Everyone’s writing such good content and I can’t actually bring myself to wait until December to share some of the stuff I’ve read since the last Link Lineup post! So bonus links for all!
The Business of Selling White Women the Righteousness of Their Own Anger
After all, it was a white woman feigning outrage (that she later admitted was a lie) that killed Emmet Till in the first place. But while white readers ordered so many books about white privilege during the summer of Black Lives Matter protests over the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that they created a shortage, the majority of books about women’s anger often depict all women’s anger as being equal, a force for good and never a tool used to silence and punish others; they largely ignore the slew of white women having meltdowns at the sight of non-white people having barbeques, enjoying swimming pools, or birdwatching that abound on the internet. Perhaps that’s because the idea that white women’s anger is, has been, and continues to be a source of terror for a lot of marginalized people is simply not something white women, even “good” white women who marched for Floyd and Taylor, are particularly interested in buying.
I think it’s been interesting how I have constantly been accused of anger – when I am at best mildly annoyed and deeply inconvenienced – by white people who are angry that I exist and that I write what I do.
Since 2011/2012, I have been subject to white women’s anger for daring to write about racism in “their” spaces – in the fandoms they dominate or try to colonize. Like binches have been out here like “seeing Stitch get treated as an expert on racism in fandom, the subject they’ve been writing about for almost a decade, fills me with RAGE” on main and they make it all righteous because to them, I am an enemy of fandom and I deserve their anger.
(In case you’ve missed it, fandom for me 2020 has been wild and racist.)
White men’s anger is instantly observable as dangerous to everyone. It’s a lantern in the dark, a clear sign to “move away swiftly”.
White women’s anger? That shit is subtle. It’s put in combination with a fear of them under fire, the weaponized white womanhood that fuels so much bullshit. It always comes with a side of tears and maybe some hyperventilating.
And white women’s anger does get us killed, fired, beaten, harmed because folks can’t figure out how to do their own damn research and must, every time, rush into the line of fire for a Betty who can’t handle criticism.
The Advent Of K-Pop “Activism” and the Continued Erasure of Black Fans
By attempting to create this image of the K-pop community as this diverse and loving utopia, you gloss over the genre and the fandom’s many ongoing issues with anti-blackness which is something that responsible journalists shouldn’t do. These articles depicting the fandom as such have not only ignored Black K-pop fans but also haven’t allowed them to have their voices be heard concerning an issue that directly affects so many of them but has given non-Black fans more of an opportunity to speak over us without fear of consequence since the media has mostly gone out of its way to ignore the darker aspects of the K-pop fandom’s growing issue with rampant anti-blackness.
In the interest of full disclosure: I was one of the Black fans who gave the article’s writer, Olivia, insight on my experiences and observations in multiple Korean idol fandoms since the end of May. I am also someone who’s written an article about international idol fandoms’ activism and the complexity of the issues that many major outlets were not covering.
I need music and fandom journalists to do better. Why hasn’t The Mary Sue tapped someone like Olivia to write about this before? Longtime K-pop journalist Tamar Herman has actually tweeted about how outlets just don’t want to publish content about antiblackness in these spaces, only the positives… and it sucks.
I get it, the narrative is that k-pop and its associated fandoms are super groovy and actually joined forces in the fight against Trump. Anything that disrupts that singular narrative pokes holes in what outlets have been saying since June.
But if the New York Times is able to post op-eds hyping white supremacy and pushing back against it in the same month… I think y’all can manage to publish something about these weird and disturbing instances of antiblackness that have actually increased since June 2020.
Distressed Damsels: There’s Nothing Accidental about White Feminist Racism
Whiteness has defined both white womanhood and Black/Brown/Indigenous identities through the creation of stereotypes: If Black women were racialized, sexualized “Jezebels,” then white women were virtuous angels or damsels in distress who needed to be protected from Black men.
This history of deliberate racialization still persists, notably through the weaponization of white tears.
As the election exit poll results came out in the wake of the 2020 Presidential Election (you know… the one still hotly contested by people with more racism between their ears than common sense) one thing remained very clear: white women were once again the weakest link. According to this Essence Magazine article, 55% of white women voted for Trump this year – 2 to 3 points higher than they did in 2016.
This is not an accident.
None of this is.
2020 has been a year of watching fragile white woman weaponized against Black people, being under attack from white women (fake) sobbing through the injustice of being expected to be better, and endless videos of white women launching themselves at Black/brown people and trusting that even with a phone camera capturing it all, that the world will be on their side.
2020 has been tiring and for me, racist white women pretending to crumble under criticism or accountability has been why… It is exhausting to deal with endless “woe is me, my white womanhood isn’t worshiped” from white women across the internet. Like the one thing I’m glad about for these pandemic times is that my direct experience has been online and not in person because my god I would’ve had to smack some people…
When white women respond to criticism with crying, talks about racism with tantrums, and meet discussions about racism (they weren’t even invited to) with demands that folks get deplatformed. And they do it all with the confidence that comes from centuries of being told that you are worthy of coddling because the patriarchy protects what promotes it – and white women have always been willing to do the most to protect whiteness. (Even the “good” ones who don’t think they’re racist but absolutely are.)
Pulling the (white) hood off “cancel culture”
Cancel culture is a rhetorical device strategically use to gaslight people who make valid complaints about discrimination and oppression. Gaslighting is a form of manipulation meant to undermine the subjectivity of an other.
I did a thread about censorship the other day and what censorship isn’t and it reminds me of how one thing that I have noticed beyond 2020 is that the people truly subject to cancel culture or consequences for existence are… not the white people screeching and anxious about censorship or claiming to be pro-freedom of speech. They’re the teachers fired for BLM masks, the professors who lecture on antiracism, the Black/brown people in fandom who write about racism, trans women who are trying to advocate for their communities in public. Essentially, the people without power.
Just last month, some unripe banana with the Black Lives Matter acronym in their bio argued passionately for me to be deplatformed because I was supposedly “abusive” and “toxic” (literally, in this case, because I was rude about their racist friends and assorted PickMe POC…who I still have never spoken to).
Deplatforming is something that you do to fascists, abusers, racists, monsters. It’s something you do to people who do harm. Trying to deplatform someone because you can’t control them or how they write about racism in a shared space is… sketch as hell. (Because clearly, you seem to think that this is harm done to you!)
And yet, this is how racist white women and their PickMe POC in media, fandom, academia, etc work. They do in fact take any pushback – regardless of whether or not it’s even at them – as a threat and direct harm and so they think it’s absolutley rational (and not you know… racist) to try and “cancel” Black/brown people who don’t fall in line… instead of racists, abusers, etc. in their communities.
Stitch's Media Mix 