Thread originally posted May 20, 2018.

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A really good fix/help for fandom racism would be education because many people just don’t know what racism looks like in fandom, fanworks, and anything smaller than an outright hate crime.

However, there are three main problems with that:

First: fans of color would undoubtedly have to do the initial heavy lifting which is going to make getting volunteers difficult because of the backlash from fandom.

How do you/can we make educating fandom about racism a thing that’s safe for fans of color to do?

Because it’s not.

Second: many people in fandom don’t like the people they see talking about fandom racism.

They call us SJWs, antis, accuse us of only caring about our ships/wanting other people to like what we like, and, in recent times, have literally shared, supported, or made up smear campaigns

How do you accommodate for the fact that some people are that unwilling to learn about things that hurt others that they go out of their way to invalidate and smear them?

(Relevant to 1&2: Part of why I left tumblr for this hiatus was because I was getting bunches of cruel and nasty reblogs from anti-sjws calling me racist & a bully specifically because I wrote about race and racism in the Star Wars fandom in a way they didn’t like.)

Third: POC aren’t interchangeable and our experiences with racism aren’t either. So attempts to educate wider fandom has to be inclusive of that.

So how do you get POC from around the world to come together specifically to educate wider, whiter fandom about racism present there? How do you get a cohesive education out of all the different experiences we have with racism in and our of fandom?

Two black people from different parts of the world might view racism (antiblackness primarily) in fandom differently, you know? To say nothing of how many non-Black people in fandom have different experiences with race and racism from black people everywhere and when it comes to fandom, they see things differently.

How do you educate while accounting for differences in what people think fandom racism is? These are all connected thoughts of course, and I don’t know/can’t think of a solution for education that informs lots of people of what fandom racism looks like offhand.

When you’re up against people who don’t want to learn, how can you even begin to educate them?