-world humans no longer crowd around a big box in the living room every evening to get the majority of their daily information and entertainment. Modern life, even for older folks and families with relatively set daily schedules, simply doesn’t allow for the prime-time appointment viewing that the live-air TV model was built on. And thus live-air commercials aren’t allowed for, either. Almost no viewer alive these days hasn’t at least got used to the notion of recording a show to watch at another time. This means on-demand purveyors like Netflix and Hulu are making traditional TV folks very nervous indeed, because they’re upending the entire structure of the business of delivering short-form, serialized video entertainment. They are proving that audiences will pay for content via subscription or pay-per-view fees, and therefore that video ad breaks are no longer necessary to generate production funds and profits.

And me? I couldn’t be happier.

First, as an entertainment consumer, as this will increase the availability of the stuff I want to see on my own schedule. Also, as a creator: Stuffing content into 4 or 6 acts over 42 minutes means it’s incredibly hard to build dramatic tension. There’s a reason premium channels and PBS win awards every year, and it ain’t just the awesome costumes. And finally, as someone crusading for social justice: it means 30- and 60-second videos trying to sell things by appealing to Id-level impulses in general audiences are going the way of the dodo.

Now, I’m not so much of an anti-capitalist that I detest advertising in itself. I can’t say as I necessarily like it, but it does have a genuine purpose in informing consumers of new products or pricing they might not be aware of. Unless you’re living in a mud hut in the wilderness, chances are you do buy goods and services, and at least occasionally, you do so because an ad informed you that they were available, or could be had for a more reasonable price than you thought. It’s when ads start getting into what marketers call “creating a need” that it gets icky. Everyone on the planet knows Coke and Pepsi exist. So why advertise for them? To convince people that drinking carbonated water sweetened with Frankensugar is what you do if you want someone of your favorite gender to find you sexually attractive. And when these ads are a minute long, louder than the actual content and you’re forced to sit there and stare at them while you wait for your content to come back on, they end up pickling your brain. (Which is, of course, exactly as the corps in question want it. A public that’s constantly worried about whether they’re x enough is a public to whom you can sell entirely useless or even harmful crap at a ridiculous markup.)

On the other hand, when a website serves me up an unobtrusive, inoffensive banner ad that’s actually tailored to the content there, it’s a lot more palatable than having to sit through yet another sexist beer commercial. And yes, I do sometimes click on those ads if they’re informing me of a product or price that interests me. Take Alaska Airlines. Their banner ads almost never do a hard sell. They don’t try to make me feel inadequate or less worthy of happiness unless I buy their product. They just tell me that they have, say, some really good airfares to Kauai. I may not be in the market for said airfares at the immediate moment, but I at least don’t feel insulted by them, and on occasion, I appreciate having that information available. (On the other hand: virtually every site seems to be using one of those rotating banner ads that occasionally throws up one promoting horrid snake-oil-esque diet and beauty products. Gross.)  Still, even icky banner ads don’t take up nearly the mental real estate that a video commercial does, and therefore their negative effects are considerably mitigated.

This is not to say that all static ads are necessarily less harmful, content-wise, than video or audio ones. Full-page glossies in magazines can be just as horrid, for instance, and I can only imagine the awful stuff that ends up on ESPN.com. But the difference there is that those horrid ads are tightly tailored exactly to the people reading the magazine or viewing the site in question. Because magazines (and their online equivalents) are hyper-focused on specific demographics, they’re not only less damaging in general, but more effective. Yes, video and audio ads can be tailored to a degree to the demos most likely to be tuning in to a particular piece of content, but they’re still far more broad than the micro markets of print and pixels. Honestly, Syfy: I’m really not in the market for ED meds when I’m trying to watch Warehouse 13, y’know?

Video and audio ads can have a legitimate place in a modern media landscape, but how they’re made is going to have to change. Rather than 60-second movies appealing to the lowest common denominator that might be watching some live-aired cop show on CBS, they can instead be tailored to the exact people who choose to watch a streaming version of that show. In fact, online streaming is a gold mine for marketers, because it usually comes with loads more viewer data than even Nielsen ratings can account for. Make your viewers register on the site to see the shows, and you have age, sex, location, etc. that makes targeting a breeze. More bang for the advertising buck should make everyone happier.

Of course, the people who won’t be happier about this are the distributors whose billion-dollar revenues come from those 60-second movies aired on a living-room box. The more advertisers realize that people aren’t actually watching their ads because they’re time/device/location shifting, the less they’re going to be willing to pay TV channels for that airtime. There’s a reason reality shows, especially competition shows, are such common fare these days. Not only are they cheaper to make, but they’re one of the few things (outside of sports) that people will actually sit down to watch live. It’s the biggest reason TV nets haven’t already gone belly up. But there’s only so much of that they can sustain, long-term. Ten years from now–maybe even less–I foresee several networks moving exclusively to online distribution, much like how print newspapers and magazines are ditching their dead-tree editions in favor of websites. Cable and satellite companies can still act as distribution aggregators for this shift, and still make subscription-fee revenue, but the concept of a numbered TV channel you tune into is eventually going to be seen by Gen X’s kids the same way we now see landline phones.

