Reasons to Care about RaceFail

A link, including rydra_wong's context for it:

Niall Harrison in Torque Control: Reasons to care about Racefail (Note: Torque Control is the blog of the editorial staff of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. Niall is editor of Vector and also senior reviews editor for Strange Horizons.)

FYI: I've seen posts or comments from various off-LJ people (including Mary Anne Mohanraj, Cherie Priest, and Jeff VanderMeer) saying that they've only just become aware of the Fail. So I think it's genuinely taking some time for the details to circulate. Hopefully the silence will lessen as they do.

And an excerpt:

Saying all of this out loud strikes me as justification enough for posting here; but there are other reasons, too. One is the issue of relevance. Racefail has been happening at the intersection of multiple sf-related communities—which fact, I don't doubt, has contributed to some of the frustration and miscommunication—and it's true that the majority of participants have been US-based. But I've now bumped up against the idea that essentially it’s none of British fandom's business a couple of times. In the comments to one (friendslocked) post yesterday, I found myself arguing against the perceptions that Racefail involved only a small subset of fans, or that it was a debate within a clique, or that it's not as though there are people clamouring at the gates of UK fandom and feeling not included. (To be fair, in the same discussion there was also the perception, or more accurately the despair, that fandom was tearing itself slowly and painfully to pieces.) I think all of these perceptions are mistaken; I think this discussion is an elephant in the room relevant to all fans, writers, and readers of science fiction.

ETA: Part of the above-linked post has been revised, following a post and thread on ithiliana's journal.