I am also blocked on one of Stitch’s accounts on my own public account, probably (though I don’t know for sure) because I called their friend […] a cunt to her face last November

[…]

[Stitch’s] behavior is undeniably rude. I think you could also call it mean.

Imp’s whatever we owe each other

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Go read Imp’s entire post (and Dom’s reblog pointing out that Imp regurgitated a debunked lie about me from someone who lied about their age and us ever interacting) and then come back here. But while you read, think about how the quotes above and the full post show a startling example of the double standards that I have to live with underneath the trembling white arm of the cult(ure) of nice in fandom.

Please think about the hypocrisy displayed where Imp can say that she called someone a “cunt” – regardless of what past history may exist, calling someone a cunt to their face for livetweeting a book without tagging or insulting the author is rude and mean – only to then call me rude and mean for… what exactly?

Using the word “PickMe” – which isn’t mean or a slur, it’s literally a term we use instead of far more harmful words – and talk a little sharply about broad behavioral patterns in fandom that undermine and derail attempts to talk about race and racism in fandom?

Like yes, Imp absolutely then validates my “meanness” except…

I am not being mean.

I am not being rude.

I am, in fact, not even talking to these people who, like Imp notes for herself in her post, would ostensibly “get their feelings hurt if I talked to them like this”.

I understand that everyone reads everything I’ve written and imagines that I’m shouting it at them or something, but I’m largely not talking to or about these people. It’s only even relatively recently – because people kept accusing me of making up the stuff I was seeing and then writing about – that I started collecting and then posting uncensored screenshots of people being racist in fandom.

And surely… collecting evidence of widespread racism in a shared space can’t be meaner or ruder than uh… being racist.

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For all that people call me rude for my own social media posts and website articles aimed largely at no one in particular, at least I have yet to call another human being a cunt to their face. (Not that anyone would let me get away with that considering how I’m treated for “PickMe POC” which remains Not Racist or A Slur.)

And even when I’ve insulted people “behind their backs” – because screenshots of every insult or comment that can be taken as such then gets sent to those people or added to some archive of my supposed awfulness – what I’ve said doesn’t compare to the things people say about me regularly and publicly while still being lauded as heroes and absolute sweethearts in their fandoms.

Everyone likes to bring up how “mean” and “nasty” and “rude” I am as if a) that’s true and b) justifies the vicious cruelty they continue to heap onto me.

However, it’s clear that there’s once again a major double standard at play here.

In 2021, I watched a Kylo/Hux shipper who’d called me a whore (literally wrote out the sentence “Fuck that whore” about me in May of that year) get called “one of the nicest people in our fandom”.

During the “Stitch called Goncharov racist” shit in November, venasaur had one quote tweet of their tweet say “I don’t like Goncharov either but I hate stitch” and many of their quotes and replies had people mocking, insulting, and otherwise disparaging me. They themselves publicly laughed at the idea that I might have been fired from Teen Vogue because in late November, a month after losing my elderly father and struggling with that loss, my column was still on hiatus.

(It’s still on hiatus, BTW, because I’m severely sick and when the time comes for me to eventually cut ties with Teen Vogue or them with me, it won’t be because of badminded racists in fandom.)

I’ve had people actively cursing at or about me turn around and say that because I swear, something I’ve been doing since I was eleven years old, I wasn’t a good role model for the teenagers who read Teen Vogue.  (Where I’m not even allowed to curse.) That one weirdo said that I “seemed” abusive and reminded her of her abusive father… because I wrote a piece about white silence in fandom in the face of racism and racist harassment like I’ve been dealing with. How about the time someone impersonated me on the AO3 in the comments of a news post while logged out… And then someone else chose to express violent wishes against that person they thought was me?

I’ve been called a bitch, a cunt, an asshole in public, and who knows what else where I can’t see. People go into my friends’ inboxes on anon and accuse me of crimes. I returned to Tumblr and instantly got a nasty racist message and several reblogs in the same vein. People on Tumblr and Twitter have, from as far back as I can remember, created sockpuppet discourse accounts specifically to be nasty and racist to me and about my work.

And yet none of that is considered unkind.

None of it is mean.

Because it is in defense of white fandom, white feelings.

Because of course the Black journalist/analyst genuinely just minding their business and slowly boiling over with frustration in the face of racist harassment is the bully, the harasser, the abuser.

Not the people – strangers – all devoting years to coordinating a fairly public campaign to harass them out of existence – not just a career – at this point.

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The question: “who gets to be mean here” has stuck with me as I’ve dealt with increasing harassment and reputation ruin in fandom.

We’re watching people insist, with literally zero proof, that I’ve done some deeply devastating harm to them and theirs that validates the way they all actively go out of their way to lie about me, misrepresent me and my work, and try to harm me across several years.

In particular, I’ve repeatedly noted how my use of “PickMe POC” and “POC TOO” – along with the misrepresentation of “Pokemon of color”/refusal to pay attention to it in its context in the intro to What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Phone A Friend of Color and people blaming me for the person in the Genshin Impact fandom’s derogatory use of “freaks of color” over Kaeluc and other ships – have purposefully and maliciously been redefined as “slurs,” “racist”, and “racially charged” primarily by non-Black people I’m absolutely not talking to or about.

