The social justice reckoning in our little corner of the Internet has been inspiring to see. Furries have listened to and amplified the voices of its BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) population, and we can speak up about our unique experience in the fandom more than ever. But the cultural divide we’re trying to bridge has proven to be both deeper and more nebulous than any of us realized. It’s a process that contains many unseen pitfalls, and even the most well-meaning of us are bound to stumble now and again. All of us, even me, have our blind spots.
Difursity: Stories By Furs of Color is an anthology that aimed to challenge the monolithic whiteness of publishing by starting in our own space. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Thurston Howl’s Bound Tales imprint brought us five stories told from an outsider’s perspective…mostly. Four are intriguing tales from writers in the Asian diaspora, representing Singapore, Laos, and Vietnam. The fifth is an opportunity to learn how to discuss these pitfalls we’re bound to run into as we seek to better understand each other.
My favorite story in the anthology is “Vietnamized” by Allison Thai. Mindy is an Indochinese Tiger taking the big step of introducing her African Elephant boyfriend, Ugo, to her traditional Vietnamese parents. Their initial, strong disapproval sets off a chain of events that leads Mindy to lose her grasp of the English language entirely. The shock of the tragedy, and the long period of adjustment to her new life, brings Ugo and the family of Tigers together through connecting with Mindy’s native tongue.
The situation is a bit far-fetched, but Thai grounds the story with strong characters and a compelling narrative. As someone in a mixed-race relationship, I sympathized strongly with Mindy and Ugo — it’s never easy to navigate through the difficult terrain of introducing someone into a wholly different and sometimes insular culture. Mindy’s nervousness about her family’s reaction to Ugo felt real to me, because I’ve seen my husband wrestle with those same emotions. When you love your family and want them to share your life, it’s very hard to deal with intolerant views. The complicated, intertwined feeling of love, anger, and disappointment can be torture to go through, and Thai illuminates that quite well.
The story also does a great job of blending its furriness into its setting. Thai peppers her narrative with small details that point to the lived reality of animal-people — Ugo twisting his trunk with nerves, or Mindy’s display of affection by stroking his tusks, or Mindy’s father unsheathing his claws to count the reasons her boyfriend is a bad match. It’s another small but important step of grounding the world, which makes Mindy’s improbable turn much easier to buy.
AlSong’s “Rekindling” is another solid effort. Charlie, a Laotian Small-Clawed Otter, comes back to his small hometown from his Seattle university for spring break. There, he tries to reconnect with a few important aspects of his history — the language and culture of his family, and the few friendships he made in high school before leaving. I love that AlSong balances the frequently opposed identities that are nonetheless important for him to keep — his identity as a Laotian-American, and his identity as a cis gay male. While Charlie struggles with leaving one identity to incorporate the other, his friend Ford struggles with following the path to a larger world and more opportunity. There are also nice furry touches here, like the indoor pool of the Vongphachanh’s apartment being the place where the family gathers to eat papaya salad and watch Thai soap operas. Overall, it’s a nice encapsulation of the second-generation experience for an immigrant family, and how tricky it can be to hold onto your traditions while embracing the opportunity of a cosmopolitan future.
MikasiWolf’s pair of stories, “In Better Times” and “Where Souls Go”, are a bit less successful. The first features a concept that could work, but falls down in its presentation. The cadence of the prose is a bit too repetitive, and the images conjured are too general to have much impact; it would have been better served by punchier prose that pointed more towards the specific details of the world he was building. “Where Souls Go” lands better, but the characterization could have been stronger and I would have liked to see Little Biscuit learn the lesson he did more actively; most of the story is a fairly static conversation with his dying grandmother, so we’re told a lot more than we’re shown. I couldn’t connect to Little Biscuit or the souls he was meant to help because they don’t really interact and influence each other. Both stories could have used cleaner prose to focus their points.
Then there’s “No Substitutes Allowed” by Laurie Hall, which is — and there’s no easy way to say this — a racist story. It casts the Big Bad Wolf of Little Red Riding Hood fame as a jive-talking woodland creature who has an arrangement with Granny to break bread and keep the peace. It’s written in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) by a white author from New England. The word “uppity” is used in the first paragraph and three times in a short three pages.
There’s a lot wrong with this, but first, let me say that I don’t believe the author was malicious in her intent at all. The patois she uses evokes the Br’er Rabbit tales and Disney’s problematic Song of the South. I read the story as an affectionate homage to the unique speech of southern Black Americans. But the use of the language is not something you should do carelessly, and that’s been done here.
AAVE is an aspect of the Black American experience that has frequently been hard to reconcile. It’s so ubiquitous, especially on the Internet, that it’s frequently adopted in wider circles, and there’s no clear consensus on the unspoken rules for what’s acceptable and what’s not. Most of the time, problematic speech is a “know it when I see it” kind of thing. What makes it so difficult to use if you’re not a Black American is understanding the context in which the language developed. When it’s used to evoke a set of stories inextricably linked to a time in American history we still haven’t fully coped with, like the antebellum South, it’s incredibly important to understand the effect that will have on an audience.
