Guest Post: Solace Ames on Requires Hate/Winterfox

Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion in the SFF community about the revelation that blogger Requires Hate and LJ user winterfox are aliases of Campbell-nominated author Benjanun Sriduangkaew. I haven’t written about this myself, largely because I haven’t felt my opinions would contribute anything new to the conversation, which is currently dominated – unhelpfully, I believe, given the context – by white people in general and white women in particular. After reading this excellent piece on the topic by @sunita_p, I made the decision that the best thing I could do, rather than write a response myself, was to offer my blogspace as a platform to any POC writers who wished, either anonymously or under their own names, to speak to my usual audience, in order to signal boost their side of the discussion. This offer still stands to anyone else who would like to be heard; feel free to contact me either via email (philippa dot meadows at gmail dot com) or through social media.

The following piece is from writer Solace Ames, who has given permission for it to appear with attribution.

*

A Perspective on Requires Hate

I’m Solace Ames, a WoC (Japanese-American) writer of multicultural romance, including urban fantasy romance under a different pen name. I use pen names, but I’ve always been upfront about my ethnicity, my priorities, where I come from and where I am. I’ve done videos on Youtube. I follow a lot of SFF discussion and have ambitions of writing it. I volunteer with Crossed Genres. I’ve been around on LJ when it was active, then moved to Tumblr. I’ve moved in some of the same internet groups as RequiresHate/Winterfox and read her blog. Our contact has been minimal and irregular. I’ve butted heads with her once that I know of, and possibly other times when she was under different pseudonyms. She’s supportively tweeted me on one occasion, and I’ve done the same for her a couple times, but I wouldn’t call her either a friend or an enemy, or say that she’s abused me.

I’ve watched her be very abusive to others, and I’ve spoken up about it before. The last straw, for me, was her apology. She apologized to only three people by name: Cindy Pon, Saladin Ahmed and N.K. Jemisin. Not surprisingly, those are the three most famous and influential writers of color in SFF that she’s attacked. It’s rather galling that there’s not another word to the many other writers of color that she’s attacked that don’t happen to be so influential in her field. They’re just a nameless mass she’s vaguely wronged. I respected her, in a measured and arm’s-length way, before the disclosure of her “nice” alternate personality and that apology. Now I don’t.

I have a lot of problems with the white supporters of RH who seem to be defending her in a knee-jerk way, and silencing the many people of color she’s attacked in what seems now to be a very calculated “there can be only ONE and that’s ME” literary strategy.

I also have a lot of her problems with her attackers. Not all of them. There are people with very real grudges. There’s also a huge group of racist white women from fandom who strategize together on anon communities (like faux-progressive 4chans) who magnify her abilities, think she’s Satan, and try whatever it takes to try to bring her down, including pretending to be WoC. That’s the reason I established I was who I really said I was in the beginning.

Some people are after her because she gave their favorite writer a bad review. In many cases, especially for the most popular writers, those were deservedly bad reviews. And they were the kind of reviews pointing out basic flaws that a lot of critics are too scared to make. I’ll admit to fist-pumping after reading quite a few of them.

I hope the takeaway from all this is for writers of color to support each other in more organized ways. Criticize each other, YES, because a healthy critical culture helps everyone, but we need to stick together in the face of our overwhelming disadvantages. And I hope white people will think twice about using PoC pain to act out their psychodramas and engage in internet battles with us as the footballs, although that probably won’t happen, because it’s a dynamic that pre-existed RH. I still hold out hope. I’m not interested in engaging in any debate or discussion about this where we’re the helpless voiceless victims to be defended… by either side.

Lastly, I think it’s up to everyone individually to decide whether to read a writer who displays such objectionable behavior. Everyone has different places where they draw the line. A lot of writers are self-centered narcissistic assholes, but still good writers. I’ll probably read her story at some point, because I’ve heard it’s good. But I’m glad all this stuff is coming out so that people have more information to make their own decisions according to their own lines.

*

ETA 12/11/14 – At the request of the poster, comments are now closed on this post. Solace has asked that anyone wanting to discuss the issue further do so at Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s blog, here.