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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm not the first to feel this way, but I feel like the discourse around this is going to be seen as a sea change within the culture wars years from now. The fact that this discourse is largely happening within "The Left" and features such polarizing opinions where a lot of people are like, "Wait... that actually doesn't make sense," and causing people to REALLY stop and think about how their biases are functioning against them.

I say this as a die-hard liberal.[/quote]

I don't know if it's going to be a flashpoint for many people because it's a niche issue that most people don't care about as much as we do.

But wow is it resonating with me in interesting ways. It's raising a lot of questions for me about what it means to be a liberal white woman these days. One thing I keep thinking about is how there is this evergreen dynamic of women ripping each other apart to save men the trouble of oppressing us. It's one thing for the liberal Twitter mob to go after that woman in Central Park who called the cops on a black guy looking at birds -- she sucked and was doing something clearly terrible. She was ACTUALLY weaponizing white womens tears, in a blatant and disgusting way, to endanger the life of a black man. It's simple and clear cut.

But applying that same thinking to Dawn Dorland is horrifying to me. She wasn't calling the cops on a person of color. She wasn't actually doing anything to a person of color. Her crime, as far as I can tell, was contacting Larson to ask if she wanted to be removed from the private support group on Facebook. The decision by the Times Magazine piece, and by Larson, to frame this as "she was demanding to know why I didn't like her posts on Facebook" is hugely problematic because I've read the email and [i]that's not what she says.[/I] She was worried she'd overstepped by adding Larson to the group (which she had!), was suddenly concerned about sharing private info with someone who maybe was not empathetic/sympathetic to her situation (prescient, as she should definitely not have been sharing that info with Larson), and was looking for a way to undo that mistake without passive aggressively removing Larson from the group. I mean, what was Dorland supposed to do in that situation? Should she have just unfriended Larson? Apparently that would have been better to some than reaching out and having a brief, simple convo about it. This was NOT a white woman weaponizing her feelings. This was a fairly thoughtful person recognizing a relationship didn't feel like it was matching up well and trying to resolve it in a mature way.

To compare Dorland to the many examples in recent years of white women using their tears/feelings to endanger POC is horrifying to me. Larson was never in danger! Not even professionally, not event when Dorland kind of lost it and started contacting organizations about her. All she had to do was stop submitting/publishing the short story that plagiarized Dorland's letter. That's it! Just write another damn story, it's your literal job.

That's what I don't get. Dorland didn't do anything to Larson. She was trying to be a reasonable person. And Larson went nuclear anyway, lying and plagiarizing and lawyering up and trashing Dorland a dozen different ways. Was Dorland just supposed to... take it? Is that what it means to be a white ally these days? You accept abuse and ridicule from [it must be said: a white passing] woman of color because to stand up for yourself is racist?

Nope, that can't be the conclusion. Sorry. That's not going to work out for anyone. Not even Larson in the long run. Try again.[/quote]

Exactly. And I think it's worth mentioning that Sonya Larson is half-white, half-Asian. She is just as much a "white woman" as she is an Asian-American, and I say that graciously and without malice -- multiracial people have a right to totally own both parts of their identities. What's telling is that she also wrote a short story before this called "Gabe Dove" where she basically dances around the trope of finding Asian-American men unattractive, which is such a low blow and such a boring cliche at this point. (I am Asian-American, so this particular line of thinking particularly irks me). Why is it that so often, the Asian-Americans who dominate the discourse around the Asian-American experience happen to be Asian-American women with profound proximity to whiteness? It's just another whole layer of this saga that has really, really rubbed me in the wrong way. Both Larson and Ng are deeply, deeply privileged by being Asian-American women who surround themselves with white people, have (presumably) married white spouses, and have always found themselves in white spaces. I really don't mean to discredit their experiences or to downplay what it's like to grow up different in predominantly white communities (trust me, I've been there), but it's weird to see women like them continually own and dominate narratives around the Asian-American experience. And then to see them weaponize their identity in this whole conversation leaves me deeply disturbed.

Sorry. I know this is a tangent at this point.[/quote]

If you read Joshua Luna's Twitter feed, he talks about Celeste Ng's proximity to anti-Asian male stereotypes, while at the same time observing that she's been victimized as well.[/quote]

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