VIII- When you don’t know what you don’t know (and you don’t want to get canceled for it)

I first heard about K. M. Szpara’s book Docile when I met him on the 2022 Writing Excuses cruise. He talked about what went into it, some of his thoughts about the process of writing it, and while I admit I don’t remember exactly what he said, I made a mental note to read the book at some point. Come mid 2024, I finally get around to seeing if our local library has it. They do. Yay! So, I check it out…and tear through it within three days.

Overall, I enjoyed it. It’s very readable. The subtle brainwashing that happens over the course of the book was fascinating to me. I liked Alex’s slow realization that he’s done serious harm to people without consciously meaning to, and he may never get to come back from that in their eyes. I didn’t love the scenes where non- or dubious consensual things were being described using erotic language, but eh, I’ve read worse, and at least the narrative was pretty clear about the “this is not cool”ness of it.

A few weeks after I finished it, I was about to recommend it to a discord I’m in, and I couldn’t remember how to spell the author’s name. I ended up on the book’s Goodreads page, and was surprised to see such a low rating. (I mean, it’s Goodreads, but still.) So, naturally, I read a few of the reviews.

Hoooooo boy.

People hate this book. It’s slavefic (a term I did not know), which is automatically problematic. There’s only one POC, and he’s given an insensitive name (I agree, that should have been his cover name, not his real one) and a questionable role. The book doesn’t even attempt to engage with slavery as it actually existed in America, and the fact that it’s white people experiencing slavery makes that an egregious oversight. It’s full of white people making stupid decisions and behaving badly. It wants to be a love story in a situation where that’s super fucked up. The erotic scenes are gross and offensive. It doesn’t engage meaningfully (the fuck does that mean, anyway) with the politics it brings up. It’s racist. It’s trashy. It isn’t the book promised by the tagline. Tor should never have published it. On and on and on…

And, like, I don’t necessarily disagree (although some of those reviews, I admit I raised my eyebrow at). I’ve done enough reading on writing the other to know not to name a POC character after an object, not to kill off gay characters, not to tie queerness or blackness to villainy, not to have an abusive relationship work out at the end, not to redeem Nazis or other real world villains, and so on.

I like rules. I like do’s and don’ts to be clear, especially when your entire career and reputation are at stake.

I don’t want my writing to hurt people, or contribute to a culture that hurts people. The thing that frightens me is that, as a white, cis woman, even as careful as I try to be, I could have easily written a book like Docile. A book which is apparently so deeply flawed and racist and arrogant and ill thought out that it disappointed scores of readers who were initially excited to read it…and I would not have seen many of those issues until the reviews started coming in.

I have blinders that I cannot see, and I honestly, frankly, from the bottom of my heart, do not know where to even begin to get rid of them.

***

I’ve been keeping up with the latest season of Doctor Who because, hey, Whovian here. Like many others, I thought I knew, going in, what the episode Dot and Bubble was going to be about, and I was pleasantly shocked that it took the turns that it did. The betrayal? That uncomfortable ending? For “family friendly sci-fi,” it went hard, and I love it when shows aren’t afraid to do that. I could feel the Doctor’s helpless rage over trying to help the kind of infuriating people who spit in the hand you hold out.

As I usually do, I watched some YouTube reviews. One, in particular, was beating themselves up because they didn’t clock the society as white supremacist until the very end.

Readers, I did not clock it as such until I watched that review.

I didn’t see it until someone else metaphorically took me along and pointed out all the looks and one liners and clues that I had either missed, thought nothing of, or dismissed as something else. I know what a mircoaggression is, because I try to be a decent human being and have done the goddamned reading. I still missed them. Because I, a cis white woman, have unconsciously absorbed the false message that racism is a thing that exists only in the past, the possibility that everything I interpreted as classism or vapishness or arrogance was actually just plain ole’ fashioned racism never occured to me, because the setting was futuristic. I didn’t see it because I, a cis white woman, do not live a life where I have to deal with microaggressions. Which means I am likely perpetuating those microaggressions in my writing, maybe even IRL, without even knowing.

It’s like discovering your skin is covered in razors, so that every time you touch someone, you stab them. Then, once you figure it out, you discover your position in life (which you didn’t choose!) makes it all but impossible to see them, let alone remove them. Every time you reach out, you’re going to stab someone. Over time, with study and work, you can blunt their sharpness, but one wrong move and you will still hurt people. You try not to. You try your damnedest not to. But you’ve never been on the wrong side of the razor.

You don’t complain about how shitty it feels to discover you’ve hurt people, because that’s taking attention away from the people you’ve hurt. You understand and accept that the people you’ve hurt will be angry at you. You understand that “I’m trying!” isn’t a good enough answer to “please stop hurting us.” You understand that those people**—who you helped hurt!—are within their rights to tear down any work you’ve put out, any career you’ve built, because you accidentally covered it in razors and they got stabbed. The only acceptable response is, “I’m sorry, I’ll do better in the future,” and you only get so many of those before people stop believing you.

I am not laying this out as an excuse to ignore the razors.

I see the social justice landscape as a rice measuring scale. The white, cis, male, hetero, rich, Christian, privileged bowl has accumulated way too much rice. You don’t balance that by continuing to put the same amount of rice in both bowls, even though that would be “fair.” You have to put more rice in the other bowl. That is, on its face, unfair in the short term. But “treating everyone equally”, “colorblindness,” and “judging on the merits” are only fair if the scale is already balanced. It’s not. Which means, as someone in the privileged bowl, I have to accept a little unfairness in my life as the cost of balancing the scale. I believe it’s necessary and worth it.

It’s just…I already scrutinize and overthink every teeny tiny decision I make when it comes to putting underprivileged characters in my stories. Now, I have the additional fear that my best efforts won’t be enough to catch things, because I don’t know what I don’t know until someone else points it out.

**Editor Mariah here, reading this a month later. I’m realizing “those people” is one of those tricky phrases that don’t register as offensive to me but has a prickly history that might grate in someone else’s ears. I’m leaving it here to prove my point: sometimes I don’t know what I don’t know, and I only catch the prickly things later.

***

I don’t have any solutions here.

I want to live in a world with no razors and balanced scales…but I also want to put creative work out into the world without feeling guilty or terrified of torpedoing my career because I genuinely didn’t know what I don’t yet know. It’s soul-wearying to discover that thing after thing after thing you thought was innocuous actually has a terrible history, is super problematic and hurtful, and the fact that you don’t already know that is extremely disappointing and suspicious and you are sure you aren’t secretly a racist…?

I just would like for people not to assume the worst of me when I inevitably make mistakes. I would like not to be mocked when I try to correct them.

Maybe that’t impossible. Maybe it’s my burden to bear as a privileged person and I should shut up. Maybe me bringing it up at all is a sign that I’m not as committed to being a decent human as I should be.

I don’t know.

Maybe I should just write my stories to the best of my ability and stop worrying about it.