In the sidebar for my website, I have the following block of text and a link to a resource on Adult Literacy:

Struggling with selective reading comprehension issues and think I’ve said something I clearly haven’t? Use this resource to brush up on your lackluster reading comprehension skills and consider leaving me out of your journey!

It is a snarky note, for sure, but this response to that block of text (from a Dreamwidth user who was responding to someone else who’d shared What Fandom Racism Looks Like: White Silence/Violence is really fucking out of pocket and nonsensical:

Also from stitch (their sidebar):

Struggling with selective reading comprehension issues and think I’ve said something I clearly haven’t? Use this resource to brush up on your lackluster reading comprehension skills and consider leaving me out of your journey!

I suspect the reason they’re not getting the engagement, signal boosting, and podcast invites they desire is that interaction with them in any manner other than 130% agreement and praise carries a significant risk of verbal abuse.

I’ve certainly preemptively blocked them on every social media account I have.

[censored DW user who recommended my work] And when I say verbal abuse I mean verbal abuse, whether or not it’s couched in progressive terminology.

I can clock someone who’s likely to verbally abuse me at 140 characters because I lived over 20 years being subjected to that treatment on the regular. My dad is no longer in my life because of it. I’ll happily die on the hill of “no one is obligated to open themselves up to abuse for *any* cause”.

(And please note that I am assuming this person is white based on prior personal experience with white people in fandom who weaponize their trauma to excuse blaming me for how they treat me despite us usually not interacting ever. If they’re not white, that’s… a whole problem there, but nine times out of ten… Well.)

To be clear: I agree with that Dreamwidth user: that no one is obligated to open themselves up to abuse for any cause.

But as we’ve covered repeatedly: what happens to me because I talk about racism in fandom at any tone and with any level of audience is never seen as abusive by the people harassing me. Even though, it is not… not that. What do you call a harassment campaign trying to “deplatform” me and cost me my job that’s so intense and awful that it was briefly news on ONTD?

What do you call the fact that even though I do curate the shit out of my space, people harass me anyway and say things like that user where they take a mildly spicy tone and accuse me of ongoing or future harassment?

I mean, this user who doesn’t know me and just blocked me everywhere (except Dreamwidth, lol) just said that I was likely to verbally abuse people who disagreed with me (about racism in fandom, mind you). That’s it.

We have had no engagement. This user has no proof of me even actually interacting rudely with people – though I’m sure they’re sensitive enough that all the bullshit proof of harassment that didn’t work on the people defending me last week will work on them.

They didn’t even bother to go “hey what’s with your tone there”. Just an immediate “well this stitch is rude, YEET” and comparing me to their abusive father. (Which of course validates how they talk about me because they were “triggered” by my tone.)

And as a reminder: the “this scary Black person shouted and it scared me” is a tactic used to great negative effect against people like me. As Reni Eddo-Lodge points out in the “White Women Crying is Racist!” episode of the About Race podcast:

 What Angelica and Kelsey are speaking about, the deference, the tears, is a really destructive byproduct of anti-racist conversation, in which white ears hear black voices talk about racism and interpret it as information designed to make them feel like they are a bad person. So, my self expression at the general state of play becomes a very individual and personal attack to whatever white person happens to be within earshot.

In circles where people consider themselves to be progressive, like feminism, that destructive individualisation doesn’t always come out in anger and defensiveness, but folds in on itself in the form of guilt. What this does is takes the conversation away from an analysis of structural power, and  moves it to a place in which we all need to look after that white person’s hurt feelings, give them a tissue and a hug, and tell them they’re not a bad person. Somehow the conversation ends in the place anti-racists are trying to drag it away from, which is tiptoeing around white people’s feelings.

I think that’s what Angelica meant when she said white women crying is racist.

It’s usually mainly white women/femme aligned people who do this – although some cishet men have done this and I have seen a few examples of this particular fragility on display with trans dudes.

What that Dreamwidth user does by saying I will (or already do) abuse others for a “cause” – anti racism, again – and connecting me with their abuser is a purposeful tactic to make sure that people who would think to engage and go “hey, that’s not appropriate or fair” would… hesitate.

Because I have hurt their feelings – even though we have never spoken and all they’ve read are a post and my sidebar – I must be an abuser waiting in the wings. For speaking about something that is clearly actively hurting me and is coming from people who want to hurt me.