The particulars of AAVE require a knowledge of its history and/or the lived experience of its culture to understand. That’s why it’s so easy to stumble over a false note or cause offense; a word that might seem innocuous on its surface can be loaded with meaning invisible to those outside of the culture. AAVE has also been weaponized by racists to paint us as stupid, uneducated, and mentally inferior. People who aren’t Black are always going to draw side-eye when trying to use it, because it’s something that connects us to our shared cultural experience and a painful history we’re still feeling the effects of. When the dominant culture comes in to treat such a fundamental part of our identity as a costume, or a writing exercise, it feels belittling. It’s a flattening of our culture that shows a lack of understanding, not only of the language itself, but of the shared trauma from which it was birthed.
The word “uppity” points directly to that trauma. It has a long, established history of racist connotations, and it’s incredibly uncomfortable to see that word coming from a white writer who, for all intents and purposes, is pretending to be Black while telling this story. What’s worse, seeing this in an anthology nominally written by furs of color as the only story speaking to the Black experience is disheartening. It sits there, third in a group of other stories that offers needed insight into the lives of the Asian diasporas, as an example of how even well-meaning attempts to bridge our cultural divide can instead highlight how far apart we really are.
While the author should be aware of the problematic nature of the story, its inclusion in Difursity is an editorial failure. I don’t know what the editorial process was like, and I certainly understand the difficulty of making sure an author is from the background they’re representing in their fiction, but the author’s bio links to her Facebook page. There’s no indication that Hall is a furry there (or at her Amazon page), or that she’s BIPOC. That should have given the editors pause in itself, but the fact the story was written in digital blackface should have been disqualifying right on its own.
I hope the editors take greater care with their story selection for the upcoming second anthology, and at the very least employ sensitivity readers or cultural consultants for stories written by authors outside of the culture highlighted.
Overall, Difursity is a welcome effort at expanding the idea of what furry fiction can be. However, it’s also a misstep that shows we still have work to do when it comes to responsible representation. There are resources available for Writing The Other that I strongly encourage all authors use to check their blind spots, and I encourage editors to be mindful of welcoming other voices into the slush pile. It may make putting together the next anthology a more difficult, slower process; but very few things worth doing are easy.
I sincerely hope that this experience is one we can learn from and use to be better. I’m rooting for the success of this initiative.
We’re living in a time where fear is a completely natural and understandable response. It feels like the world is perilously close to the edge of ruin — nuclear tensions between the world superpowers are higher than they’ve been since the Cold War; our governments are doing very little to deal with the environmental problems even as we’re seeing the effects that have long been promised; the fragile network of agreements that form our civilization seem to be breaking down. Many of us are living perilously close to the edge of personal ruin, too. I know personally that if I lose my job and don’t find another one immediately, things would get really bad really fast. I think the tone of our public discourse reflects how much fear has become entrenched in our lives. Anything and everything that makes us feel safe and in control is inviolate, no matter how flawed or dangerous it is. I’ve been swept up in the current myself, fearful of what happens if things get worse, angry that they’ve gotten this bad, ashamed I’m not doing more to fight against it.
At the beginning of last month, I made three resolutions: I wanted to meditate and write every day, and I wanted to avoid added sugars if at all possible. Well, the first month of the year has come and gone, so I thought I’d take a look back on the last 31 days to see how I did. I realize that it’s really hard to be actually perfect with these things, especially just starting out — it takes a while to build a practice into a habit and obstacles are going to come up. Still, all things considered, I think I did pretty well for myself.
Earlier this year — with some encouragement from My Husband, The Dragon — I decided to go back to school to pursue a degree in Psychology. I’ve gotten to a very good place with my mental health, but there are so many people who grew up the way I did without access to mental health services or education, who suffer in silence and ignorance about their issues. The goal with my degree is to do something to address these gaps in coverage and tailor treatments that speak to the particular manifestations of mental illness in communities of color. No one exists in a vacuum, after all — depression, anxiety, and social issues intersect to present unique challenges to people of color.
In 2000, the very first year I was old enough to vote, I turned to Ralph Nader. I was a young voter and fairly liberal, but Al Gore just wasn’t inspiring me. Nader, the Green Party candidate for that year, spoke my language with a passion that I could really get behind. Of course, since I was living in Arkansas at the time and the state would certainly go to Bush, I didn’t feel my vote would tilt the outcome in the election. But, looking back, if 500 Nader voters in Florida had broken for Gore instead, history would be very different.
Compared to Bruce, Amadeus is remarkably well-adjusted. He’s a happy-go-lucky kid that seems to relish the chance to be a superhero, and with his sister Maddy there to keep him focused and level-headed he might actually have a shot at sticking the landing. What’s clear in this first batch of issues, though, is that he’s got a few blind spots that are going to bite him pretty hard in due time.
One of the earliest memories I have about my mental illness is breaking down in the middle of lunch in sixth or seventh grade. Things were not going well for me. I was a shy and awkward kid who loved reading fantasy books. I was really sensitive, so I didn’t hold up to bullying very well. And I had gotten into trouble enough that in addition to homework and everything else, I had to write a sentence “I will not…something something something.” 1000 times.