I love the premise of NPR's new Guilty Pleasures series in part because I supoprt anything that may help to break down genre-guilt, but I found the recent piece by Brad Meltzer to be very problematic. Unnecessary gender-gauntlet-throwing aside, Metlzer proclaims his love for the Twilight series without actually saying why he does like the books. Fine: however, by doing so, he completely glosses over every reason to legitimatley dislike the books, which have absolutely nothing to do with their being young adult, or gothic fantasy, or any other reasons that often cause the Literati to defend their reading choices ("but it really transcends genre!"). 

Metlzer calls on women to give the Twilight books to their teenaged sons, nephews and husbands, to tell them the books are cool, that they'll like them. ( The thing is, I wouldn't even want my daughters (or nieces, or sisters) to read them, let alone the men... )

Sorry, Mr. Meltzer, but I won't be foisting Stephanie Meyer's anti-feminist, raceist pop-fluff on the guys in my life. Instead, I gave Ethan Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, which features an empowered-but-refreshingly-unspunky heroine, realistic relationship dynamics, and multidimensional characters. I'm sure he'll still grow up to be a Real Man.

My head is exploding right now with thoughts on race and being a white ally - yesterday I was checking out some of the smart and savvy blogs by people of color (POCs, for short, as per the web-lingo) who have moved to Dreamwidth and was feeling conflicted about how to keep following them...and then I came across deepad*'s post Staking Out My Stomping Grounds, on how she realized that during the RaceFail '09 discussions, she had been writing to Whites as a default without realizing it - how she wanted "You" to be the same as "Us," and how profoundly upsetting that was for her. My first gut reaction to that, and her disclaimer about Whites writing their reactions elsewhere, was one of feeling left out, excluded.

And then my privilege smacked me in the face, and I was so ashamed of my own sense of proprietariness--  as though I was owed something, was somehow entitled to be part of that discussion. Just when we think we're "doing it right," we realize how pervasive our privilege is. And I thought about White Liberal Guilt, and how to be a better ally while at the same time checking my own motives to make sure I didn't have my hand stuck out for cookies without realizing it. It's not about absolution, or having the Black Fairy tell you you're a Real Boy.

So I joined racism_101 , in part because I really love this idea of whites educating other whites on being better allies - to, as sparkymonster  said at the Safe Space WisCon panel, give your friends of color (or your gay friends, or your feminist friends) some ice cream money and send them out of the house for a bit, so they don't always have to be doing the basics for you. And at the same time, I'm reading as much as I can, and realizing how few friends of color I have (though I have a lot of gay friends, which actually came up in conversation about Prop 8 recently when someone assumed I didn't know any gay people personally just because they didn't - gah!).

Which isn't to say I'm going to put out a personal ad (White female looking for Friends of Color, enjoys books, science, outdoorsy stuff, tea, and complicated board games), but it did give me pause. As a Vermonter living in the Midwest, it's not surprising, but those can be easy straw men to hide behind-- I mean, the majority of my LJ friends are whites, too.  There are no blacks or latinos in my department, either faculty or students, and our only Asians are one Chinese faculty and a handful of Chinese students, most of whome work with him. And we teach geography.

*How do I link to a Dreamwidth user on LJ? Help!