This guy at Netflix isn’t saying anything the network suits don’t already know. He’s just saying it out loud, and thus pointing out the naked emperor. Those revealed as bare-assed can now either admit that he’s right, and start shifting gears to adapt to the new reality, or they can dig their heels in and become as extinct as drive-in movie theaters. Their choice.

Long post ahoy! Grab a cuppa your favorite bev, and click to to read more . . .

So, this ongoing storm over Caitlin Moran and her crew rejecting intersectional feminism reminded me of a discussion a few months ago on Tumblr regarding race and identity. Nutshell edition: someone was upset about U.S. forms always having a tick box for “African American” when that term doesn’t describe everyone with the same general physical feature set/ancestry. Of course most folks with that feature set can trace their common-era ancestry back to sub-Saharan Africa, but their more-immediate ancestry can be incredibly diverse, from people who actually live in African countries now, to people in the Caribbean and South America, to, of course, North Americans who are descended from people imported here as slaves.

I’m white (by most definitions–more on that below), and therefore I don’t have a say in what individual people of color identify as, of course, but it seemed to me the complainer’s point was sound–as was the other half of the issue: People with that feature set aren’t all directly African, but nor are they all American. There is, as it turns out, some controversy over whether the term “black” can be claimed by people who aren’t Americans descended from slaves, and I’m not in the position to decide that (though it is interesting that that issue gets applied to Obama.) However, it’s definitely clear that the AA term simply doesn’t apply to, say, a Brit whose most-recent non-U.K. ancestry is from Barbados. If you want to get technical about it, everyone currently walking the planet has some African ancestry, and there are plenty of white Africans as well. How recent should their African ancestry be to legitimately call someone African-x? And where does the line get drawn on skin color and feature set? Is the paper bag test ever used both ways?

As I say, this particular issue isn’t mine, and I’ll leave the decisions and in-depth discussions about it to people who are directly affected and/or have considerably more education and experience on the topic. However, it does raise many other related issues about the nuances of identity, especially as related to intersectionality, and some of those issues do affect me directly.

As I think I’ve mentioned here before, my husband and I are currently in the process of waiting for a (domestic, open) adoption. When we were going through the home study process, one of the aspects we discussed with the agency was whether we’d be open to a transracial adoption. My first impulse was: “Of course. Duh.” My second impulse was: “I’m a clueless white person from clueless white personville. I don’t have the experience to be able to do this right.” But after some discussion and research, I came upon the crux of the issue, for me: I was concerned about whether I could properly teach my child about that aspect of her identity, since my knowledge on it is indirect. And I realized: No, I can’t teach her that exactly. But neither can anyone else.

She’ll be in contact with (at least) her birthmother, and if her birthmother is the same race/ethnicity, then she can have that connection there, but beyond that: what kind of person she wants to be is up to her, and that goes for race as much as any other part of her identity. If she’s Latina, for instance, she’s the one who gets to decide what that means for her. Not us. Not even her birthmom. Certainly not the other Latinas she sees in the media. And not even the other Latinas she’ll meet through school, cultural activities, etc. She will get a taste of how other people do Latina, but it won’t necessarily be something she identifies with. There is no one way to be Latina, and even that term itself is incredibly broad, covering millions of people from very different cultures. She will share many experiences and perspectives with many other people who look like her and have similar ancestry, but her experiences will not be exactly the same, and therefore she will be a different person. The same goes for every other aspect of who she is that has more than one kind of expression and experience. Everything from being an adoptee, to living in the Northwest, to having queer parents will be different for her than it is for most other people, and thus there’s no sense in trying to do more than give her information and guidance as she’s trying things on to see what fits. I certainly don’t wish to downplay or gloss over any aspect of who she is–I detest the notion of assimilation and colorblindness–but I do strongly believe that exactly how that identity will manifest is entirely up to her.

Interestingly enough, not only did that epiphany make me more confident about being able to do transracial parenting, but it opened up a lot of other epiphanies about identity in general, especially the fact that we tend to have rigid definitions for labels, and break things down into binaries when they’re anything but. Having a physical feature set in common with millions of other people whose ancestry is based in a certain region of the world actually means very little in the larger context of who an individual is. But it also does matter. It cannot be erased or subsumed in a clumsy attempt at equality. And that’s especially true when it comes to the fact that millions of people are oppressed based on nothing more than having that physical feature set. If no-one knew that Obama is technically biracial and had no immediate slave ancestry, he’d still get just as much racist garbage lobbed at him as anyone else whose ethnic makeup is more in keeping with the popular image of African-Americans. If the POTUS were dressed down, driving alone, he’d still be more likely to be pulled over by a cop than a white person. Having a white mother isn’t insurance against that. And yet, his childhood experiences were still different from many other black men who would be pulled over, and he has a right to those aspects of his identity as well.

