Mercedes Lackey Removed from the Nebula Conference

SFWA removed Mercedes Lackey from this weekend’s Nebula Conference less than 24 hours after celebrating her selection as a Grand Master during the Nebula Awards ceremony. The reason given is that she “used a racial slur” while on a panel.  

SFWA explained the action in a “Statement on Removal of Mercedes Lackey from the Nebula Conference”.

Dear Nebula Conference Participants and SFWA Members,

We learned yesterday that while participating in the “Romancing Sci-Fi & Fantasy” panel, Mercedes Lackey used a racial slur. First, we apologize to our attendees and the other panelists who were subjected to that slur. We’ve disabled access to the panel to avoid any additional harm being caused.

Second, we are immediately removing Mercedes Lackey from the conference and the additional panels she was scheduled for, in accordance with SFWA’s Moderation Policy. The use of a racial slur violates the instruction to “Respect all cultures and communities. Do not make derogatory or offensive statements even as a joke.” That applies to everyone in a SFWA space, at all levels of their career.

Third, we will be discussing with the other panelists for “Romancing Sci-Fi & Fantasy” how they would prefer we proceed when they are able and comfortable in doing so. We will be offering to edit out the offensive portion of the panel or hold the panel again at a later date, inviting back the other three panelists and moderator to again take part. We will respect their wishes on how to handle this issue while also sharing the invaluable expertise they offered during the discussion. 

Thank you to our conference attendees and panelists who reported the use of the slur. We appreciate being alerted to it right away, so we could investigate and come to this decision as swiftly as possible.

The SFWA Board of Directors

The circumstances and the specific slur are discussed by Jen Brown in a Twitter thread that starts here.

What was said is stated in the Twitter thread.

This is the second time an issue has come up since Lackey was announced as a Grand Master last fall. Previously, SFWA asked Lackey to “clarify a past statement on writing trans characters”.

187 thoughts on “Mercedes Lackey Removed from the Nebula Conference

  1. Removed as in not in any other programming this conference? Or removed as in being told not to enter any conference spaces or events?

  2. SIGH

    I wonder when people will learn that some things just shouldn’t be said. I learned that on the playground more than fifty years ago.

  3. Honestly, I think the moderator slipped up badly there. A quick, “I think you meant to say ‘person of color'” would have given Lackey a chance to realise what she’d said, apologise, and restate whatever she was saying without the offending word.

    I hope it was just a vocabulary slip, and not indicative of anything deeper than that.

  4. Nancy Sauer: I would think that the phrase “Second, we are immediately removing Mercedes Lackey from the conference and the additional panels she was scheduled for…” means BOTH taken off programming and restricted from the conference space. The linked Moderation Policy does include the latter as an option.

  5. Oh, thank you. I clicked over to the statement on the website but had missed the moderation policy itself.

  6. I can’t be the only person who wonders what exactly she said? Surely it wasn’t the N word? One of the comments above would seem to imply that…

  7. I read a couple of threads about this last night. No name was given (because people were afraid of a swarm of defenders). But the first initial was given, and I guessed.

    And there are defenders saying it was blown out of proportion, etc. Sure, dude. Sure. Writers should be better about picking words.

  8. So, you gotta wonder what happened to make this happen. Even most racists these days (at least those in educated communities) know to watch their tongue in public. And I admit, now I feel uncomfortable reading Lackey’s work. What subliminal messages have I been missing?

  9. I have ongoing issues with Lackey platforming Sad Puppies in her anthologies, so I’m not surprised.

    It may be time for a conversation about how we can honor emerita without necessarily platforming them.

  10. Lanodantheon: Thanks — I have updated the post with that information to make it more clear.

  11. Larry Dixon, Mercedes Lackey’s husband, has tweeted a thread in response. Begins here.

    Dixon says he is banned, too:

    It appears I won’t be on the Collaborations panel at the #Nebulas because I awoke to find myself banned from the conference for something I didn’t say, on a panel I wasn’t on.

    I’m not that hard to reach, am I?

  12. Dixon is no doubt outraged by his spouse’s removal from the conference, but defending her use of the term by citing the NAACP is cringeworthy. The group chose its name 113 years ago. Nobody thinks this makes the word she said acceptable in 2022.

