So i had to post this

[jhameia]

Hi Lou,

Fan here and hopefully future SFWA member, and I find your lack of knowledge and perspective about this issue appalling.

The USA has a long history of dehumanizing huge swaths of people in order to exploit their labour. Even today in the animal rights movement, there are organizations that use tactics that dehumanize actual people in the name of saving animals. These issues permeate everything, from media representation to political representation, right down to how individuals speak to each other.

Your affection to your companion animals does not in any way elevate them, on any institutional level, to the rank of human beings, many of whom still face obstacles to have any decent quality of life that you have no problem giving your own dogs. Many individuals suffer being thought of as animals, not quite human, on a systemic level, and yet here you are utterly unable to comprehend that perhaps this is a larger issue beyond what you think about your dogs. People are denied citizenship, denied humanity, and denied basic respect, based on their ethnicity, and somehow, Nisi is taking herself "way too seriously" because you don't understand why the ethnic identity movement exists? A movement which has spread to encompass other forms of identity, beyond ethnicity?

What, then, qualifies you to run on a platform that touts "diversity", when you clearly don't understand the concept? What qualifies you to tell a woman of colour, who will face dehumanization on a more regular basis than you, or your dogs, ever will, how she should approach the issue? How dare you, in fact, tell her, a woman who probably has faced more racism in the last month than you have your entire life, that's she's speaking of something esoteric?

As someone who may potentially become a permanent resident of North America, facing immigration issues, it's deeply insulting to see that dogs are granted immediate citizenship over humans. It is deeply enraging to see the hyphen of identity, used and insisted on by so many minority groups to claim just a little piece of America for themselves, trivialized in such a way for animals, because some random dude thinks it's cute and funny.

I strongly urge you, whether you win or not, to research what the term "diversity" means and can truly encompass, so that you can learn for yourself how you are participating in the trivializing and whitewashing of the term, your participation of which perpetuates the racism that permeates the system that people of colour are forced to survive.

Perhaps in that search you will also see how your apology isn't truly an apology. Nisi may have accepted it, but since you clearly don't understand why you're giving it, it doesn't mean much in the long run. I understand the impulse to give the apology; I've done it before. And that's why I can tell you, there is more to apologizing than saying, "if it means that much to you, here are the five letters that make up this word."

ONCE AGAIN, WITH FEELING.

Comments

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

+1, go you!

Louis and Patricia have two adopted Canine-American children, Millie and Sugar Antonelli.

...

We adopted a pair of dogs as our own children. ... I ask them all the time if they are happy having human parents. My wife was adopted, human to human. I tell my children they were adopted canine to human.

It is interesting to me that no one has called him out on adoptism, too. Pet ownership =/= adopting human children, as much as you love your pets. There is something about the intersection of this and the racial/ethnicity fail that is making me very uncomfortable, like this is supposed to be some parallel to transracial adoption. Is this reading off base?

[fantasyecho.livejournal.com]

It's the equation that animals are like human beings, while ignoring how non-white minorities are often animalized. That's why the transracial adoption aspect of it is so problematic: that adopting a dog is anything like adopting a human being. Someone in Jim Hines's LJ made the point that animals are not citizens; they don't vote, they don't live independently. Which I think illustrates why it's problematic quite neatly, I think.

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is it. It also reminds me of the "are children people" conversation we had earlier, although that was in another context.

There is also the commodification of babies that occurs in adoption. It makes me uncomfortable to see dogs referred to as human children (trans-species adopted), when I know how actual human children are commodified (especially PoC children to white parents).

And his whole "we couldn't have children, so we adopted dogs as children" -- wait, what? Did you not want to adopt human children, did you try and you were not able to...? Not everyone can adopt, for one reason or another, but without more explained, I am seeing a non-sequitur here. If you wanted children, you could adopt actual children -- and you could even still have dogs! Dogs do not become equivalent to human children because you are unable to conceive.

[fantasyecho.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the ignorance of the commodification process is pretty stark too.

And it sounds so disingenuous, "we couldn't have children!" Oh please, you are white and middle-class. Unless you meant, you didn't want to adopt a child of colour from the state system...

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

Yeah... that's how it reads.

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

That's a pet-peeve in general, but it fits in with the "furbabies" and "my pets are my children" thing taken to an extreme. I don't know if the reading is off-base, because it is so outlandish, but it's not uncommon rhetoric among pet owners even beyond the adoption parallels.

It drives me nuts that my mom calls me the sister to her dog. The dog doesn't care when mom asks her "do you wanna play with your sister?", but it makes me uncomfortable and she won't listen to me when I tell her that I am not sister to a dog. Of course I am, the dog is her child, and so am I. Ergo, we're sisters.

[fantasyecho.livejournal.com]

Urk. It's not like I don't understand where the impulse to talk to animals like they're humans comes from, but there ought to be a limit on what you can say to your own, ACTUAL children, on how they should relate to your pet...

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

I even told her "mom that makes me uncomfortable, I am not related to a dog, I'm a person." "Haha, oh, honey!"

And I'm one of those zany people that believe some animals deserve sentience/personhood rights (NOT on the basis of the 13th amendment, though). It still fills me with massive DNW.

NGL the furbaby stuff is part of what drove me out of childfree comms too. It is so-- pardon my french-- fucking creepy.

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

It makes sense to me when people are talking about their relationship with their service animals. People with disabilities often have very deep, special bonds with their service animals, and that deserves a lot of respect.

When people are not talking about that, I do not grok.

[februaryfour]

I deeply hope that people are reading the comments to his candidacy. Now _there_ is where you see how unfit for leadership he is.

I can't see John Scalzi (president of SWFA and up for re-election) working with this man.

ETA: Holy crap. Inability to understand diversity notwithstanding, did you see the man's running platform? Do not want.

[fantasyecho.livejournal.com]

IKR? NOD TO THE MASONS? Wow.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I saw this comment over at Antonelli's page and admired it silently. Now that it's here, I will admire it vociferously. Thank you.

[fantasyecho.livejournal.com]

Aw, thanks =)

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

Facedesky!

Excellent call out.