caffeine diary

Following links from IBARW posts, I ended up looking at James Loewen's Sundown Towns project (there's an associated book):

From Maine to California, thousands of communities kept out African Americans (or sometimes Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, etc.) by force, law, or custom. These communities are sometimes called "sundown towns" because some of them posted signs at their city limits reading, typically, "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Go Down On You In ___." Some towns are still all white on purpose. Their chilling stories have been joined more recently by the many elite (and some not so elite) suburbs like Grosse Pointe, MI, or Edina, MN, that have excluded nonwhites by "kinder gentler means." When I began this research, I expected to find about 10 sundown towns in Illinois (my home state) and perhaps 50 across the country. Instead, I have found more than 440 in Illinois and thousands across the United States. This is their story; it is the first book ever written on the topic.

There's a list of suspected Sundown Towns on the site and -- sadly unsurprisingly -- the town I lived in for the last six months -- and its nearest neighbor; we lived right on the border -- are on the list. They're probably not still Sundown Towns, but as recently as twenty years ago, within my lifetime, there are anecdotes about African Americans being driven out of town.

But the thing is, besides my absurd and awesome gladness to be back in an urban area, that this doesn't terrify me. It sickens me, and and it saddens me, but it doesn't terrify me to think about doing the grocery shopping in, driving in, fetching the mail in, taking a walk in, just LIVING IN, Anytown Kansas. Because I'm white. And I have privilege.

[IBARW caveat: I'm a white cisgendered able-bodied lesbian USian English-speaking middle-class college-educated Christian]

[Today: links to and discussions of articles about trans* PoC in the U.S. and Thailand, with bonus musings on identity, visibility, alliance, and privilege ( are all under the LJ cut )

Drabbles-on-demand (still working on last week's, too.)

Choose a character from the list! Choose a pairing for hir if desired! Give a prompt word. And go. [In which I likely accidentally spell many characters' names wrong.]

( cut for the pretties )

As last year, I am pretty sure that I can write all these characters, but am not making any promises about when fic will get done.

As always, het, boyslash, girlslash, threesomes, and gen, as well as crossovers, are perfectly acceptable requests.

I will comment on the drabbleset next; first I wanted to reexamine this, since I've been meaning to do since I wrote it. The pieces work in a weird kind of tandem for me. This piece is very internal, because Ducky is very internal, because even in the Diaries-series, Ducky is the most self-reflective character and so much of his arc happens inside his own brain. "Nine Rules" is an external piece, not reflective at all, very physical in ways that I'll talk about more when I discuss that. "Nine Rules" is about characters I don't feel especially resonant, at least not in surface ways; none of them are characters I write very often or feel very confident about writing. "Reflections" on the other hand is about a character I identify with a great deal and always have. "Nine Rules" is not about race; only one of the nine drabbles even mentions race as an explicit issue. This piece is all about race; writing a canonically white character as black and not talking in detail about race would be counterproductive.

With that in mind, line-by-line commentary. This will spoil through CA Diaries book 15.

( reflections on reflections on my reflection )

Title: "Reflections/on my reflection"
Fandom: California Diaries
Featured character: Ducky.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Ann M. Martin owns the copyright and Scholastic owns Ann; Peter Lerangis wrote him, and I just love him way too much.
Notes: A thought experiment in sympathy with International Blog Against Racism Week. And yes, I will write the drabbles eventually. But now it's way past bedtime.
Summary: What if Ducky were black? or Ducky thinks about race.
Wordcount: 706

( you look in the mirror and you see someone who is: )