What Fandom Racism Looks Like: The Cult(ure) of Nice

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In the OTW Election Q&A segment on “AO3 Content Policy and Warnings”, there’s a merged question that asks the candidates:

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:

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Matt Wallace: Grapes, Malt, & Hops: Blended Fantasy [Guest Post and Giveaway]

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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.

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Stitch Has THOUGHTS on that DKDK TV Video on BLM, Cultural Appropriation, and… Racial Slurs

Stitch

For those of y’all that like MP3 versions of things~

https://soundcloud.com/zina-marie-772368491/thoughts-on-that-dkdktv-video-on-blm/s-vscdUZXRliw

The DKDKTV video that I’m talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugFtZpctMbQ

Transcript

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*

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Fandom Racism 101: Clocking and Closing The Empathy Gap

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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.

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Stitch Has July (Writing) Plans

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June… happened hard.

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.

But I’m trying, y’all.

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Stitch’s Hamilfilm Thoughts

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As always, if you don’t like when things you like get criticized on any level… skip this post, beloveds!

My friend K got me into Hamilton.

K and I met in our senior seminar in the history department at our alma mater. She went on to get her MA in History and I went to English  Literature. When Hamilton was getting popular and she’d already traveled to see the show once before, she introduced me to what was (and remains) a stellar musical experience at the height of its early popularity. If not for K, I don’t think I would’ve cared as much as I actually do about Hamilton –

Nor would I have a framework to build any critical thoughts.

Fast forward to July 2020 and well, I actually still think it’s a great musical.

However, I also have… thoughts on Hamilton after what feels like an eternity.

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[Stitch Talks Ish] Episode 6: When Black Lives Matter, But Black Opinions Don’t

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Episode Notes

Transcript

Hello, darlings!

So this is episode – officially, Episode Six-  of Stitch Talks Ish. In the timeline, it’s Episode Seven because we had a bonus episode last month, I believe to celebrate the release of Yoongi’s second mixtape as Agust D, D-2. So, if you haven’t listened to that episode already please go check it out.

So this episode is called when “Black Lives Matter, but Black Opinions Don’t” because I have spent pretty much all of June and part of May realizing that for a lot of people, you know hashtagging, sharing petitions, and donating that is really all They think they have to do to be antiracist whether in fandom, in public, in their day to day lives, whatever.

They do the bare minimum, which is publicly perform antiracism.

They’ve bought the books. they own White Fragility. They share their few friends of colors’ GoFundMe ease and cashapps. They really do care about racism in the abstract.

And of course, they definitely don’t want Black people being killed because we’re Black, but they also don’t really care about us as people.

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Romance Is A Bonus Book: Roughly Retrospective

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a tvN poster for Romance is a Bonus Book that shows Kang Dan-i and Cha Eun-ho cuddled up close and looking at the viewer. Dan-I has a book in her hand and a visible smile on her face. Eun-ho has a slight smile on his face
This is the tvN cover for the series, found here.

I can’t think of any drama that makes me happier than 2019’s Romance Is A Bonus Book does.

Written by Jung Hyun-jung and directed by Lee Jeong-hyo, this scripted romantic drama has so much going for it… and had my heart from the first few minutes of the very first episode. Like from the literal moment that Lee Jong-suk’s Cha Eun-ho sees Lee Na-young’s Kang Dan-i in her wedding dress and whispers a stunned compliment about how beautiful she looks, I was in.

Every time I rewatch Romance is a Bonus Book, I’m overwhelmed by how much fierce fondness I feel for the leads. This is my first drama experience with Lee Na-young, but my second with Lee Jong-Suk (my niece had me start W a few years back) and so I didn’t know what to expect from her Dan-i or their chemistry as a couple.

From the start though, I fell for Dan-i. I’m not being dramatic here. I fell hard for her.

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Antiblackness in (Service of) the Archive: A Statement

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Huge chunks of transformative fandom are currently playing the most actively antiblack game of telephone in the world.

And I’m the subject.

What will I be by the time they’re done? I’m already being compared to trans exclusionary radical feminists despite being nonbinary, accused of holding grudges against people I don’t know and have likely never interacted with, and being slandered literally every single time that someone else mentions me as an author to read.

And all because I write about racism in fandom in a relatively sharp tone.

