Thread by @aliettedb

Look, I'm annoyed, so: a thread of things that have happened to me. They're disjointed, and they're just off the top of my head. They're not intended to be exhaustive: just my personal experiences

When I got listed for one of my very first awards, the presenter couldn't pronounce my name (I'm super elastic on how my name is actually pronounced because most people get it wrong). This was WAY OUTSIDE THE RANGE and involved swapped letters and entirely new letters.

Reviews have policed my use of English, delighting in pointing out grammar errors because I couldn't possibly speak it properly as it wasn't my native language (and I know this happens to PoCs for whom it *is* a first language).

I've been praised for creating such a wonderful and realistic alien language. The language in question is modern Vietnamese.

I have been told multiple times that my characters were difficult to connect to. Almost every PoC writer I know has had this: it's not the writing skill, it's because we present an experience outside the norm of the reader. And it's our fault.

I've been accused, as a person living outside the US, of being the reason why Hollywood doesn't do diversity (export sales, apparently. I'll reserve my salt)

I've been to Asian restaurants at cons where people expect me to know what to order for the whole table because I'm "from around there". Actually, Northern China or Korea is super faraway from Vietnam.

I routinely have to wait until someone from the dominant gender and dominant culture repeats what I've said in order for people to pay attention.

People have explained the Vietnamese/American war to me (by "people" I mean people who aren't connected to me), and racism in France (by people not living in France)

I've had to push back on some of my covers. I've had to argue against some edits. I memorably tried to explain Asian history and why a thing was a bad idea to someone over and over, only to be ignored (it involved traumatic WWII stuff, they saw it as cool exotic)

If I had a penny for every time I got "exotic" in reference to me I'd be pretty wealthy by now. My work and I have been referred to as Chinese, East Asian, Korean (I'm none of these).

When I won a Nebula in 2013, I was one of the first French people to win one and the first person of Vietnamese descent to win one (I think, not 100% sure about that one), and I got accused of only winning because of diversity cookies.

I got told to stop talking about colonial history because I'd been raised in France and surely I could be more grateful to the west.

I get asked where I'm from and very often people don't take "France" for an answer. (the classic where are you from/where are you really from/where are your parents from).

I get asked how my identity influences what I write way more often than people from dominant genders or dominant cultures.

I'm uncomfortably aware that, as a native French speaker writing in English, I have way more chances of selling in translation *from* English than the average French SFF book.
Even though, as a WoC, I have fewer chances to be translated.

I know I've been lucky in a lot of ways and this isn't even a fraction of what other people in the field get. And I know my TL is probably full of people who are aware of all of this already. (and I could probably come up with more stuff if I thought more)

And again: I've been lucky. I've been supported and I've made wonderful friendships and relationships within the SFF community. I've been amazingly successful in a way I didn't expect when I entered the field more than a decade ago.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that all this stuff? The lionising of Campbell, of Lovecraft? It's just part and parcel of a culture of micro aggressions, and it's exhausting, and it's *driving people away*.

It's saying that the dead (in this case, the actively harmful dead, the ones who shaped SFF so that people like me stayed away) are worth more than the living. Worth more than us. Because we have the wrong skin colour, the wrong gender, etc. etc.

It's not a new feeling. But can we recognise how profoundly unwelcoming it is? And how it actively continues to turn people away, or chew them up and burn them?
(I know a lot of people I know who decided it wasn't worth staying)

And if you're interested in finding out about me (because this thread has gone viral and whoa it's running around the internet way faster than I expected, here is more info about what I write:
aliettedebodard.com/bibliography/n…
aliettedebodard.com/bibliography/n…
aliettedebodard.com/bibliography/n…