A while back I went and re read an ancient diary entry of mine. One of the oldest surviving ones I have. I keep thinking about it.

I hate that nothing has changed since then.

It was about Israel. Of course it was. They dominate my life at a crossroads so vanishingly few people can understand. Vanished by them. Vanished by the US through them.

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I made a comment last night talking about how spurious claims of purity policing led to me getting shut down when discussions racism in media, specifically as regards to popular cop comedy Brooklyn 99. That all happened about 6 months ago.

And, as if summoned from the depths of hell by the mere mention of it, lo and be fucking hold, it's happening again as of this evening.

I don't understand why this is considered such a contentious subject. Brooklyn 99 is a fantastic show, and I love it. It's got superlative writing, exceptional acting, and a real sense of conscience about race dynamics.

But it's also a show where cops are sometimes the villains, but always the heroes. And that comes with baggage in a society that already considers the heroism of cops to be so ubiquitous and inherent that even when cops murder children in cold blood, most of them receive paid leave, and get hired by neighboring police precincts.

It's not that B99 doesn't try to talk about the nastiness of police and race. It's that it's a sitcom where police are the heroes. The genre restraints prevent a serious discussion from happening, save in the occasional Very Special Episode. And, often enough, that ommitment to acknowledging the complexity of race and policing is back-seated in favour of a good joke at the expect of an arrested person, of a defence lawyer, of internal affairs.

It's a good show.

It's also a flawed show.

I don't think that's really in question here... And yet, so many people insist that by pointing out and discussing these flaws, I am a monster calling for the end of QPOC on primetime TV.

There's a topic of conversation that has been rolling around my social media feeds, and which is extremely frustrating to me in ways that I have trouble articulating.

There's this persistent notion that you "shouldn't" write about characters with identities you don't share, because you "can't" understand the nuances of their lives. Sometimes, people will say you should only write about such characters if you've done extremely detailed amounts of research, and others will say it is utterly forbidden.

This is endlessly frustrating to me.

From the perspective of almost any of my myriad marginalizations, it puts people like me in a situation where no one will write for or about us except for ourselves. From the perspective of the marginalizations I don't share it, it leaves me without the ability to use my art as a way of expressing alliance and furthering equality. From the perspective of a writer, it just rings of the same censorship people are always trying to put on fiction, this time with a slightly different set of vocabulary.

I want to be able to read about, say, mixed race intersex people, without having to be the one who writes those stories for myself.

Basically, white/cis/hetero/men/whatever get the opportunity to be the audience. The rest of us are expected to be the creators. And we are expected to create only in extremely restrictive, and even separatist fashions.

I have a hard time expressing why, exactly, this line of argument is so frustrating to me. It seems more like a conflux of little things than any one major flaw.

But it's gettign more prominent again, and it's making me absolutely livid.

Basically, let straight white men write about queer poc so that queer poc like myself can take a goddamn break.

That's not mutually exclusive to "celebrate the art of marginalized people" either. But this expectation that marginalized people do all the hard parts...

Well.

It smacks of, "if you don't like white men being the protagonists of games, go make your own game," in progressive paint.