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Thread Collection: Antiblackness in the Archive (6/14)

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I just did a thread on Twitter about the specific ways that antiblackness manifests in fandom via fanworks on the Archive of Our Own (or any other hosting site, to be fair) revolving around punishing, harming, killing, etc Black characters and since some of y’all aren’t on Twitter or in the event that you’re blocked on my main… I turned it into a blog post lightly edited since I don’t have to abbreviate points for Twitter’s character count.

There’s a thing about the Racism on the Archive of Our Own that i wanted to mention.

The racism specifically directed at Black characters (and sometimes fans and performers) in some fanworks on the archive does diverge somewhat from racism aimed at non-Black East Asian or Latinx characters for example:

All characters of color get fanworks that are full of mild to major racist stereotypes and that is definitely a thing I don’t know how to fix via reporting or tagging.

But Black characters get that and abusive fan content to tear them down, dehumanize them, or put them in their place.

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I Am Not My White Friends’ Keeper

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Here’s an interesting fact that you might not have known before this very moment: I, the Stitch, am apparently responsible for the behavior of any white person I am friendly or friends with inside of fandom. It doesn’t matter if I’ve seen the behavior or not. It doesn’t matter if everyone involved is an adult or not.

I personally am responsible for handling my white friends.

Or at least that’s what one Hannibal fan made it their point to claim when tagging me into a thread that I demanded that I take responsibility for and handle a white friend whose opinions on racebent characters in the show aren’t my opinions on racebending and whose behavior in fandom isn’t something I can or do control.

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Why Write About Fandom Racism At A Time Like This?

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The short answer?

We live in a racist world and that world doesn’t stop existing when someone crosses over some kind of threshold to fandom.

The long answer?

In fact, because fandom communities are insular and twist themselves in circles to avoid engaging meaningfully with things that disturb the peace that they’ve surrounded themselves in –

The racism that folks have as baggage lugged around offline? Gets stuffed full of more racism and carted around to other fandoms.

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On Korean Artists Using Their Platforms to Say that Black Lives Matter

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I didn’t expect that I’d be writing about the Black Lives Matter movement in the context of Korean pop and hip hop music – or their fandoms.

But that’s what this post is actually about – barring some all too necessary backstory about fatal antiblackness and police brutality in this country.

Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created the Black Lives Matter movement began in 2013 as a hashtag (#BlackLivesMatter) in direct response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who had murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin the year before.

I remember the birth of the movement, but more than that, I remember watching the news when Zimmerman was acquitted. I remember clearly feeling anger that that man killed a child only a few years older than my oldest nieceling and was going to get away with it. Because we watched as we were told once again that Black lives didn’t matter.

I say once again because the United States is one of many countries to make it clear that Black people – our lives, our opinions, and our hopes – do not truly matter to them. The United States has a history that started with the Triangle Trade, kept on going through Reconstruction Era white supremacy up to the Civil Rights movement and –

Just hasn’t stopped.

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June Content Calendar

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I don’t really have an intro to June’s (hopefully) upcoming content. I genuinely don’t have the energy right now. If you haven’t checked out the one post I’ve done so far about what’s going on in the US following the murder of George Floyd, please do so.

June… is going to be rough. I’m going to do my best, but… we’ll see how that goes.

Thank you as always for your support and continued readership!

Website Content

  • Fandom Racism 101: Size Matters
  • Romance is a Bonus Book Retrospective
  • Room for Criticism In Fandom, Or Nah
  • WFRLL (K-Pop) – Survival/Reality Shows
  • Stitch Talks Ish: When Black Lives Matter But Black Opinions Don’t
  • Dominion ARC Review

Patreon Content

  • Repost Hire The Stitch
  • WIP Post – Pillars of Fandom
  • Audio Backlog – Girls (Not) On Top
  • Photo Essay/Image Post: Korean Pop Culture Clout and Criticism
  • Finished Draft: Either Part 5 of The Hollows Reread or Pillars of Fandom
  • Unexclusive Audio: It’s Time For Urban Fantasy to Rethink It’s Clear Cop Focus
  • Exclusive Audio:
  • Fiction/Poetry: Cannibalism Surprise (fiction from May) & Self Care Looks Like (Poetry)