Look no further

June 19–21, 2020

I find the Alphabettes article deeply offensive on so many levels. Just a month ago I would have applauded the article. But the events of recent weeks accelerated a shift in my thinking that has been brewing for a long time that I did not even fully recognize before. I started to listen to people explaining how oppressive systems are sustained. And now everywhere I look it is the same simple pattern I see. I became angry, very angry, at myself for having been part of the problem for so long. And now I point it out whenever I see.

I don’t even know where to start. Let me see how nice I can be in this response… /me checks… yep, not so nice anymore. I’m talking to you, who wrote and endorsed the article, not as individuals, but as a mentality. I know you expect that I apologize in advance for making you uncomfortable. Because that’s the only thing you care about: “to not feel uncomfortable”. And that is the problem.

“1) We need to actively include more BIPOC in our events, conferences, and communities.”

Look! We need you to do one thing only: recognize what you don’t know. Maybe you were privileged in where you were born or your upbringing or your access to schools and jobs. Good for you; we don’t have any problem with that. You were also told to believe in yourself, and you should. It is that you do not know what you do not know that is the problem. And we tried telling you many times before we stopped trying because it made you “uncomfortable”. If you were aware of that, you would be delegating your platform to promote and delegate to people who have studied these issues for decades. Instead you prescribe what everyone should do to make you not feel uncomfortable.

As women you probably are all familiar with being taken as “the female quota”. We do not need you to look harder to discover us and elevate us to address the problem. Sure, make it easier for “BIPOC” people to attend events and conferences. But not because they are “BIPOC”. Just make your events, conferences, and communities more accessible to everyone regardless of their resources or conformity to your norms. Level the playing field; we stand on our feet just fine.

“2) We need to stop using the term Non-Latin… We also oppose any context in which various scripts are grouped together under an umbrella term.”

So Fiona Ross or Kalapi Gajjar are not experts on Indic typography? Ben Mitchell, David Corbett, and Martin Hosken are not scholars of South-East Asian scripts? The Unicode Standard groups scripts into umbrella terms all the time. That has enabled all the world’s digital typography. Stop trying to “help” others, to police others. They are not the problem. Just refer to things by what they are, not what they are not. You did it again: declaring the term taboo to silence whoever still wants to point out the problem, because that makes you uncomfortable. Read! Read until you realize that you are still stuck in your colonialist mentality.

“4) We need to discontinue the practice of designing for scripts we did not grow up reading and writing for custom/client projects.”

Just because someone grew up in Lebanon does not automatically qualify them to design a Persian typeface for Iranians. Do not run back to adjust your prescription for languages and regions instead of scripts, that is not the point.

Liang Hai, Anshuman Pandey, Roozbeh Pournader, Michael Everson, have all contributed to dozens of scripts’ inclusion in Unicode. Debbie Anderson’s Script Encoding Initiative has encoded or roadmapped hundreds of minority scripts for inclusion in Unicode.

See. I have been surrounded by type and type technology all my life. And I grew up in Iran. But I’m not qualified to design a Persian typeface. Because I do not know type-design! Do what you are qualified to, no matter how you learned it, where you learned it, or where you were born. That is what you are not doing.

We do not need you to stop taking jobs to make room for us. Just decline jobs you are not qualified for. But you don’t, not because you don’t believe in that principle. But because you do not know how much you do not know. Fix that and there will be plenty of room for us all.

So yeah even in your “woke” try, you know only how to prescribe your colonial “problem solving” on us. If you are a heart surgeon you wouldn’t take a brain surgery job, unless you also happen to know brain surgery. To most of us that is called common-sense. Which I recognize these days is scarce. Your prescription is as stoopid as saying: “no one should practice medicine unless their parents also practiced medicine.” You are promoting more oppression in response to your ongoing oppression.

“It’s time to act”

Here, you did it again. And you just close by throwing a few treats for the “BIPOC type designers” because of course you are writing this to your “BIPOC” audience to boost your own ego and sustain the status quo. You are not really writing to people like yourself, which continue to not see the problem. Take your optical allyship somewhere else. We are sick of it for fucks sake. And we are sick of handholding you lest not we scratch your fragile ego. Start with yourself. You are the problem.

“This is a call to action and not a debate of this topic”

I rest my case.