There are people who use “PickMe” in other contexts just fine –

Or stay silent when one of their own uses it.

How is it mean to describe a pattern of harm that we do to our own as people of color when we’re still chasing racist approval… but it’s not mean to try to get me fired (going on the third year of this), to ruin my reputation, damage my relationships because you don’t understand AAVE or its usage? (Which, I’m gonna be real, is giving me flash backs of that era where people were like “fuckboy is an anti trans slur” from 2014 Tumblr with its levels of shameless ignorance.)

The reason why people are able to “recognize” meanness or rudeness in my words and behavior – or what they’re told are my behavior/my words – where next to none exist or while their white friends or non-Black friends of color use all kinds of slurs and cruel or violent on main is because society literally tells you that Black people are automatically aggressive, violent, and loud.

Even when we’re not doing anything remotely wrong, we are automatically portrayed or seen as threats to white people’s safety and stability.

Especially white women… who notoriously leverage their position in society and the preconceptions that they are innocent, vulnerable, etc to get away with heinous behavior towards others. As Ruby Hamad points out, “It is crucial to understand what we are talking about when we talk about “white tears.” The kind of distress we are analyzing may well feel genuine, but it is neither legitimate nor innocent.” (12). She goes on to note that:

DiAngelo explores white fragility in explicitly race-based workplace interactions between women, but the issue goes further back in history and deeper into the present, and it is important to look at gendered racial dynamics beyond the professional context. These dynamics also shape and taint interactions between white women and women of color in social situations. The catalyst need not be explicitly about race: the act of being challenged or politely disagreed with or, heaven forbid, “called out” by a woman of color about almost anything at all is enough to raise the defenses and trigger a reaction based not on the immediate situation but on the mechanisms of white fragility.

Hamad, Ruby. White Tears/Brown Scars (pp. 12-13). Catapult. Kindle Edition.

And of course, not every single person doing this is white but that doesn’t tint the fragility that much darker because we’re talking about the way a perceived innocence opposite an inherent violent Blackness is leveraged.

I know not everyone who dislikes me and is harassing me is white.

Lots of the people of color partaking in hunting me for sport across the internet preface the nasty ass things they say about me and their lies with their identity. They almost feel like they’re trying to beat me in a Yu-Gi-Oh duel, layering their identities against mine as if that negates the fact that I’m right about what fandom is like and what they’re doing.

And like Rahaeli says, she has five to fifteen POC who supposedly can prove (though not in public) that I’ve said these horrible ass things to them (that their ship – not the behaviors but the ship itself without explaining myself – is racist, that they’re Oreos for being Black and liking reylo, that liking whatever ship they like makes them white, that (East) Asians aren’t actually POC).

I know some of my hugest haters are POC TOO not just because they won’t shut up about it, but because the big draw for racists like Rahaeli is that they can distance themselves from their own racism by using POC to do their dirty work… as if POC can’t be antiblack or Black people beyond that can’t internalize and then practice some wildly racist behaviors about our own skinfolk.

Tons of people of color will break their own backs to be acknowledged by white racists who have some semblance of power in the same shared space.

It’s how I’m most frequently accused of harassment (or condoning it) for things like pointing out what harassment ensues as a result of a nonexistent offensive content policy on the AO3 or talking with my friends about what we’ve seen from other Black fans/POC who choose to side with racists to their own detriment… but people in the act of harassing me are never called that within their group of friends or by fandom at large.

Not everyone that dislikes me is racist, duh.

A lot of them are just opportunistic bullies.

But a lot of these people are also deeply antiblack in the way that they so easily decide, without actual proof of anything I’ve said in context or at all, that I am an abuser, a bully, or a harasser of people I’ve probably never even interacted with even when I was a part of Fight Fandom… while they largely stay silent about their friends and faves actively harassing me and actively working/speaking in favor of racism and racists in fandom.

When I talked with Flourish and Elizabeth a few months ago for Fansplaining, I pointed out that you don’t have to like me. You really don’t. I repeated it three times. But the thing is that the “me” that’s being disliked isn’t the actual me. It’s the dehumanized symbol version they’ve built up inside of their own little anti fandoms.

And when you’re running around calling me mean and rude and couching even your defense of me – or your neutral stance mildly disapproving of what’s being done to me, most likely – in this need to point out that I am a terrible person… there’s something going on there that’s worth unpacking.

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I’m not going to say “I’m nice and I don’t deserve this”.

That doesn’t matter.

Even though it’s mostly true.

But even if I was mean… I wouldn’t deserve this.

I’m making broad critiques of increasing racism in fandom and they’re sometimes a little sharply worded. That doesn’t mean I deserve racist harassment, ongoing attempts to get me fired what they THINK is my main source of employment, and lies… all from people who I’ve probably never spoken to or about and who are actually mean to and about me.

I am not rude because I made a comment about racism in fandom that you take personally because it hit home.

I am not mean because you got your feelings hurt or didn’t feel represented by something I wrote and then didn’t communicate any of that with me.

The expectation people have that I need to be nice to be listened to – and that I’m not nice right now because sometimes I swear in my writing and I don’t let other POC slide when they’re defending or participating in racism in fandom – is infuriating and hypocritical.

I and other Black people in fandom specifically don’t ever get to be mean… because we’re assumed “mean” by default. Especially when talking about antiblackness in fandom.