on being colourblind

Back in the dark ages when I was a poor student, I somehow ended up going out for dinner in London with a bunch of other students and some people who worked in a casino. At the end of the dinner, the guy who was somehow in charge divvied up the bill and told us how much everybody owed. It was scary, because I'd ordered what I could afford and didn't have much in my purse at the time. (Student behaviour would have been that eveyone paid for what they'd had.)

I was reminded of this by a year-old comment I found while following a bunch of links this morning.

...your ability (and mine) to say "it shouldn't be that way, so I'll behave as if it isn't" is the *definition* of privilege. Deciding that we'll just treat everyone as if they had privileges *that they don't get* doesn't end in equality, it never does no matter how much we try it. It leads to racism. Foolishly, I didn't note who said this, but she said it very well.

When you have a healthy income, treating income-free students as your exact equals isn't exactly the right way to go. When you have the advantages of being white (and in my case, middle class and well educated and well off too), treating not-white people as exact equals isn't exactly the right way to go. It's an assumption with far too many flaws.

My apologies to any PoCs reading this - the analogy isn't very good, but it makes sense in my head.

Something Like August

It's my Something Like August day today, so here is fic.

I haven't entirely forgotten that I signed up for the wtf27 challenge. One of the prompts is 'Fuck or die'. Not one of my favourite notions, but I started thinking about it, and very soon got a notion. Which was crack for, oh, five minutes at most. The resultant story came out of a lot of stuff I gathered by reading here, there and everywhere. As you'll figure from the prompt, there are dub-con issues, if you don't like them, you may not want to read.

( The White Room )

That's part one. More tomorrow.

The story only got to an end yesterday, and hasn't been beta'd, so if anything seems out of whack or unclear please let me know. Does the conversational style work for you, etc. Also, I'd be very interested in discussing it, so if anything occurs to you, today or tomorrow or Wednesday, let's get to it!