[Peter Pan icon used ironically; alas, Tiger Lily]

I took the first two seasons of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman out of the library, on a whim and because I think Jane Seymour is really really hot and I enjoy looking at her shiny shiny hair. I kind of embarrassingly love it? It reminds me so much of the "benevolent" liberal rubbish I was raised on: "The Song of Hiawatha" and the Just So Stories, being encouraged to dress up as cultures for Halloween because it provided the opportunity for cultural education (so we read a bunch of books and then put on bathrobes and painted our faces and trick-or-treated as geishas. so much side eye, parents), and American Girl dolls (I had the Black one and the Mexicana one, and while I do think it's no bad thing for white girls to grow up playing with dolls of color, there's still something uncomfortably consumptive about the whole scene), and YA Holocaust novels (I had a phase. It was a shameful one).

I'm never quite sure how to feel about that particular kind of rubbish. Because obviously it's wrong; Dr. Quinn is alternatingly making me squirm with happy id satisfaction and go "impure impure impure" while making the sign to avert Nice White Racism. But I also kind of see the logic - I don't like it, but I see it - of incremental education in anti-racism. I feel like Nice White Racism helped render me receptive to Black and Chicana feminisms when I encountered them, which in turn have made me much more willing to try and ditch Nice White Racist stuff like the Tone Argument, or the fantasy of the White Savior (tho I apparently still kind of fetishize the Barbarian Lover; sexuality forms around kyriarchy same as anything else). To some degree, I maybe do it with my students, in that I deliberately never let myself be judgmental of racist ideas they communicate, because I want to keep them on my side, where I feel like I can still maybe have some effect. I try to set up easy paths for them: last semester, I started with "There was racism in the past and it was bad," which seems to be pretty easy to get people signed on to, and then did "History still impacts us now," and only then pulled the two moves together into "racism still impacts us now and it still is bad."

But at the same time, while I find nostalgic pleasure in some Nice White Racist stuff, I would feel really weird about giving it to a kid, or engaging with even fannish people about it that I didn't already know were committed to anti-racism. And I definitely don't plan on letting my own hypothetical children do cross-cultural Halloween dress-up.