The Remyth Project: Dragons

Before people, there were dragons. They controlled wind, rain, storms, and even waves of the ocean. No one measures when people first came, but, at some point, an accord was made. The dragons lived in palaces below the water, and people above, and gods above that. The dragons "paid tribute" by bringing the weather on time.

Or perhaps the gods paid tribute and the dragons were kind enough to grant rains.

It's really hard to say, as people are the ones who wrote the history.

An empty palace sits under waves, abandoned. And storms come harder and more fierce every year. The dragons aren't carved of ivory and jade- they sit printed on napkins and club shirts. They do not echo with the roars of thunder and storm waves, but the voice of Eddie Murphy tinning out jokes to soften "foreign stories" upon ears.

Nobility, of the spirit and not of blood, knows that it's power is not in who it commands but who it serves, how it betters the world just by being. At one time, people sought monsters, not for the slaying, but to learn their truths.

If I meet one, I'll ask her if she has lost her history as well.

Remyth Project: The Ghosts Close to Home

I spent almost a year living in the Central District. I had just came back from Vancouver, deciding that spending 100 hours a week doing computer animation was not the way to live life. I was staying with a friend, and while he had been there longer, we were both Southend natives, and two hoods had a long history of beef. So, we're walking around, trying to learn what places were cool/not cool, etc.

Just a couple of blocks over from the house, we're walking by a torn out building being renovated.

"Hey. If you ever hear or see any little kids in there? Don't go in there."
"What's up?"
"It used to be a church a few years back. It got firebombed and a few kids died. Sometimes you hear or see stuff at night."

It was one of those classic cases of a bit murder that got a half paragraph in the back of the 3rd section of the newspaper. You know, in super liberal, tolerant "Safest City in the US" Seattle.

Don't be brown in the town.

I chose to avoid that block ever since. I spent two years on the run from gangs, but I wasn't ready to deal with "ghosts", real or not...

I wonder what building is there now. I wonder where ghosts of children go, when genocide is done and gentrification has begun.

Othered Only Because You Say So

So once again, white writers are crying tears and needing hugs and cocoa because they don't know how to write characters of color and they did it wrong and everybody hates them and their fee fees hurt.

Let me give an analogy.

If every time I spoke about women, I painted them as some mysterious other- magical and wise, vicious and cruel, stupid and helpless, lusty and animalistic, unfathomable and alien? You'd tell me I'm crazy and a sexist dick and you'd be right. (and yeah, there's guys doing this still.)

You'd say this not only because I'd be telling lies, but because these falsehoods are so easily shattered that I would have had to went through considerable effort in mental gymnastics, in not interacting with women (either literally or practically by behavior), that in the end, "But, but, no one pulled my head out of my ass, I NEVER KNEW" would not be a valid excuse. My not knowing would be the result of a lot of work on my part.

Women are everywhere and the only person I could blame for such fuckwittery at this point would be myself.

So. When you tell me that you couldn't possibly write any characters of color because they're so strange and you can't identify with them at all? Or that's why you had to fall back on stereotypes? You've just told me you've spent decades of your life doing mental gymnastics and avoiding people.

And, after a lifetime of aversive racism, and, you creating media that helps perpetuate lies, you want me to do the work FOR you of pulling your head out of your ass and then give you a cookie and tell you that you're a good white person, even though you're not willing to do any effort to undo what you've done to yourself?

So, no, the answer is neither to stop writing characters of color or to read a lot of books about POC and try to study them from afar or endlessly demand we educate you.

Get your head out of your ass and meet us as people.

And then you'll see why, "But X are people too!" is a phrase that only works if you start from an assumption that only your people were people to begin with.