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because they don’t know anything about us; or don’t know what it’s like to live as a racialised person; or, perhaps more honestly, because they don’t want to piss us off. It is common for science fiction and fantasy writers to say that they set their stories in imaginary worlds among imaginary beings because that allows them to deal with fraught issues such as power and marginalisation divorced from the real-world effects of such issues. But there are also many writers who see it differently.
    In 2009, white science fiction writer Elizabeth Bear published a blog post in which she challenged her fellow authors to include racialised and otherwise marginalised people in their stories. That post ignited an Internet firestorm of discussion and argument about race, racism, and representation in science fiction/fantasy literature and community. Fans, major editors and writers in the field, and emerging writers took part. Some people of colour expressed their frustration, pain, and rage at the field’s ongoing racism. Some white people engaged thoughtfully, with understanding and respect. But many others responded quite negatively. They were indignant that we dared express rage in rageful ways. 2 Some of them loudly denied the existence of racism in the field, in ways that demonstrated their lack of understanding of how systemic racism operates. For a time, some of them appeared to be policing the Internet posts of politicised black women writers in the genre and attempting to verbally intimidate, berate, and belittle us. A couple of the major editors in the field, perhaps understandably upset at how some of the rage was being expressed, made statements of the ilk that they would never again allow communication from any of those they considered guilty of offence.
    Among the angry people of colour were unpublished and barely published writers. Our field is quite small. There’s only a handful of large professional houses. They currently only publish a handful of people of colour. To their credit, many of them want to publish more of us. But from my perspective, when key representatives of one of the most powerful houses in our genre say that they never again want to hear from people
who could be the future SF/F writers, editors, illustrators, and publicists of colour, and who are the current SF/F readers of colour, that’s a pretty clear expression of both the power and the will to actively keep the genre as white as possible.
    I do not believe I overstate. I do believe that is not how they meant it; they are well-meaning people. But that is how it would have been heard by those who have been implicitly and explicitly, through ignorance or wilfulness, largely rendered invisible for decades. When you’re historically the one with the power relative to another, if you really want to correct the imbalance, you have to be willing to hear pent-up rage and not retaliate. You have to be willing to acknowledge your actions that make you complicit. You have to be willing to apologise and then take visible, effective steps towards righting the imbalance. 3
    Some of the editors who made that type of statement have since been taking a little extra effort to be seen to be supportive of people of colour in the genre; but they have not, to my knowledge, acknowledged why they are doing so. And they have not, to my knowledge, acknowledged fault and apologised. You can’t bring about reconciliation by doing little or nothing. You can’t make change that way. So at some level, perhaps the will really isn’t there. I know some of these editors and I respect the good books they’ve made happen. But at the moment I have no reason to trust them and I do not wish to be published by them.
    I believe it was a clueful white person who coined the phrase “RaceFail ‘09” to signify the more vehemently recalcitrant white voices in the debate. A couple of those voices have adopted the nomenclature “failfandom” as a pejorative to denote people