Overthinking Clickbait

Yelp Reviewers’ Authenticity Fetish Is White Supremacy in Action
https://ny.eater.com/2019/1/18/18183973/authenticity-yelp-reviews-white-supremacy-trap

According to my data, the average Yelp reviewer connotes "authentic" with characteristics such as dirt floors, plastic stools, and other patrons who are non-white when reviewing non-European restaurants. This happens approximately 85 percent of the time. But when talking about cuisines from Europe, the word "authentic" instead gets associated with more positive characteristics.

This article makes two main points. The first point is that sometimes people are racist on Yelp, and the second point is that racist reviews on Yelp hurt nonwhite business owners. These are both good points, but the writing and research are full of problems.

This article is a representative example of a bizarre fallacy I keep seeing in leftist social media spaces: deciding that a specific group is bad and that therefore every bad thing is the doing of the bad group. I see this a lot with people who use the word “cishets” as a pejorative, but what the writer of this article in particular is doing is assuming that, since white supremacy is bad, everything she finds problematic is therefore the fault of white people. This syllogism sort of makes sense on a superficial level, but the reification of “white” as the automatic default for all people in all circumstances has major issues.

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It’s important to say what the author is saying, but I really wish she could have found a more meaningful and nuanced way to say it. The restaurant industry in America is super fucked up on multiple levels, but a reliance on statistically meaningless generalizations and cultural essentialism doesn’t strike me as a productive way to start a conversation. And again, it’s not as if the author’s main points aren’t valid – it’s just that her research is flawed in so many easily avoidable ways (at least as it’s presented in this short article). So it’s not that the conclusions are wrong, necessarily, but rather that this article is mainly useful as an example of how social justice can’t really do the work it’s supposed to do without the critical thinking, empathy and compassion, and basic acknowledgement of diversity that are the foundations of progressive thinking.

I'm Getting Too Old for This Nonsense

Two weekends ago I gave a panel at Katsucon, a large-ish anime convention held just outside of DC in National Harbor, Maryland. It was a fun panel, and I gave it in a packed room with more than 150 people in attendance. The con staff later told me that they turned away more than 200 people at the door after the panel started. I did not expect that sort of reception, but I put a ton of work into the panel, and I'm happy it paid off.

I also got a free badge for myself and a friend, which is the most important thing. Katsucon is one of my favorite cons, and some of my favorite people come to town for it, and we all had a lot of fun this year.

I care more about drinking and tabletop gaming and appreciating cosplay and saying hello to artists I follow online and having interesting conversations with strangers than I do about going to panels (or about anime itself, tbh), so I didn't notice this myself, but one of my friends pointed out that Katsucon has a programming track that bills itself as the "Japanese Culture Institute." Unlike a peasant such a myself, these panelists get their profiles and pictures printed in the convention program, which is how I know that most of them are white. When I started asking people about this, I also learned that they get paid.

So why is it that, in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse geographic locations in the entire United States, where white people are a minority, the people getting paid to give panels about Japanese and East Asian culture at the second largest anime convention in the region are predominantly white? I know one of the people involved in this personally, so I asked them, and they told me that it's an issue that needs addressing, but that it's also important to have the most qualified people on the educational programming track. I didn't go to any of these panels, so I can't attest to their quality, but I kind of wanted to be like, Since when does having a blog and a Twitter account make anyone "qualified" to do anything? Something I also noticed, once I started paying attention, is that most of the upper-level con staff were white as well.

I would be interested to find out what's going on here, but I don't want to step into that particular pit of quicksand. Also - and I think fandom ageism is stupid, don't get me wrong - but I feel like I'm getting too old for anime cons.

In other news, Blerdcon is now entering its third year, and it's quickly becoming a big deal. The first year was small and tentative, but last summer saw a huge boost in attendance, and this year they've already started to get a lot of media and corporate attention. If nothing else, their social media game is excellent, and I'm excited to see where they go and how they get there.

The Silence of Our Friends

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm tired of basic, bog-standard white supremacy coloring everything I'm interested in or care about. It's boring and stupid and irrational and unnecessary, and the tools that can limit its influence are so simple and accessible that it's offensive when people forget to use them.

The topic of race as it applies to vectors of privilege and discrimination is extremely complicated. The social, cultural, economic, political systems that influence these vectors are deeply embedded and not always obvious. These issues can and must be viewed through an intersectional lens and approached from multiple directions. A multiplicity of voices is an absolute necessity in order to have useful and productive conversations.

This is why it makes me furious when people are excluded from or shut out of these conversations. I know this seems like an obvious thing to say, but what I keep seeing, over and over and over again, are diverse voices being left out of conversations about diversity, and it drives me crazy.