The idea that if you don’t agree with me 130% – about racism in fandom, mind you, this isn’t about ships – you’ll be lined up for abuse for multiple levels is really messed up and unsupported by anything I’ve ever done.

For one thing: There are people who have criticized my work in comments on this very site or who engage with something I’ve read and go “I like what you’re saying BUT here’s why I disagree at points”. I’ve even have a few “darling you’re dead wrong” comments up too.

Truthfully, I have never verbally abused anyone – being mildly spicy in response to people being racist in fandom and/or about me, is not abuse – and even when I have directly/generally insulted people it’s been insults related to like some food I’m in the middle of eating or… “PickMe POC”.

For another thing: when it comes to people engaging with me over my work, I am the one being harassed and abused by people in fandom because of the fact that I write about racism and because my tone isn’t… soft and sweet the entire time.

This is tone policing.

Tone policing is a tactic used by non-Black people to silence Black women (and femmes). Tone policing can be used by anyone, that’s true, but when it comes to the common response to my work, it’s clearly used in that capacity.

Because I cuss every so often, because I poke fun at racists and racism in fandom, and because I do not have respect for people who have been invested in dismissing racism and crapping on me… my tone is why I cannot be trusted. (Even though it’s milder than most of the backlash I get…)

Take this example of tone policing from the Blackburn Center’s “How Tone Policing Is Used to Silence Black Women”:

Consider a situation where a Black woman and a white woman are discussing an incident of racism at work. The Black woman gets emotional as she explains to her white colleague just how wrong the situation was. Her coworker doesn’t think what happened was a big deal, and responds, “You don’t need to get so angry about it.” She goes on to tell her colleague, “If you approached this nicely, then more people would be on your side.” The Black woman gets frustrated and walks away. In this instance, tone policing was a successful diversionary tactic, as the conversation ended without ever getting to the heart of the racist incident.

Tone policing often relies on an argument that a person must be able to address issues in a calm, rational, detached way. Of course, if you are not personally affected by a particular topic, it is much easier to be levelheaded about it. Demanding that others who are personally affected be just as calm as you are is a way to shut down conversation.

Even though I actually write with a sense of mild snark for humor’s sake – because again, I am dealing with racists in fandom and they are trying to Deal With Me – I’m rarely expressing even 15% of the pain and anger I experience from the constant attacks on my character by people who managed to read like one of my pieces and then choose to write me off as “unhinged”, “aggressive”, and “potentially abusive” without once ever interacting with me.

Let’s look at Rachel Cargle’s experience with tone policing from a DM that basically tells her to anticipate “an angry backlash” for her not being “nice enough” and for a “steady, underlying hostility” in her anti-racism work.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rachel Elizabeth Cargle (@rachel.cargle)

Simply put: if you expect anti-racism to cater to your needs as a white person (or a non-Black person learning how to fight antiblackness), you are racist/anti-black. You are fragile.

You do not have the right to demand people of color be “nice” – and we are rarely ever actually mean when we talk, just somewhat sharp because we already know what y’all are like – when we’re talking about racism in a space and how it hurts us.

And it doesn’t help that no one else is ever expected to be “nice” to us at first or in return.

No one in those groups ever manages to tone police the strangers who are calling me “arrogant and unhinged”, a “whore” or who call me a cunt/bitch on the regular. No one tone polices the people planning to destroy my life and online reputation.

For years I’ve been subject to aggressive comments, intensely personal insults, and targeted harassment for writing about racism in fandom. No one in those spaces publicly shuts that shit down and says “okay if you don’t like stitch, don’t read their work or tweets but don’t lie about them”.

In fact, people like the Dreamwidth user up there actually tend to think I deserve that treatment… because I’m not “nice” – even though I do not even speak to anyone and I never @ people unless it’s a necessary correction.

But let’s say I was Actually Mean about talking about racism in fandom: why should I be nice to racists in fandom and the people who think racists in fandom have more of a right to freedom or escapism in fandom than I or any other person of color who care about racism do?

But I’m not mean. I’m not the one calling people slurs, trying to get them fired, comparing them to my abuser (even though they are literally the same class of racist online user trying to destroy me).

And because that Dreamwidth user has already decided that they’re dealing with an aggressive Black person, I cannot engage with them. I cannot reply to that comment and say “okay but that’s not fair and this is contributing to mental stress and harm I experience because you’re not the only white person to take my tone as a threat and tell others that” to them because they will take that as a further threat. They will use that to validate what they already believe about me… somehow.

