September is all about placeholders, catching up, and hurricane prep.
It’s peak hurricane season from here until the end of October (November usually doesn’t have hurricanes like that but I’m prepared to be wrong) so there is a huge chance that I will be preoccupied with dealing with storms as the month crawls on.
So, I can’t promise any content beyond what I didn’t get to do in August for Patreon (because for once I did most of the stuff for my site) because I’m still trying to hustle and take care of my family since things are tough BUT I will do my best!
You’re not going to convince me that any white person who is super hostile at the mere idea that fandom is racist by default and design (especially the folks who just love to tone police fans of color and call us mean/bullies for being done with racism in fandom) is an ally or that they will be any actual help in the horrifying future we’re heading towards.
No one who frames fans of color talking about racism in fandom as bullies, ideological purists, haters, cops, antis, etc actually cares about people of color (outside of their sometimes treasured tokens).
People who think that harassing people because they talk about racism in fandom will NOT be using their privilege or visibility to fight racism online or offline.
Hello, Darlings, this is our first Stitch Talks Ish issue episode, my bad, since May or June. If you missed that episode, it was an episode about the way that non-black people — not just white people, this also includes non-black people of color — were utilizing the phrase “Black Lives Matter” while also being incredibly anti black in practice, and to specific black people, like myself. And it’s been several months since the start of widespread conversations about police brutality, fatal anti blackness, systemic oppression, and the universality of anti blackness; and the important thing to note is that it hasn’t gotten any better.
As I record this right now. There’s another… There are two black men who have been shot by police officers one, I don’t know where he’s from, I don’t think his hashtag is currently trending. But one was shot seven times in front of his children after getting into his car following breaking up a fight. Like dude was completely unarmed. He was basically shot for being a good samaritan and trying to stop shit. And as I write this, as I, as I talk to you guys, I’m very much aware of the fact that we are hurtling towards a time when the United States is not going to be safe at any level for any of us, and kind of especially black people. And the same people who have plastered Black Lives Matter across their… their social media, while publicly and privately slandering black people, who will accuse black people, like myself, of using Black Lives Matter to gain some sort of clout in a world that hates us, and does not care about us, are currently pretending they care about Black Lives Matter, Black people our very, very fucked up future that is looming or speeding towards us.
And so I suggest if you haven’t listened to that episode already, please listen to it; and please be better about who you, are what you do in fandom spaces in, your social spaces, if you have them. But this episode is supposed to be a lighter episode. So no more talk of that, I guess.
I haven’t shared a lists of links in a while, huh?
Well here’s some of what I’ve been reading, speaking on, and watching across the internet!
Roundtable of Legends of Korean Hip-Hop: The Quiett, Swings & Paloalto | THE VETERAN EP. 1
I’m doing this like intense and incredible speed-run through Korean hip hop across my project because I want to know and listen to everyone and out of nowhere (for me, a person who does not follow HipHopLE on social media and does not read Korean well enough that that’d make any difference anyway), here comes a casual conversation between three of the “greats” in Korean hip hop. Out of the three men here, I’m more familiar with The Quiett’s work but I’ve listened to them all and seen them in things.
One thing that stood out for me was how this understated “three dudes talk hip hop history and memories” was one of the things that felt really close to the things I grew up with in terms of Black rappers siting down and talking about their own histories. So it’s interesting and they touch on a lot of incredible memories and moments in their lives as rappers, producers, and dudes who ran (run?) their own labels or crews.
I knew I’d wind up writing about blackface before this project was done.
Early on in my research before I ever had the #StitchProcesses hashtag and back when I could pretend I wasn’t super invested (like yes, there was a time when I could “play it cool” about all of this), my youngest niece and I went on a binge of research on YouTube. One of the things that kept coming up during my early outlining was how so many of the lists of cultural appropriation taken to extremes involved blackface from idols as part of the problem.
Within minutes of scrolling through YouTube, we came across acts like the still active and (sort of) blackface-ing Bubble Sisters. We saw a (racist in its own right) documentary on blackface in Korea and Japan that showed a large number of blackface moments that left us both shaking. Some of the same incidents involving idols – like A Pink’s Bomi made up as Michol, the Bubble Sisters’ everything, and Super Junior’s Shindong and Yesung in two separate instances of Blackface and other members of the group supporting a performer in blackface – show up on those same lists about cultural appropriation.
The only problem with that is that blackface is not a form of cultural appropriation. It is minstrelsy and horrifically antiblack on top of that, but it’s not appropriation. They’re not appropriating anything, they’re insulting it.
