Friday, 3 August 2007

"You become the problem"

"It's tiny," says Nalo Hopkinson, 46, from her Toronto home, of the black sci-fi community. "And it's happening in an environment in which, particularly in the US, to talk about race is to be seen as racist. You become the problem because you bring up the problem. So you find people who are hesitant to talk about it."

-- From "Race, the final frontier", an article by Vanessa E. Jones in the Boston Globe on black science-fiction writers.

2 comments:

zentinal said...

Since I'm mentioned in the first paragraph of Ms. Jones article, I had to blog about it. Not about the larger issues she raised, but at a more personal level. http://www.doublefeature.com/unconventionaut/

H. Sabrina Gledhill said...

Amazing - that situation has long been true in Brazil (anyone addresses race is a racist). In fact, affirmative action has been accused of "introducing apartheid" and "creating racism" where, according to that logic, it presumably didn't exist before (so why are there so few blacks in Brazilian universities?).