[OOC] Racefail happens, no matter your intent.

Hi. In case anyone was wondering, even people of color can do fucked-up and racist shit.

I should know. I'm of mixed race (Latina/white), have seen the effects of racism on myself and on people I love, and I'm still guilty of failing pretty hard in this very journal.

Let me break it down for you, in all its uncut glory, because these issues are important, and they go beyond one little RP scenario. dishonestman, in RP, suggested he and Pirate!Jamie go off to Cuba to help Anamaria free some slaves. This... might not be inherently faily on it's own. One white character and one character of ambiguous ethnic origin, going to help out a character of color (Anamaria), who was already doing this shit. She didn't need a white hero to tell her how to save other characters of color, but as long as it didn't become all about them, Jack and Jamie would have been fine to help out.

And then I had an idea, and because this was my fluffy happy 'verse, I just ran with it without considering the implications. The idea was that Jamie would get a ship of his own and make Jack chase him for a bit. All well and good. Except that, hey, they were last seen helping slaves escape the sugar plantations in Cuba. So what if some slaves wanted to turn pirate, but hadn't had any training in basic seamanship? Sure, they could split up and join individual crews, but they'd already gotten to know each other, and they'd fought together, and it made more sense for them to keep that tight-knit sense of community. So Jamie would decide to help them out, and they could steal a ship and learn to sail it, and Jamie would have some time to examine his feelings about piracy away from Jack, while helping a bunch of former slaves kill slavers on the high seas, which struck him as a fair thing to do, unlike the more morally reprehensible (to him), "So we steal stuff because we can!" philosophy.

OH CHICA NO.

Do you see what I did there? Do you? I just took a horrible, tragic thing that affected (and still affects) real people, and used it as a plot device so some faceless characters of color could make a white colonialist protagonist feel better about himself and his boyfriend and there could be BUTTSECKS YEYS!

I noticed this fail shortly after I started RPing it, and so I went, "Okay. I've already started this fail and posted it on the internet -- can it be redeemed? Can I write about these people as people, not plot devices?" And my attempt to fix it then turned into the Token Black Guy, because in the course of an ongoing RP thread, I only came up with one character to speak for everyone on that boat who was not James Norrington. (And, going back and rereading, some of my descriptions were problematic -- there was some Othering going on there, which I should have seen and prevented.)

Well, fuck. That... didn't really help much at all, did it?

So I tossed some ideas around, decided to try and develop Diego and his crew, explore their backstories and give them a purpose in the narrative other than making Jamie feel better... And then never got around to writing it.

Further fail, because I knew there was a problem, and didn't immediately fix it. And then I saw the well-deserved outrage over someone in the SPN/J2 fandom who'd written a very offensive fic in which the earthquake in Haiti was used to provide a setting for a pair of white boys to have BUTTSECKS YEYS!

...Sobering look in the mirror, much?

So yeah. Fail happens. Even if you're a PoC. And, although I don't think anyone's stumbled across this journal who's noticed the problem and been offended, I'm saying this anyway: I'm sorry for this. I'm sorry that I made the same thoughtless mistake, and I'm sorry I didn't fix it right away.

It doesn't matter whether or not someone caught me out. My ass is still showing on the internet, and just because someone hasn't seen it yet, as far as I know, that doesn't mean no one ever has or ever will.

I'm making this post so that other people can see how easily this kind of fail happens, and with the best of intentions. No matter how enlightened you think you are, no matter what your ethnic background, if you don't approach what you're writing with mindfulness, you, too, can fail!

And, while I'm writing more about what turned out to be some incredibly interesting characters (not that you'd know it from what I've posted so far), and telling their stories, instead of using them as accessories in the story of James Norrington, I want to have something addressing the issue up where people can see it. Yes, I am aware of the fail, and I am sorry. No, this isn't going to stop me from writing chromatic characters of non-Latin@ origin, but it is going to make me pay more attention.

So here's what I'm planning on doing:

+ Writing the story of Jamie's time on the Virgen Inmaculada in a way that smacks him down a bit for his privileged colonialist bullshit, and puts all due emphasis on the people he's supposed to be working with.

+ Writing more about Diego (not his real name, but he's keeping it for a sort of, "what you did is kicking your ass" effect) in non-faily ways, and telling his story, and that of his crew, without the spotlight being on James. I may have to take that to another journal -- and in fact, I may make an RP journal for Diego, because he turned out to be of the awesome, despite my failure in portraying him -- but I've put the character out there, and just making him disappear after failing all over him just seems unfair to what could have been an awesome character, and a chance for more CoC in PotC fandom, which is racefaily enough already.

Comments are welcome, especially if my rather abundant ass is still showing, though anyone implying I am making a big deal over nothing is cordially invited to go fuck themselves, and the same goes for opinions about the SPN/J2 fic. It was not okay when I did it, it was really not okay when the fic author did it with a very recent tragedy where the scars are still fresh (I raged over Hurricane Katrina as a plot device, and I'm raging over this, too). It's just not okay.