    He and others are citing her age as a reason this is not fair, but if she’s sharp enough at 71 to be on panels (and she is), she can face the consequences of her words like anybody else.

    Personally if I had the choice of facing criticism for my comments or seeing my ardent defenders suggest I’m decrepit, I’d choose the former.

  13. Hoa, this was good to know. The word is still in use in Swedish news reporting, even if complaints have been made, but I had missed that it taken the effect of a slur in US. Not that I would have used it anyhow, but I most likely wouldn’t have reacted to hearing it before this.

  14. In Lackey’s youth (she was born in 1950) the term “colored” had already been replaced as the “polite term” by “Negro.” By the time she was 18, “Negro” had been replaced by “black” and “African-American” (sometimes “Afro-American” in those days). She has had over fifty years, much of it spent writing professionally, to learn that the term her grandparents thought was polite was no longer considered appropriate.

  15. I was a big fan of her selection as Damon Knight Memorial Grandmaster. This situation must suck for her and her husband.

    But I think the best way for her to acknowledge that the word is hurtful and caused genuine offense would be to apologize and accept the SFWA’s decision.

    This is easy for me to say when I’m not the one feeling like my good name is under attack. But as I’ve told my sons, if you say something that’s perceived as hurtful or discriminatory, you have to try and set aside defensiveness and really listen to what people are saying about how it made them feel.

  16. SFWA, like so much of the world, has gone absolutely bat-shit crazy. There is not a person alive who has not said, done, or written something at sometime that someone else took offense to. Nobody is or ever has been guaranteed the right to not be offended. On the other hand, we are (in this country, at least) guaranteed the right to free speech.

    Following the current cancel culture dogma to its logical conclusion, everyone should be forever barred from the opportunity to be heard by others or interact with anyone in any way – an arrant absurdity. What ticks off one person delights another.

    If Larry Dixon was indeed banned from the conference simply for being the spouse of an alleged offender, I don’t even have words to express my contempt for whatever SFWA officials made these moronic decisions.

  17. Pingback: Mercedes Lackey Cancelled - Death Is Bad

  18. On the other hand, we are (in this country, at least) guaranteed the right to free speech.

    It’s amazing how many times people trot this argument out in situations that have nothing to do with the government infringing upon speech. If you’re going to celebrate the First Amendment show an understanding of what it actually protects.

  19. I do not think Larry Dixon is helping.

    If he’s right and the goal of some people involved is to hurt her, he’s handing them a delicious three course meal of proof it worked. Why would that discourage them?

    And in the mean time he’s savagely attacking people who have every right to be hurt by what he wrongly considers a “non-issue”.

    Not good.

  20. Delany has posted in a couple of social-media threads I’ve followed, and he doesn’t seem offended. In one public thread, he says “”Colored ladies,” was what my aunts Bessie and Sadie referred to themselves as, and I favored “black”(with a small B, because because of my experiences in ’68, with the activists who changed the country from “Negro” to Dr. Du Bois’s preferred term).”

    As to when terms went out of date, it’s somewhat geographical, on top of everything else.

    Furthermore — we’re talking writers talking to writers here; using the term current at the time, a time both she and Delany will remember well, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do when trying to convey feelings and attitudes.

    I personally was not aware that “colored” was a racist slur; I thought it was merely out of date, not the current preferred form. (In contrast, the unmentionable “n word” was always a racial slur, even when it was in common use.)

  21. Personally, I did not realize this term is considered a racial slur. I know it isn’t the preferred term but regarded it as being more outdated than offensive.

  22. Total: If SFWA explains why Dixon was removed, I will report it. At the moment, I only know he was because of his own tweets.

  23. Re: why didn’t the moderator call it out at the time and deal with it then — it’s possible that it didn’t register for the moderator in real-time. I was watching the panel live and it didn’t register for me, though I may have been distracted by boggling at her mispronunciation of Delaney’s name and rambling digression about how there was some other Samuel Delaney who was different from the Samuel Delaney she was talking about, which was the general context in which the word was said.

    You don’t use a word casually like that if it isn’t a word you’re accustomed to using. There are contexts and words where that sort of slip might be honest ignorance or unfamiliarity with recent shifts in usage, but that’s hard to buy in this case.

