Homesick, passive-aggressive teen girl. Oh, joy.

So, we've got an exchange student from Taiwan living with us for the summer to work on her English before starting school in the fall.  She's got classes this summer, plus living with an English speaking family (us).  Last two weeks, she's been often saying she was sick and staying home from school.  This is suspicious since we haven't seen any symptoms except a runny nose and sleeping a lot.

What's probably been happening: she's been staying up all night IMing her friends back home, and sleeping during the daytime.  So now, not only does her computer stay out in the living room, but I'm going to be disabling wireless in the house when I go to bed.

Mom chose not to directly tell her we know she's almost certainly been lying and staying up late IMing, but she's not stupid.  Nor was she happy about having to leave her computer out in the living room, and she wasn't getting ready for bed when Mom knocked on her door at bedtime, so she may be thinking of coming out here after the household is asleep.  Hence disabling wireless.  But she didn't directly try to challenge anything.

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So, I didn't post anything about/during Racefail '09 because I'm pretty much generic whitebread middle-class American and had nothing to say on the subject that other people weren't saying far more eloquently and didn't want to add to the signal/noise ratio. Also because I'm lazy and don't like conflict.

But you know what? Racism and productive/constructive ways to deal with it and (as much as possible) prevent it are ordinary, everyday situations that should be thought about constantly, not just whenever it happens to blow up. That way, hopefully, we can make things better instead of worse. I still don't have much to say on the subject that others haven't said better, but I do have a rec: Go read the Spock/Uhura Racefail Prevention Post. It's concise, it's positive, and it's got good advice for how to talk and think about issues of race particularly in the fannish realm but also in general.  With links you can follow which lead to lots of other places where racism in life and in fandom are discussed in helpful ways.

For those of you who don't know, in the new Star Trek movie Spock and Uhura (a character of color) have a romantic relationship. This has led to a whole lot of fiction and fan attention for Uhura and to the creation of a community dedicated to the pairing. Within two months of its creation, spock_uhura has had at least one major incident of racefail.  The mods then publicly apologized on behalf of the community to the person who'd gotten attacked, put together a post on how to prevent such things from happening again (and then on how to respond appropriately when they inevitably do), and generally serve as an example of how to be responsible human beings.

I swear.  If the anti-racism training they'd given us in school had been even 1/4 as sane and reasonable and reality-based as the stuff you can learn through fandom ...