Tag: antiblackness

When Transformative Fandom Passes The Buck On Representation In Fandom

Stitch12 Comments

“Well if there were more well-written characters of color, I’d focus on them,” is a recurring excuse for the way content is unfairly weighted towards white characters in Western media fandoms.

I have heard it used for over a decade and it’s an excuse used to successfully argue that the thing stopping them from caring about Black/brown people in their shows is… quality and quantity.

Back when we were hearing the first rumblings of rumors for Pacific Rim Uprising’s John Boyega connection, my friend Holly over at DiverseHighFantasy posted on Tumblr that:

The PacRim fandom is already chanting for no romance in 2, but wait till they see whiteguy Jaeger Tech #3 and whiteguy cafeteria server in a 2 second shot together.

The post on Tumblr currently has over fourteen thousand notes and considering how from the jump people were insulting Holly, accusing her of “a homophobic microaggression”, saying “let women like things”… .it probably hasn’t gotten much better. From John Boyega’s interviews and how he talked about why he wanted to be a producer – this film was his production company’s first outing – we knew that the film was going to probably have a diverse cast of characters.

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Link Lineup – November BONUS

Stitch

Everyone’s writing such good content and I can’t actually bring myself to wait until December to share some of the stuff I’ve read since the last Link Lineup post! So bonus links for all!

The Business of Selling White Women the Righteousness of Their Own Anger

After all, it was a white woman feigning outrage (that she later admitted was a lie) that killed Emmet Till in the first place. But while white readers ordered so many books about white privilege during the summer of Black Lives Matter protests over the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that they created a shortage, the majority of books about women’s anger often depict all women’s anger as being equal, a force for good and never a tool used to silence and punish others; they largely ignore the slew of white women having meltdowns at the sight of non-white people having barbeques, enjoying swimming pools, or birdwatching that abound on the internet. Perhaps that’s because the idea that white women’s anger is, has been, and continues to be a source of terror for a lot of marginalized people is simply not something white women, even “good” white women who marched for Floyd and Taylor, are particularly interested in buying.

I think it’s been interesting how I have constantly been accused of anger – when I am at best mildly annoyed and deeply inconvenienced – by white people who are angry that I exist and that I write what I do.

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[Image Post + Essay] On Performative Anti-Racism

Stitch

Originally posted on Patreon July 29, 2020

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

If you’re on social media, I’m sure you’ve seen people show their support of Black Lives Matter as a movement while making it clear that they don’t give a damn about Black people in “their” spaces. 

The folks in fandom with #BLM in their bios or in their display names who tweet snide and shitty things about Black people in their fandoms. The folks who use their – or their celebrity or political favorite’s – donation to charity to say that they care more about Black people than… Black people do. Fans, businesses, and celebrities known for literally making Black people stress out from how they talk about us all were performing anti-racism and professing to be ready to unlearn antiblackness.

Even SM Entertainment got into the swing of things when they released a statement in June about how they were “new to the conversation” (despite hiring Black people to dance, write, record demos, etc for them for decades). 

But it’s all been incredibly performative.

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Link Lineup – October 2020

Stitch

Hey friends and assorted nerds, I come bearing some links to things that have held my attention since last time we did this! Go read, watch, or listen to them right away!

John Boyega: ‘I’m the only cast member whose experience of Star Wars was based on their race’

“I’m the only cast member who had their own unique experience of that franchise based on their race,” he says, holding my gaze. “Let’s just leave it like that. It makes you angry with a process like that. It makes you much more militant; it changes you. Because you realise, ‘I got given this opportunity but I’m in an industry that wasn’t even ready for me.’ Nobody else in the cast had people saying they were going to boycott the movie because [they were in it]. Nobody else had the uproar and death threats sent to their Instagram DMs and social media, saying, ‘Black this and black that and you shouldn’t be a Stormtrooper.’ Nobody else had that experience. But yet people are surprised that I’m this way. That’s my frustration.”

2020 has been a year where I have consistently been proven correct about things. Case in point? I knew that the Star Wars fandom’s unending racism absolutely was impacting how John moved throughout the world. I knew it was taking a toll on him across his time as Finn. And I mean, he confirmed it. He also talked about how antiblackness in the industry – from the people working around him and from casual oversights – left him essentially wounded. Star Wars should’ve been a positive and affirming nerd experience for John, but it really was not.

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Black American Privilege: A Poem

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Black American privilege looks like

Being barked at in the elevator at your Miami university,

hours after weeping with your friends

in the English department,

following Trump’s election.

It looks like being told that you’re

“pretty for a Black girl”

Over and fucking over.

It looks like having people touch your hair

Everywhere.

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Apologies, Please

Stitch

I don’t apologize unless I mean it.

More people should be like that.

Especially when it comes to minor to major antiblackness in media like the kind we constantly do see from Korean pop and hip-hop artists. If you don’t mean it when you apologize, why are you apologizing in the first place?