    And the suggestion that Dixon makes in his twitter thread that ML is a poor, powerless, nobody of a writer being maliciously targeted is classic DARVO. But of course the ML fan brigade will close ranks and absolve the two of them of any flaws…which is one of the ways you end up being out of touch with the behavioral standards of the community you claim to be part of.

    There are several sff writers who are highly respected by people I like and hang out with, but whom I have long had grave reservations about. But you know? You don’t yuck other people’s yum, so I don’t tend to offer opinions on such people out of the blue. But ML is one of them.

  24. @Steve Stanley
    Free speech limits the government. It doesn’t limit businesses and organizations. It’s the First Amendment. What businesses and organizations have are Terms of Service and Codes of Conduct, and you agree to them if you want to use their service or join their group.
    Also there’s no such thing as “cancel culture”. That’s a political term used by one side to complain about the consequences of its own actions.

  25. So, while praising a writer of color, Lackey referred to him by the adjective form of that description rather than the prepositional phrase.

    I’m kind of shocked that the SFWA would put out a press release that baldly says “Mercedes Lackey used a racial slur” for a situation like this. That honestly feels borderline-defamatory to me. The actual situation is 100% different from what that press release let me to expect.

    And, that’s enough to ban her spouse from the convention? Unless there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes, this feels like an insane level of overreaction.

  26. rcade says It’s amazing how many times people trot this argument out in situations that have nothing to do with the government infringing upon speech. If you’re going to celebrate the First Amendment show an understanding of what it actually protects.

    Having had the honor of assisting someone from Somalia getting ready to become a US citizen, I’m amused and yes often disgusted how little most of us know about how our own system of government actually works and what the Constitution actually means.

  27. “Free speech limits the government. It doesn’t limit businesses and organizations”

    The First Amendment applies the right of free speech in the United States to the government. There are other countries in the world where the free speech discussion and implementation is different. The right of free speech itself is much older than the First Amendment and that Amendment is not the only way to put it into action.

  28. Delany gets to be gracious on his own behalf. That doesn’t constitute his words speaking for anyone else.

  29. Add me to the white people shocked to find that referring to people as “colored” is now a racial slur, which to my mind would equate it with the n word. That said, I would think that anyone using the term now is very old (older than Lackey). It was the preferred polite term in my mother’s family (Southern Ohio and Northern Kentucky) well into the 80s.

    I didn’t watch the Nebulas so I don’t know if there is context in her favor or not. I can’t see myself ever using that particular term but I’m glad to know that it’s definition has shifted so much from my childhood.

  30. I’m sorry, but I disagree with SFWA’s decision. I, personally, have never heard “colored” referred to as a slur. It is most certainly far, far out of date, just as “negro” is (and before anyone jumps on me, ML King referred to “negros”).

    Had it been me, I would have said black, or African-American*. But this level of response is more than was called for, IMO.

    I’ve recently seen it pointed out that African-American could refer to anyone white from, say, South Africa who was now an American citizen (not to bring up any billionaires).

  31. @Total
    SFWA is a US organization and the Nebula awards banquet is in the US. Other countries’ laws don’t apply to this. But maybe you didn’t realize.

  32. mark: and before anyone jumps on me, ML King referred to “negros”

    The last time he did so was 54 years ago. Surely you’re not claiming his use of it then means it is okay to use now.

    As far as you not being aware that the usage of “colored person” has also been considered inappropriate for decades… well, I would be ashamed to publicly admit to such ignorance, but you do you.

  33. SFWA is a US organization and the Nebula awards banquet is in the US. Other countries’ laws don’t apply to this. But maybe you didn’t realize

    I understood this years Nebulas to be entirely online with, I would guess, people accessing the platform from around the world. I wouldn’t be too sure which laws apply in that situation.

    But, in any case, I was speaking more generally because I get annoyed when people conflate “free speech” and the “first amendment.” And note that, even in the United States, the right to free speech was seen to exist before the Constitution was written, so even here, you want to be careful about using the two interchangeably.

    (Oh, and on the “colored” as a slur — it’s been long enough that it was a (supposedly to be immediately recognizable) plot point in “Ocean’s Eleven” back in 2001, so I think people protest too much).

  34. From the OED: “b. Denoting a member of any dark-skinned group of peoples, esp. a person of sub-Saharan African or (in Britain) South Asian origin or descent; in earliest use with reference to South America. Now usually considered offensive.”