Which means I have to write out my pain and frustration here.  I have to get it out here. I have to hope that maybe this user will stumble across it and realize that my tone is always rather mild, that they’re participating in unthinking antiblackness, and that they also need to figure out if what they read was what I actually wrote.

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Now let’s talk about the reading comprehension issues on display.

A lot of people struggle with selective reading comprehension when they interact with my work. People literally actively make up things they feel I’ve said.

They can read a post about weaponized white womanhood and literally come out of it with “you are racist against Black women” as their first thought. They are reading to react or reply, not to understand. That’s why so much of the response to my work is about how it makes racists or POC Too (“I’m a POC Too and this is not racist”)  feel, not about where it is flawed.

(Like the slavefic article, three years later, is incredibly flawed and I’m working on doing an update for that. Rather than say “hey, I get that you were in your feelings here, but here are some ways you could make this better and more accurate”, people get angry because slavefic is their thing and I have just insulted it/made it seem bad. They read to react, not to understand and offer actual feedback.)

There are people who literally go around telling people that I’ve said “[Reylo/Kylux/Snowbarry/ETC] shippers are automatically racist”. They can’t, of course, link to any of that or even an actual post where I say that, but hundreds of people sure do believe that this is a ship war and not ongoing commentaries on racist shipping patterns in fandom [because they are simultaneously white-centric and antiblackness]  that combine with harassment.

How about the way that the following paragraph from What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Phone A Friend of Color is used to claim that I am racist against other POC/dehumanizing them when I’m actually clearly talking about the ways that racists will basically launch POC with differing opinions at each other:

I’m going to let y’all know right off the jump that this behavior actually isn’t good for either the fan of color being used as a Social Justice Pokémon or the fan of color who now has to deal with another person of color that will go “I’m [identity] and I don’t think that was racist” – but then accuse them of using their shared ethnicity to gain some kind of clout in fandom. (Even though the Social Justice Pokemon of color actually is doing that!)

It’s a paragraph referencing how there’s a thing people do where they tag in a POC to derail and dismiss conversations about racism in fandom or cultural appropriation in K-pop. The person actually doing the dehumanizing in this situation is the racist who thinks POC are interchangeable and that we should perform Not Caring About Racism to excuse their bad behavior in fandom.

Not me, Black person pointing out that this is happening and hurting us all. And yet, it has repeatedly been used as an “example” of my “racism” against other POC. Somehow.

Or how about how, every single time I reshare my piece on queerbaiting villains  and the Kylo/Hux fandom from 2018, people tell others that this is an anti-villain piece and that I’m an anti of the ship? The piece doesn’t say “I hate this ship” or even “I hate this fandom”. I simply poke fun at the fandom in 2018 in the process of pointing out that queer-coding villains tends to trade on stereotypes and that white male villains are often the only ones who get that kind of coding layered onto them in Western/English language media.

I put the link in to those adult literacy resources in my sidebar because I am constantly subject to people willfully turning off their reading comprehension capabilities off in order to read the worst from my work. It is not ableist, abusive, or whatever to be a Black person fed up with people who only seem to suck at understanding what they read when what they’re reading is about racism in fandom. Or to provide a resource for people to Level Up and understand what they’re reading if they’re having genuine issues understanding.

But also… how do you get “stitch will verbally abuse people that disagree with them even a little bit… just like my dad” from “please don’t make your reading comprehension problems my problem”?

It is a choice that lots of people in lots of fandoms make. They assume the worst of me based on their own reactions to me saying that the things they do and love in fandom can be or even are racist… and they tell people the things they believe out of nowhere. And ultimately, they decided that the “bad” tone they read in my work excuses how they and others treat and talk about me, dehumanizing me and allowing me to be mistreated by their friends in fandom.

People choose to be bad at reading when I am writing about racism. They choose to read violence, aggression, and abuse into me being a Black person dealing with direct antiblackness in and from fandom and writing in a way that’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

I would like people to stop and think about whether they understand what I’m actually writing or if they need to reach out for clarification before deciding I’m just like some abuser in their life… for writing on my own site about something that is actually actively traumatizing for me.

It is exhausting – truly draining – to constantly and purposefully be read and misrepresented as cruel, abusive, aggressive, and mean-spirited simply for talking about racism in multiple fandoms and how racist harassment, white silence, and weaponized POC Too-ness or white womanhood directly hurts me.