No one likes feeling as if they’re under attack when they’re just trying to do their thing and vibe in a space that feels right.
Fandom is comprised of digital and physical spaces populated by people from various marginalized communities and with vulnerable backgrounds or traumatic pasts. We’re talking about people constantly under fire from someone, usually for something that they are or that they’ve gone through. In fandom, sometimes criticism at every single level is constantly taken as an attack and for the most part, I do understand the process behind rejecting critique that seems aimed to injure instead of educating others.
Chapter sixteen begins with Rachel punching Ivy in the face because she thinks that Ivy has snuck into her room and is going to eat her out of nowhere so like… I’m starting this session Quite Annoyed.
Because I get that the point is that Rachel is on edge about living with an apex predator that’s also predatory in her direction, but… Ivy has pretty much just gotten over her “woe is me, don’t judge me harshly” thing. Why on earth would she be in Rachel’s room for anything short of an emergency since the reaction that she does get – Rachel punching her in the stomach – about what she can expect from a situation like this.
In this video, we’re looking at the recent dustup with ATEEZ Hongjoong’s cornrows, KQ Entertainment’s statement in response to criticism, and how even here fandom is full of people who CHOOSE to be antiblack *to their fellow fans* in the name of their idol favorites.
“K-pop’s online activism for Black Lives Matter is complicated” – Vox’s Reset Podcast (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0fix…) – Start at the 16-minute mark for Miranda Larsen’s incredible segment!
What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Antiblackness in the K-Pop Industry and Its Fandom Spaces (https://stitchmediamix.com/nonficpost…) – The masterpost for my ongoing project!
New to my weird need to make bingo cards for racism I’ve seen in the fandoms I’m in? Check out my Black Panther and Star Wars fandom racism bingo cards!
Unfortunately for everyone who follows me… I’m at it again.
Nothing new has happened in my primary fandoms. I just like making these cards. (Because both the Black Panther and Star Wars bingo cards were born directly from witnessing or experiencing antiblackness, but this has just been on my to-do list for a month or so.)
So here’s my fandom racism bingo card for… various K-pop fandoms. It’s majorly multi purpose so it can be used in reference to almost anything when it comes to racism in these fandom spaces.
Now, here are some helpful explanations/unhelpful snark!
Let’s keep this short and simple because we’re already three days into August:
Hurricane season is going to amp up from here on in so everything here getting done hinges on there NOT being a major hurricane disrupting my life across August. (It also hinges on me not having to address racism from folks in fandom but since some weirdo’s already got me in their sights over it… I figure we’re off to a shit start there… So I’ll have to work around my rage.)
Here are my goals for the month in terms of content! There’s one secret thing I want to do for social media, BUT I can only do it if I get access to my Twitter data and so… we’ll see if I get to do that this month.
Website
K-Pop Fandom Racism Bingo – what it says on the tin…
Good Girl review – possibly on YouTube, but we’ll see how it works out
Stitch Talks Ish Episode #7 – Where Stitch Gets Nostalgic (featuring Smallville)
Mini Stitch Talks Ish Bonus Episode – Covering BTS’ new Japanese releases and their Dynamite single (after Aug 21st)
Book reviews (hopefully)
Latest public installment of The Hollows reread
Post the ATEEZ video to my blog
Fandom Racism 101: Feeling Fragile
#StitchProcesses Project – Either “Aching For Authenticity” or “Video Vixens, Mommae, and Male Rappers’ Misogyny”
How will you protect fanworks and meta which are upsetting or offensive across your platforms? What about if those fanworks or meta express views which are illegal/censored in some countries, but perfectly legal in others? Say a fan’s works don’t challenge problematic values endemic to older canons, or espouse problematic values directly. Providing they politely abide by AO3’s TOS, do you believe this fan deserves equal protection under Ao3’s TOS (a posting platform, confidential treatment of their RL identity, ability to report harassment)?
Mind you, this question clearly is more focused on protecting fans creating content that could be considered problematic or harmful than it is on considering that fanworks aren’t more important than fans – and we’ll talk about how this sort of questioning elides conversations of race and racism to make it out to be about kinkshaming and anti-queer rhetoric another time, probably tomorrow.
But what stands out is the last part:
Providing they politely abide by AO3’s TOS, do you believe this fan deserves equal protection under Ao3’s TOS (a posting platform, confidential treatment of their RL identity, ability to report harassment)?
