Steampunk News

I talk a lot about racism in my work, not least because, uh, part of why I get pretty fucking angry about colonialism and whatnot is because the histories of colonialism that many POC live with today are the foundation for systemic racism that exists today.

It’s gotten to the point where I am kind of aggressively avoiding novels that feature straight white dudes unless it’s a YA (out of the four novels I have attempted to read in the last while, the only one I could stand was a YA novel) because I am just kind of pissed off at the reminder that straight white dudes have been allowed to call the shots when they have been so utterly wrong, and have created such utterly wrong worlds, both in fiction and in reality, and continue to be accepted when they exhibit utterly wrong behaviour. It gets to the point where I want to cloister all my white friends who are wonderful people away from all this wrongness in case it’s catching, like a flu.

But I can’t, so instead I go about identifying Things That Are Wrong and tell any listening public (like all four of you reading this blog!) about them, so I have the satisfaction of having at least attempted to mitigate the wrongness of the world. And you will have some names for Things That Are Generally Wrong With The World that also creep into steampunk, so you can start learning how to call it as you see it and thus help in the long arduous battle against racism in steampunk! Our first term is: Aversive Racism!

Aversive Racism is when people, in particular white liberals, say that they are not racist, and may genuinely consciously believe in egalitarianism, but unthinkingly display a bias. This bias is unconscious, although very easy to see if you’re a POC on the receiving end of it.

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