Racialicious & Racebending Are Teaming Up At San Diego Comic-Con!

By Arturo R. García

This year, Racialicious won’t just be covering San Diego Comic-Con, we’ll be part of the action. I’m proud to announce that The R is partnering with Racebending to present a panel of our own:

Diversity & Fandom 102: How You Can Make A Difference
In the wake of campaigns like Racebending.com’s protests and the rise of safe spaces like Racialicious.com, fans, consumers and creators from underrepresented groups have more outlets for speaking up. This panel explores how can we take those voices and add them to the conversations we need to have with geeky business interests and our own fan communities!
Where: Room 24ABC
When: Sunday, July 24, 10 – 11 a.m.

Our moderator will be Racebending’s Mike Le, who I interviewed at last year’s event:

Also, I’m honored to say I’ll be sitting on the panel along some pretty impressive company from around the media spectrum. The full line-up, and how you can participate, is under the cut.

• Also representing the online community will be Phil Yu, a.k.a. all-world blogger and friend of the site Angry Asian Man.
• Javier Grillo-Marxuach has written comic books and for TV shows like Lost, Medium, and Ghost Whisperer, among others, but he might be best-known for holding the line when it came to the tv adaptation of his comic The Middleman. ABC Family asked him to change his protagonist from white to Latina. Although Grillo-Marxuach is Cuban, he was reluctant to do so because he did not want character to become a stereotype. He cast a Latina actress, Natalie Morales, and made sure to write her in a non-stereotypical fashion.
• Author Malinda Lo’s works Ash and Huntress both feature gay women of color as their protagonists. This year’s SDCC will be Lo’s first, and she’ll also be doing an autograph signing from 2-3 p.m. Saturday, July 22.
• From the world of academia, we’ll have Henry Jenkins, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of Communication and Journalism, and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
• Actor Dante Basco’s career has earned him fans in two generations of fandom – he entered the national spotlight playing Rufio in the 1991 Peter Pan film adaptation Hook, and is now also known for voicing Prinze Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Basco also works with his brothers in the musical group Fly Brown Dragons.

If you’ve got a question for our panelists, please leave it in the comments section, and we’ll get to as many of them as possible during the session. We’ll have a rundown of the rest of the Comic-Con calendar tomorrow!