Recently, there’s been a spate of fannish and original writers claiming that they’re so afraid of negative reception and responses from people of color, that they refrain from writing characters of color in their works.

We saw this during Amy Lane’s racist mess (where she wrote a book that had a black character refer to himself as a monkey) where dozens of M/M authors rushing to defend her claimed that POC were so scary and aggressive in defending themselves from racism that they were perpetuating (racial slurs as “cute” petnames and objectification in droves) that they’d never be writing characters of color again.

We also saw it a couple months ago in fandom where BNF Franzeska decided that the best response to Black fans pointing out racism towards Finn in Star Wars to write thousands of words of white washed fandom history that contained comments about how we (people of color willfully misidentified as white social justice warriors jonesing for ally cookies) were why they weren’t writing Finn.

Her post claimed that white writers were terrified of being accused of racism for… constantly imbuing their Finn-characterization with stereotypes of black masculinity and objectifying Finn’s body.

I still see my fellow fans of color dealing with that shit now, damn near three months after all of the work Black fans and anti-racist allies put into writing and talking about fandom’s racism. It’s still a thing that I see people claiming as if researching and respecting characters and people of color in fandom is so damn difficult!

These authors’ excuse for unbroken whiteness in their fiction appears to be that it’s downright terrifying to imagine people of color who’ve asked for characters like them to be written responsibly getting annoyed with racist portrayals of these characters of color.

You know, because it’s all about hurt white feelings in the end and it’s more upsetting to be confronted about their racism than to be confronted by racism.

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