While I’m sure, if pressed, the people responsible for that Frankenstein’s monster of a question will deny that racism and racist fanworks are the kind of content they’re talking about (because they always say “we weren’t talking/thinking about racism in fandom” and uh… duh) –
Let’s work this word problem out with some fandom racism:
I’m returning to my Book Blogger roots for one of my favorite writers in the history of my reading life!
Matt Wallace’s latest book, the epic (in all forms) Savage Legion, is out July 21st and my little site is one of the stops on the book tour. Take a second to pop on over to Amazon or Bookshop to preorder your copy and then dive right into his guest post about two of our shared most-favorite things in the world: worldbuilding and booze!
Warriors drink ale. Nobles drink wine. That’s the way it always was and for twenty-plus years I never questioned it.
I read my first stabby magic novel (or epic fantasy, or swords and sorcery, or whatever the hell you want to call it) when I was eleven, and I never looked back. Throughout my formative years, I read whatever was on the fantasy shelf of the nearest big chain bookstore. For a long time I didn’t know enough to look beyond that shelf, or understand why it was important and incumbent upon me to do that work, especially if I ever hoped to write this stuff myself.
Realizing now how homogenized and whitewashed fantasy, like all genre fiction, has been in mainstream American publishing for so long, I see all the cracks in those piles of books and endless fantasy series I grew up reading. Millions of cracks, an endless spiderweb of them in a mirror reflecting my own faulty hardwiring and false and persistent centering.
Right now I just want to talk about the booze, though.
So, I started watching Korean’s Honest Drunk Opinions on Black Lives Matter, Dreads and the N-word with a Black American on YouTube.
This is Daniel – Danny from DKDKTV. And so it has this introduction where he’s like talking to Mike, who is the black American.
And it’s like, the introduction already rubs me the wrong way, because it’s like, “should Koreans be expected to educate themselves” and it’s like Koreans aren’t infants.
Y’all need to stop infantilizing yourselves and your peers because y’all aren’t babies. Like, we should all be expected to educate ourselves about cultural sensitivities about complicated subjects.
Like if you’re going to have a platform, especially like DKDKTV does you should definitely be expected educate yourself and those guys really haven’t across the years. It’s been very like this – they have yet to do a video on blackness specifically and like anti blackness that hasn’t been kind of like shit.
And like when they brought it up in the past like when with Amber they called Amber’s like moments of anti blackness about the cops harassing that black man in the California train station. They call it a mistake her saying that he deserved what happened to him. And so these aren’t – these aren’t people that I really want talking about race, anti blackness, whatever, in general, but especially if at least one of the two is coming into it from this position of like we shouldn’t really be expected to care and like and like their their past has just been not great.
And so like, we are not even a minute in and I’m like *heavy sigh*
How does fandom’s empathy gap come into play when the trauma of POC is on the table? Why does the empathy that fans extend to white characters, fans, and performers, hit a hard wall at POC – especially when it comes to Black characters, fans, and performers in my direct experience?
In the Slate.com article “I Don’t Feel Your Pain”, author Jason Silverstein uses the following example as he describes the racial empathy gap:
Let’s do a quick experiment. You watch a needle pierce someone’s skin. Do you feel this person’s pain? Does it matter if the person’s skin is white or black?
For many people, race does matter, even if they don’t know it. They feel more empathy when they see white skin pierced than black. This is known as the racial empathy gap.
The way that non-Black people literally do not believe that Black people feel the same levels of physical pain – documented through over a century of studies – is one way that we see the empathy gap play out. However, this isn’t the way that it tends to play out in fandom because there’s no one out there pricking fans of color with pins to see if we bleed the same color and amount. (Yet.)
But what they do is constantly privilege white feelings over Black ones.
To be entirely honest here, June was probably the busiest I’ve been aside from the first two weeks of January where I was documenting the racism Rey/Kylo fans were slinging John Boyega’s way. June was ALSO (I mean, like January) a very racist month. I mean, my god, I basically didn’t get to do what I wanted to do with my site content because I had to deal with the fact that racists in fandom haven’t figured out that they can just ignore me instead of shit talking and slandering me endlessly.
And I’m trying to work as much as I can because again, I’m basically my family’s breadwinner and that is… a lot, so my hierarchy of writing (and reading) goes a little something like Day Job > (Freelance if I Can Get It >) Patreon > Website.
July is already looking like it’ll be busy, but I’ve whipped out my Happy Planner for the first time in about two months and I plan to get shit done – barring a hurricane or a massive terrible political moment, of course.
Stitch's Media Mix 
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