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Some tough truths for you…

Stitch

Originally, this was a tweet thread I did last night.

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.

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

Stitch7 Comments

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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This Shit Is Hard (On Current Antiblack Events)

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It is very difficult to create meaningful, hopeful content at a time like this when we are watching Black people around the country protest our continuing oppression and the fact that our murders can now be recorded… and ignored because somehow that’s not enough proof of wrongdoing.

We live in a country that claims to be better than everyone else even though

  • We have over a hundred thousand documented COVID-19 deaths specifically because the administration does not care about us and politicians do not care about us and once they saw which communities were disproportionately affected – and dying – just sort of Kanye shrugged their way out of caring or acting
  • Our literal infrastructure – bridges, dams, etc – is crumbling around us as I type this
  • Thousands of Puerto Ricans died in Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 and the mainland has never once treated them with the respect that they deserve. As recently as February 2019, when I took off from a flight from San Juan, the island was not 100%
  • One in like five children in the country are either food insecure or are starving
  • If someone loses their job in this country, they lose their health insurance and that of their family as well
  • the Navajo Nation and Native communities are being left to fend for themselves during the COVID-19 crisis in another act of obvious hatred that is linked with a genocidal desire for their nonexistence
  • At the end of the day, it never has been better than most countries out there.

So yeah, it’s hard to create right now.

But on top of that:

It’s hard to get on social media and see anything that can truly distract me. My timeline on twitter is full of photos, videos, and texts about the protests around the country. It’s full of people showing that even in the middle of a pandemic and increasingly public antiblackness, they’re still going to find time to be antiblack on fandom/stan twitter.

It’s hard to see some of the same incredibly antiblack fandoms – and fans – who police (yes, police) how Black people in fandom can care about antiblackness in fandom and who attempt to punish us (by dogpiling us, lying on us, disrupting our fandom existence, shunning us if they can) when we speak up… tweeting about how get that #BlackLivesMatter and pretending that they give two shits about Black people and fatal police brutality and antiblackness.

(It’s been hard as hell seeing non-Black people say like outright that they “don’t have to” talk about what’s happening to us and what’s affecting the Black people in their fandoms because “fandom is my safe space” when Black people have never had a guaranteed safe space in any fandom – not from the antiblackness of the outside world and not from the antiblackness of our peers in fandom.)

It’s hard to realize that the hashtags and the online activism and the donation chains will dry up by this time next week because people really think this ends at any point other than rebellion, resistance, and rising up together.

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[Video] So They Think They’re Talking Black

Stitch

There’s an error in this video that I did actually catch before it posted…

I wanted to open with that because it’s honestly hilarious. I copied the original introduction for this video – which I had originally drafted and recorded last year before the world was Like This – which means that I didn’t update it to include how much work I’ve done across this project.

At this point in 2020 after a solid year of working on this project, we’re at eleven articles, twelve related articles, two Spotify playlists, nine videos including this one, two pieces of Patreon-exclusive content, countless twitter threads, and two podcast appearances.

That is a lot of work, y’all.

And I am honestly maybe only halfway done. Two thirds if I squint.

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What Fandom Racism Looks Like: For Clout and Social Capital

Stitch2 Comments

Across Korean pop/hip-hop twitter, anyone who calls out or even mentions the antiblackness that is a constant from the artists, the industry they’re part of, and the fandom spaces we’re in on and offline… gets accused of doing it for “clout”. 

And by clout, they mean positive power or influence in fandom

Here’s a newsflash for y’all: there’s literally no scenario or fandom where a person of color – or even a white person – talking sharply and critical about the racism in a fandom, in the source material, or from a celebrity gains measurable powerful and positive influence in fandom for it. 

None. 

I have had this site for five years and was on Tumblr talking about racism in fandom for three or so years before that and if you think any of that translated into people overwhelmingly and actually listening to me when I talk about racism in fandom…

You would be extremely wrong. 

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“But Namjoon,” Nothing – Antiblackness in the K-pop Industry and its Fandom Spaces

Stitch1 Comment

Have you checked out the rest of the works in this year-long project yet?

The first time I think I saw a “But Namjoon” in the wild was almost a year ago when Stray Kids’ Bang Chan came under fire for the attempted cornrows in his hair back in mid-April 2019.

During that time, fans of the group would respond to any person with a BTS-related icon that commented on that particular instance of cultural appropriation with comments dismissing their comments because “Don’t you stan BTS”.

Many of the comments were like “But Namjoon [had attempted an afro, had whatever this style is supposed to be, covered that one Shinhwa song, etc] so how can you be critical of anyone else if you like him”.

If this was strictly an attempt at calling out hypocrisy that acknowledged that our faves in this industry are all (largely) similarly problematic when it comes to respecting Black culture(s), maybe I could’ve gotten it. Maybe I could’ve even managed to gloss over it.

But this is not a fandom where that sort of thing happens – most fandoms aren’t.

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