When people face discrimination en masse, there’s a strong tendency to circle the wagons. Group identity becomes critical, because building up an army to take on one’s attackers is an immediate need. But that can, of course, lead to accusations of disloyalty or infidelity to the cause if someone either doesn’t quite exactly identify the same way as most of the group, or someone who may fit that identity, but considers it only one aspect of themselves, and not the sum total.

There’s a legitimate concern about people who want to pass or otherwise downplay the aspect of themselves that’s being targeted, because it’s easier to question whether they’d be willing to put themselves on the line to save others with whom they may share a given trait. Yet, when it’s very clear that the person in question is fighting the good fight, and isn’t actually hiding who they are, demanding rigid adherence to a specific set of identity markers makes no sense. Conversely, there actually are people who try to claim an identity that isn’t truly theirs to claim because they romanticize oppression or some cultural aspect of the identity in question. See: thousands of white folks who have absolutely no Native American cultural connections, yet who identify as such solely because one ancestor four generations ago was Cherokee, and they think Indians are cool.

This particular issue is why, as noted above, I identify as white instead of claiming my own NA ancestry (one great-grandmother was Cherokee, another Chickasaw.) I wasn’t raised anywhere near a rez, and any cultural knowledge I have is secondhand, at best. Honestly, I know more about the culture of Pacific Northwest tribes because I researched them in some depth for the book I just finished. So I can’t claim a cultural connection. And since my Irish genes trumped my NA ones, I’m fish-belly white, with all the attendant privilege. (I am disadvantaged in a hell of a lot of other areas, but race ain’t one of them.) My lack of desire to truly identify with that part of my genetic makeup isn’t because I’m ashamed of it, or wish to pass to dodge discrimination. Rather, it’s because I respect it that I’m not going to go pretending to be something I’m really not. I feel a great sadness that I didn’t have access to that culture because it was assimilated out of my ancestors, and it is something I like learning about, but my participation in NA culture at this point is purely as an outsider who wants to be an ally.

And it’s that concept–allies–that is, I think, the key to getting rid of the worst aspects of identity politics. If we can start judging who’s on “our side” not by what vital statistics they posess but by their words and deeds with regard to any struggle for rights, not only will we end a lot of the petty infighting, but we will have a broader base of support. And, best of all, everyone will be free to identify as who they are, rather than shaping it around unreasonable expectations for solidarity.

For example, I’m 100% in favor of intersectional feminism, especially in regard to participation by people who are trans* (however they identify.) If a given trans* person is contributing to the perpetuation of sexism, then no. But that goes for cisgendered people as well. I’ve complained before about the sisterhood myth, and it’s definitely the case, here. Neither chromosomes nor secondary sex characteristics define a woman, and they certainly don’t define a feminist.  Indeed, that’s the heart of feminism right there: understanding that women are individuals, and not a hive mind, and merely having a uterus doesn’t guarantee a feminist sensibility. Nearly all who are perceived as having a preponderance of female-coded traits will at some point face sexism, but that alone is no guarantee that they’re allies in the fight against it.

It is true that certain subsets of the very broad category of female are more likely to face certain types of sexism, and it is of course natural that those who share those traits will bond over that shared experience. Dealing with sexist health-care providers during pregnancy and birth, for instance, is clearly going to be an issue most dear to women who have been pregnant. But that’s not an issue all women face, nor is it an issue that “belongs” only to those who have been affected by it. It doesn’t take direct personal experience with discrimination to want to end it. I won’t speak for women who have been pregnant–I leave those words to them–but I will definitely speak up for their rights.

And truly, isn’t that at the heart of virtually every fight for social justice? Isn’t it supposed to be about empathy, and an understanding that we are stronger when we work together for mutual benefit? Coalescing into affinity groups makes perfect sense on a granular level, but trying to broaden that out into huge umbrella categories like race, gender, orientation, etc. gets icky, fast. I may be able to play No True Scotsman on some very specific things, but I’m hardly in a position to speak for all white people, all people with a uterus, all bisexual women, all writers … you get the picture. The question on everyone’s lips shouldn’t be “are you just like me?” but “are you willing to fight for me?” Yes, statistically speaking, it’s more likely that people sharing an umbrella trait will be allies, but it’s hardly set in stone. So long as a given person isn’t trying to hijack your movement (in which case, they need a judicious application of cluebat), seems to me it’s much more useful to hand them a set of tools and point them at a good place where they can be useful.

It can be scary, I know, to trust allies who are different from oneself, especially if that difference makes them look like the enemy. But none of us can do this alone. We need to be allies for each other, and that compels us not merely to offer our genuine, good-faith alliance, but to accept that alliance when it’s offered.