Race

This is my last post on the Girls of Color in Dystopia guest blog series. I've read nearly 40 books just for this series and was disappointed (but, sadly, not surprised) to realize just how many of them have few to absolutely no girls of color in them.

Happy Friday, fellow feminist-news junkies! Here's all the wordy business on our radar this morning.

• If you've been following the story of Beatriz, the young Salvadorean woman whose pregnancy threatens her life (she has severe medical complications stemming from lupus, and the baby has already been deemed unviable), you'll be outraged to hear that the Supreme Court of El Salvador has officially denied her an abortion, handing down what amounts to a death sentence for the 22-year-old. Will a petition to the Pope help? Who knows, but it can't hurt to let His Holiness know that this is some senselessly cruel bullshit.  [RH Reality Check]

• Brooklyn district attorney Charles J. Hynes has announced that the borough's police force will no longer treat the possession of condoms as evidence of prostitution, a move that's a win for sex-work and public-health advocates. [New York Times]

• In the new cartoon SheZow, a 12-year-old boy gains superpowers—and a female alter ego—when he puts on a magic ring. To the folks at Breitbart News, the premise is evidence of a vast left-wing conspiracy to feminize boys. But creator Obie Scott Wade tells io9 that he just wanted to make a great animated show. [io9]

• White allies, antiracists, and more: A consideration of the limits—and, often, the meaninglessness—of self-applied labels among activists. [Spectra Speaks]

• NPR's Code Switch blog rounded up some of the most intersesting responses to the question, "What's the most ridiculous thing you've been asked about your race?" [Code Switch]

• The number of women opting not to pursue careers in academic research because of institutional bias is increasing—and that has dire consequences for universities that resist changing their internal structures. [Guardian Higher Education Network]

• In case Dolly Parton wasn't awesome enough: She has donated more than 50 million books to children as part of a literacy program called Imagination Library. [RawStory]

• Looking for an feminist internship in the Las Vegas area? Nationally syndicated blog The Sin City Siren wants you! [The Sin City Siren]

To anyone being raised in the 90s, whether as a kid or teenager, the new book Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age (out in September 2013 from Plume) is an excellent nostalgia trip.

Like millions of Americans reared in the nineties, I grew up rather mindlessly consuming Nick’s cartoons and teen sitcoms.Slimed author Mathew Klickstein prods viewers like me to revisit the influential channel's beloved shows with an eye on racial diversity, gender dynamics, and the process behind creating each show. 

Two years ago, on vacation in the Great Smoky Mountains, I saw a white couple at a restaurant with their Asian daughter. Though her father told her to quit staring, I felt the girl’s eyes on me all through the meal. I smiled at her, feeling a strong sense of kinship, a pang of sympathy. As a child, whenever I saw another Asian person – which I hardly ever did – I used to stare, too, hungry for the sight of someone, anyone, who looked like me.

When I first picked up Nalo Hopkinson's The Chaos last summer, I thought, "Finally! A book with a young woman of color as the protagonist!" Of course, I've since learned that there are other dystopic novels with girls of color, but this hasn't ended my love forThe Chaos even after a second (and third) reading.

The Chaos isn't actually set in a dystopia. It's more of a post-apocalyptic world in which Toronto transforms from its usual racist, misogynist, able-ist normalcy to utter chaos, complete with hoodie-wearing sasquatches, escalators that ask questions about quantum physics, and Baba Yaga and her flying house.

Star Trek has a reputation.

For almost fifty years, the disempowered and the marginalized and the outcasts have held up Star Trek as a show that said, “This is what we can aspire to: a humanity that has evolved beyond inequality and oppression”. The show presents a vision of Earth that has moved beyond racism and classism, beyond ableism and sexism and homophobia. As a life-long Trekkie, it is tempting to agree with this reputation. Me and Star Trek, hand in hand, running through fields of wildflowers on a soft-focus sunny day while I gaze upon them longingly. Oh Star Trek! So progressive! So feminist!

But this reputation is not reality. 

Star Trek: Into Darkness came out this weekend, and like any good Trekkie, I was eager to see the film. And although I came away from doing so feeling satisfied, there was one thing that stuck in my craw.

A couple of years ago I saw ex-Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna speak in New York City, right before she donated her musical archives to New York University’s Fales Library. I was struck by her acerbic wit, her ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude.

While I was a teenager during the grunge and Riot Grrrl era, for some reason I was (at the time) more drawn to hyper-masculine, testosterone-saturated grunge and metal bands and was not that interested in what was happening on the other side of the scene. As Hanna’s talk was intriguing, I took the opportunity to check out The Punk Singer, part of the Hot Docs Festival in Toronto.

About 10 minutes into the documentary, I knew that I had made a colossal mistake.

"If you see something, say something" has been the slogan for buses, trains, and airports since 9/11. It's been used to justify increased surveillance and targeting of Muslims and people from the Middle East. After the Boston bombing, we've seen it used to mislabel the suspected Boston bomber as a "dark-skinned male" and later to misidentify Sunil Tripathi by Reddit users.

Kat Zhang's What's Left of Me takes the mass suspicion, xenophobia, and hysteria that's become normalized since 9/11 and sets it in an alternate United States where people are born with two personalities inside one body.