In my last SFWA post I linked off to N.K. Jemisin’s excellent Continuum GoH speech, and now that I’m home from work tonight I see rumblings that this has caused one of the most repellent people in the SF/F genre to shoot off his mouth again. What drives his hateful spewings over the top this time is that he apparently put them out onto the SFWA authors’ Twitter feed, in particular.
Trigger warning on all of these links: repugnant racism in the quotes being shared.
Jim Hines addresses the matter here.
Foz Meadows has an eloquent and passionate response over here.
Amal El-Mohtar calls for Beale/Day’s expulsion from SFWA here.
As I have posted in previous posts, I’m not in SFWA and I’m not likely to be any time in the immediate future. So I can’t add my voice to El-Mohtar’s to call for his expulsion.
But I can say this. The man can have any opinion he likes, and yes, free speech means he gets to say it on his own platforms. But free speech also means that the rest of us get to say that the message he’s trying to vomit forth has no place in a civilized society. That it has no place in the company of writers who are trying to look forward, not back, and who are trying to embrace all voices, not just those of white males.
The rest of us get to say that no, that crap is not okay.
Y’all pardon me, I’m going to go buy every single N.K. Jemisin title I don’t have in my ebook collection yet now.
ETA: And speaking of voting with your wallet, John Scalzi has an excellent suggestion for how to support diversity in SF/F right over here.
ETA #2: Dara’s declared that Mr. Beale is in fact a white supremacist. I agree. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a goddamn duck.