The original headline for this piece was supposed to be “people are so weird about Black women on the internet,” but that didn’t do enough. It doesn’t say enough.
It’s not just that people are some unspecified but supposedly harmless form of “weird” when they see a Black woman (or queer or femme) online speak on anything with any seriousness.
It’s that they’re racist.
People aren’t weird about Black women online.
They’re racist to them.
Read More »This piece on racist spite fic – sparked by someone writing thousands of words of such to get back at “antis” in the MDZS fandom after a BNF requested and then received racist threadfic – is getting clicks again and I know why.
It’s because, as is the case when racists in fandom do something racist… they never get the same consequences or pushback as people like me calling out racism or just speaking about it mildly. So people are finding out that the two people involved did this racist thing and then a third person did a more racist thing. Two years later. Because BNFs can do no wrong. Obviously.
But this isn’t the point of the audiopost, not fully.
Although, I will say it’s wild to see people who actively participate (present tense) in harassing, mocking, and punishing me for talking about racism in any fandom speak out against “hunting” people across the internet and out of fandom after they continue to do just that to me,
The point of this audio post is the horse I’m beating.
It’s the “you guys need to leave me out of your shit” of it all.
Especially because it’s not like you’re sharing my work with people who will read it in good faith or like you’re defending me at the risk of your own reputation and relationships. The vast majority of people who share my work do so knowing the people they’re linking it to will say awful shit about me. The majority of the people who invoke my name as some fandom spectre of anti racism do so knowing that they’re speaking to people who have a messed up mythology of me in their minds.
And honestly?
You all know the company you keep.
Keep me out of it!
A little guilty pleasure I must admit to… I love seeing other people’s apologies.
Especially when they’re celebrities. You may have guessed this because I have a whole article about celebrity apologies for antiblackness and other racisms and how fans should respond especially when they aren’t of the offended/harmed party.
One of the things that I find fascinating, but unsurprising when it comes to apologies? How few apologies I’ve gotten over the years.
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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
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.
Read More »I don’t think I am or should be above critique. I’m at critique, craving those rare moments where someone will sit down and send a long meaty email for me to chew on as I rewrite… And knowing how how rare it is.
I’m not getting critique so much as harassment people then claim is critique as if there’s anything I can learn from unintelligent racists spending years lying about me…
Take the reaction to the woobification article. People called me racist, said I hated abuse survivors, said I had internalized homophobia and didn’t understand queer coded villains. Those aren’t criticisms and they’re not true in the slightest. They also hold no basis in what I actually wrote. Few critical (negative) engagements with my work actually address my work?
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A friend sent me a Reddit post in the r/FanFiction subreddit made by a Black fan venting (it’s literally tagged as such) about how it feels for her to read fan fiction while Black and essentially looking for support. Fandom being fandom – aka “racist as hell” – the most highly upvoted comments in the sub on her comment are from people insulting her, insisting that she’s an entitled “Black American” for venting, and complaining about “wokeness” in fandom (and some that even wind up getting in digs at people like myself apparently leading the charge).
A common thread across many of the comments? They’re not just telling the OP to “make your own” – especially in the case of Reader Inserts, but they’re also assuming she doesn’t contribute anything to fandom at all in the first place. If she’s “just” complaining without contributing – even though she says she’s a writer and has a clear history of engaging on the sub and other parts of reddit as a writer -, then it’s not her place to complain.
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The thing about the statements in that meme is… they all exist in some form. You can read one of them below in the screenshot in my second embedded tweet and the others went viral over twitter – like the full clown take about AO3 doing anti racism leading to wiping out entire East Asian media fandom collections.
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I’m tired of being told that I have somehow imagined racism in fandom.
Whether it’s an interaction between myself and someone else, a subtweet thread I come across, a cosplayer in Blackface condescending at everyone, or racism in a piece of fanwork or fandom itself… I am sick to death of being told I’ve somehow managed to exercise my imagination in a way that has “made up” racism in fandom and/or from the source media.
And so are a lot of other people of color across fandom.
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Captions:
Image A: The “Don’t make me tap the sign” meme with bottom text that reads: “Declaring that the real problem with how we talk about racism is “angry” POC and not racists harming and harassing them is… racist. Bitch.”