    I was taught in early childhood that it was a word I might hear older people like my grandparents use, but I mustn’t say as it was not considered polite any longer.

  35. Merriam-Webster is similar:
    3a dated, usually offensive, see usage paragraph below : of a race (see race entry 1 sense 1a) other than white especially : black entry 1 sense 2
    b dated, usually offensive, see usage paragraph below : of mixed race (see race entry 1 sense 1a)
    4 dated, usually offensive, see usage paragraph below : of or relating to persons of races (see race entry 1 sense 1a) other than white or to persons of mixed race

    Usage of Colored

    Adjective

    The adjective meanings of colored relating to race were formerly in common and widespread use well into the 20th century, although attitudes toward them had changed by the 1960s. In most nonhistorical contexts, these uses of colored are now considered unacceptable; the terms Black and African American are preferred. The adjective colored remains in the full name of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), a civil rights organization founded in the early 20th century. The use of colored in this name is not regarded as offensive. The adjective colored is also occasionally still used in self-reference by Black people, but its use by others is offensive.
    Usage of Colored

    Noun

    The noun colored was formerly in common and widespread use well into the 20th century, although attitudes toward it had changed by the 1960s. In most nonhistorical contexts, this use of colored is now considered unacceptable.

  36. From Larry Dixon, in his own Twitter thread:
    “So, whoever you are that grabbed @SFWA by the balls & made them your bitch, wow, what a winner you are. You screwed all Neb attendees out of an honored panelist, made SFWA look like intolerant reactionary jerks, & made an elderly woman cry under one day after recognizing her.”

    Wow. What a classic example of weaponizing White Women’s Tears.

  37. Hi. White writer raised in the (U.S.) South here.

    When my older relatives use the term in my presence, it is very clear which word they’d rather use (which I have made clear I won’t tolerate in my presence), and that in settling for this slur and looking at me meaningfully, they are playing a racist version of the “I’m not touching you, look at me not touching you, what’s your problem, I’m not touching you” game. Because the racists in my family are just that mature.

    But my testimony as a white Louisianan irritated at her racist relatives isn’t nearly as important or relevant as that of someone like Jen Brown, who went into that panel without any expectation of, or preparation for, getting verbally/metaphorically punched in the face like that.

  38. Nice derail, Total. Americans claiming a right to free speech are talking about the First Amendment.

  39. Catching up on cross posts. HelenS helpfully quotes:

    The adjective colored remains in the full name of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), a civil rights organization founded in the early 20th century. The use of colored in this name is not regarded as offensive. The adjective colored is also occasionally still used in self-reference by Black people, but its use by others is offensive.

    And indeed, as with the n-word, we have white people arguing (whining) that if Black people get to use the word, why can’t they? *facepalm*

  40. Considering there’s been a previous issue (transgender tweets), I suspect that Lackey was being watched Very Carefully in case of another slip.

    I’m sorry, but as far as I’m concerned, age is not an excuse. If you’re together enough to go to conventions and be a panelist, then it behooves you to be aware of the language you are using. I’m not that much younger than Lackey, but even I’m aware that “colored” is a slur and should not be used, even casually.

    (I do have a point of difference with someone in the Twitter thread about people first language always being appropriate. The majority of the autistic community that I have been in contact with prefers “autistic” to “people with autism.” Same for the Deaf community. Which means that when you are in doubt—ASK. And if you get it wrong, apologize. I’ve gotten it wrong sometimes, enough to know that I need to check in when in situations where it’s unclear.)

  41. So if Lou Reed were still alive and had performed at the Nebula event, he would have been banned?

  42. Rich Lynch: I’ll tell you what I do know about clever rhetorical questions with premises so extreme or absurd that the people holding the position they’re designed to undermine are supposed to suddenly agree they have been silly — those questions fail all the time.

  43. Samuel Delany has weighed in and he’s not siding with the SFWA. So… this should be… interesting.

  44. Rich Lynch: So if Lou Reed were still alive and had performed at the Nebula event, he would have been banned?

    When that song was released in 1972, the term was already considered offensive, a different version without it was released in the U.S., and in the years before his death he was performing it as “and the girls sing”.

    It’s a shame to see you stoop this low, I had a better opinion of you than that.

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