Ah, yes. This person.
Some of the best quotes from the "George" book, courtesy of a Tumblr post I found a while ago.
And he also chimped out when some kid did a letter to the author assignment for him, so decided to put the literal child on blast for making him do "labor" somehow.
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I posted about his second book in the Deaf Community thread a while back. Crossposting that here now.
(There were several chapters focusing on how a character was super racist for asking another character for their recipe for sweet potato pie.)
Oh my God, I think I actually ran across that thread somewhere on here! I remember seeing that Letters to the Author bullshit and wondering what sort of idiot gets into writing kid-lit and throws a fit when letters get sent to them- especially when they're writing about something so ~*
super important and necessary*~. It comes with the territory, and if you're so opposed to it, work something out with your publisher to establish to teachers/whoever that you're not responding to letters. (I also seriously, aggressively hate it when grown adults use baby-words like "yucky" and "icky" to describe discomfort. Especially when that adult is a grown man larping at being agender or whatever, I don't even know if he's trans or if he claims to be nonbinary.)
And yeah, I read pieces of that
You Don't Know Everything, Jilly P! book and it was a
fucking nightmare. Jilly gets treated like the world's dumbest, most ignorant bitch for
daring to suggest that Derek was misinterpreting the situation when he claimed that someone staring at him in a restaurant was "ableist and racist", because he's black and deaf. Because, you know, obviously it
is racism and ableism, and Jilly just doesn't
get that because she's white and not disabled. And because this is written by an SJW, she gets to eat all the crow and the poor, black, deaf boy is elevated as the True Voice of Equality and Education.
This whole goddamn book was like a Tumblrina's fantasy:
Humiliating Educating the poor, ignorant, privileged fools of the world and smugly assuming that being offended automatically makes you right. And if that wasn't enough, the self-righteous, smug, self-abusing white/hearing apologetics author's note at the end made me want to yeet the book into the fucking sun. I actually have a copy of it in my computer because I was considering doing a formal review of the book a while back, but fuck it.
I don't believe this is the author's note in its entirety- iirc it was much longer- and I don't recall if the bolded parts were my emphasis or Gino's, but I think what I have here is enough to explain my desire to yeet with great prejudice:
Thank you for honoring me with your time, both to read Jilly’s story and now to read a bit more context that underlies it. I believe that books and stories are tools for talking about contemporary issues and that young readers need and deserve these tools just as much as the rest of us. As Aunt Alicia said, nothing changes if we don’t talk.
I am white. I’m more Italian than anything else, but my ancestors come from throughout Western Europe. I was raised on Staten Island, NY, on the unceded land of the Lenapes and currently live in Oakland, California, home of the Muwekma Ohlone people. I have a college degree, U.S. citizenship, and English is my first and primary language.
It is impossible to see my privilege myself. The nature of privilege is that it feels “normal”. It is only in conversation with others, whether by reading and reflecting on their work or by talking with them directly, that I am able to see the differences between what we have and how we are treated. I wouldn’t know about racism if not for the work and thoughtfulness of many Black and other People of Color in my life and in the world.
I want to name that you have just read another story that centers on a white hearing main character. Readers of Color and Deaf readers, particularly Black Deaf readers, I appreciate your patience as I bring this story aimed at white folks into the world. I hope that you will forgive me killing two Black youth on the page, and injuring another, for the edification of my white main character. I hope that my choices are worthy of forgiveness.
[...] Like so many American children whose grandparents spoke a language other than English, I only knew a few dozen signs as a kid and communicated with my grandparents without much language. It wasn’t until I started taking American Sign Language classes in college that I began to sign conversationally, and still, my skills are shaky.
[…] While a handful of signs are mentioned in this book, none is meant to be a complete description. That is, please don’t try to figure out how to make these signs from my words. Instead, visit an online American Sign Language dictionary like (link). And if you really want to learn sign, it’s much more valuable to take classes and interact with fluent signers than to study from a website. The grammar of ASL is very different from English, so if you try to translate sentences word-for-word, you might not make much sense.
Note that the “sign” Jilly created for Emma improperly blends two ways name signs can be formed and should not be used. And thanks to Deaf reader Ayisha Knight-Shaw for gifting Derek with a name-sign. (You didn’t think I was going to make up a name-sign for him, did you?) For a video of Derek’s name-sign and more information on Deaf culture, visit (link).
Thanks again for reading.
This fucker's going out for an award: Not only does his apologize for being white and having a white main character that has to be educated by a black deaf one (and that they- gasp-
killed and injured three characters of color); not only does he smugly reassure us that he would
never step out of line by making up a name-sign for Derek without asking a real Deaf person; but he also makes a point of saying that Staten Island, NY is the "unceded land" of the Lenapes and Oakland, CA belongs to the Muwekma Ohlone. Like, you have to be kidding me: I don't think I've ever seen anyone SJW so hard that they actually apologize for where they fucking
live.
This person should not be allowed within a mile of any child, and he shouldn't be writing anything that they might read and internalize. Any kid that takes this shit seriously is going to end up
so fucked up in the head.