Saturday, August 29, 2015

Piling on Sara A. Hoyt

A couple of days ago, I got upset with author Sarah A. Hoyt for referring to her critics as "cock-suckers". Although this is far from the worst form of homophobia, and although many people, possibly including Ms. Hoyt, use the expression without thinking about its homophobic connotations, this kind of thing really pisses me off.

Over the past few days, Ms. Hoyt has been savaged on twitter for being a racist, too. Specifically, she has been criticized for using the term "Chicom":




I'll admit to being tempted to pile on with this criticism; Ms. Hoyt is not my favorite person right now. But when I looked into what she actually had written, I was forced to admit that she was being very harshly treated. For if you look at what she actually wrote, she doesn't accuse anyone of being a "Chicom". And if, like me, you have no idea what "Chicom" means and look it up on the web, it is not clear it is even derogatory, let alone racist.

Here is what Hoyt wrote on her own blog:
Yes, yes Three Body Problem.  Well, I didn’t find it worth it, but I bet you half the people who voted for it voted either under the illusion they were favoring Chicoms OR as a slam against the puppies.
It should be obvious from this that she is not calling the author of Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, or the translator, Ken Liu, a "Chicom". She in fact says that half of the voters incorrectly thought that they were supporting Chicoms. Perhaps by this she means that they incorrectly thought that the author and/or translator were Chicoms, although I am not convinced of this (more on this below). But she certainly doesn't call either of the Liu's a Chicom. In fact, she does not disparage them at all directly; the most she does is disparage them indirectly by implying that they would not have won if not for bias (anti-puppy or pro-Communist China) on the part of the Hugo voters.

What does Chicom mean anyway? I had never heard the term before. If you google the term, the first three hits define it as simply short for "Chinese Communist" (for example, The Urban Dictionary, The Free Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster). There is no mention of the term even being derogatory, let alone racist. It is only when you get to Dictionary.com that you find this:
noun
  1. Slang: Disparaging. A contemptuous term used to refer to a Communist Chinese.
So I think it is fair to say that a reasonable person could think the term was not derogatory, and certainly could be forgiven for not knowing that it is sometimes viewed as derogatory. But racist? There is nothing racist about referring negatively to a group that has a history of appalling behavior. Roughly 1 million people were killed during the early land reforms under Mao not long after coming to power, with another million killed as part of efforts to suppress counterrevolutionary tendencies. Millions more were killed for resisting the Great Leap Forward with another 45 million dying of the resulting starvation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Another million appear to have died during the Cultural Revolution form the mid 1960s to mid 1970s. The Chinese Communist party has been one of the nastiest regimes and it deserves our condemnation. One is not a racist for doing so.

A literal reading of what Hoyt wrote, combined with a literal interpretation of the term itself, should be enough to vindicate Hoyt. If more is needed, it should also be noted that Three Body Problem itself presents a brutal and terrifying account of life during the Cultural Revolution. As a result of this brutality, one of the main characters is driven to betray the human species. That is, the book itself is very critical of the Chinese Communist party. As a result, I think Hoyt's statement, which disparages the Hugo voters, is explicitly ironic.

Moreover, I think Hoyt is drawing a parallel here between Hugo voters and the large number of Western intellectuals who gave their support to Communist China despite evidence of atrocities. There is no shortage of people guilty of this sin. Perhaps the best known, and most notable, concerns the China scholar Joseph Needham, whose Science and Civilisation in China forms the basis for much English language scholarship on China even today. In spite of all the evidence, Needham was supportive of the Communist regime in China, even to the point of accusing the USA of using biological weapon against China and North Korea, until the 1970s. That is, Hoyt is likening support of some Hugo voters for the book to the support some western intellectuals offered the Chinese Communist Party.

In sum, I do not think Sarah Hoyt is guilty of racism here. That is not to say she is not guilty of it elsewhere, or that she hasn't done other things worthy of opprobrium (see above). Perhaps Tempest Bradford's tweet alludes to other behaviors I am not aware of (if so, I hope someone will write to tell me of them).

What I think we are seeing here is the all too common phenomenon by which "the mob" identifies a target, looks for any scent of blood in the water, and then goes into attack mode independently of whether or not the attacks are justified. I suspect many of them did not look at what Hoyt wrote, and that many others did but did not care as they were prepared to use any excuse to attack someone that they dislike. This is appalling behavior, and is one of the reasons why I am being forced to concede that some of the Puppies complaints about SFF fandom are correct.

EDITED 08/30/2015 TO ADD: Indeed, in Hoyt's later posts, she states explicitly that her point was to draw a parallel between people who voted for Three Body Problem and the western intellectuals who professed support for Chinese communism:

I wasn’t making FUN of Chicom. I was pointing out that people like Chu and Kowal and their camp followers just might be stupid enough to think Chicoms are cool and quite capable of voting for a book VOX DAY RECOMMENDED because they thought it was a paean to Chicoms.
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