Image B: The “Don’t make me tap the sign” mtoeme with bottom text that reads: “If you’re angrier at POC in any fandom for being “mean” – cussing, snarking, etc. – when speaking about racism in fandom than you are at racists for BEING RACIST IN FANDOM… you’re a fucking racist.
Why do racists keep getting to define the rules of engagement? Why do they get to position themselves as neutral and unbiased, when they’re clearly biased in favor of white supremacy in a given space? Why is it that racists get to declare POC “too angry” to listen to and have people listen to them instead… As they angrily insult the “too mean” POC simply asking people to stop being less racist. Do people think this isn’t their entire goal? To make listening to anti racists/stopping racism in any space or capacity too hard or scary to do.
It’s wild that we have to be nice to racists… or else they won’t listen to us? Because kindness is so important to them.
Apparently.
Except… have you ever noticed that the people who insist that conversations about racism just have to be done at their tone and in a way that they’ve previously signed off… are some of the nastiest assholes on the internet?
I had a great time talking with Maggie and V over at imetyouonlj, a really cool fandom podcast that’s just tons of fun! Please go check it out!
(Pretty much they’re everywhere you get your podcasts!)
Have fun and happy listening!
Content Notes: descriptions of police brutality and violence from law enforcement that includes sexual violence and violence against vulnerable people like children. Screenshots that mention harassment that include racism, threats, harassers urging people to self harm, and doxxing.
I also swear a lot and in a way that can be read as “at” the people who pull the nonsense I’m talking about.
Genuinely, I can hardly think of a clearer example of what fandom brain rot does to a person than the repeated insistence across multiple fandoms that ACAB – “All Cops Are Bastards” – somehow includes people on the internet who are critical of fandom at any level including just… being critical of racism in fandom and media in public.
The thing is that yes, ACAB as a term existed well before the horrific events of Summer 2020, the time period when lots of people on your social media feeds decided to put the acronym in their bios and display names for the first time… But it has never revolved around anything other than rejecting the violence that law enforcement/policing does as a system.
As Victoria Gagliardo-Silver wrote in her op-ed “What I mean when I say I want to abolish the police“:
Something is very, very wrong in American police culture. This is why the saying “ACAB” — or “All cops are b*ds” — has become a popular rallying cry. It doesn’t actually mean every single cop is a bad cop, just like saying Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean white lives don’t. “ACAB” means every single police officer is complicit in a system that actively devalues the lives of people of color. Bad cops are encouraged in their harm by the silence of the ones who see themselves as “good.”
Holding one police officer accountable every time a black person is killed by police is not enough. The issue isn’t “a few bad apples”; it’s a tree that is rotting from the inside out, spreading its poison.
ACAB serves as a punchy shorthand referring to the way that there can’t be such a thing as “good cops” in a field fueled by violence including fatal antiblackness, sexual violence, theft, bigotry beyond all of that, and just… an entitlement to other people’s lives in literal cases.
I understand that with this somewhat valid fear of random people harassing others over fandom – a thing that happens no matter what you’re into – it is tempting to not just accuse people of policing your fandom experience… but to compare them to the real police.
“Fandom police” as a term has been around for ages too… but it’s the way it’s being used now to refer to fans as actual cops that’s literally the problem.
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As we’ve covered, there’s a specific class of fandom weenie that I cannot stand because of how willing they are to support racists and racism in fandom using their POC-ness as a shield.
I use “PickMe POC” as a term for them – which remains not a slur despite what rabid racists in fandom insist – but they also define themselves as POC TOO. As in “I’m a POC TOO… and this isn’t racist/this other POC is actually the real problem in fandom and somehow racist against me for pointing out racism”.
In the… decade or so since I started actively speaking out against racism in fandom spaces and in media – primarily antiblackness, but I’ve talked about whitewashing, anti Native racism in fanworks, the weird way white fans can approach East Asian celebrities or characters in different fandoms , etc – who pushes back against me has shifted.
First, the loudest people were white people who prefaced everything with “I’m queer and” or “i’m a trauma survivor and”. But as people started to absorb a particular form of Tumblr social justice diss-course that hinged even more heavily on specific identity politics, it shifted to “I’m a POC and”.
That wasn’t really a thing in fandom discourses when I was growing up in fandom.
(Probably because for most of modern fandom, anytime you’d preface a conversation on racism by talking about how you were affected by racism here as a person of color, people would basically laugh you out of the room and/or gaslight you because you were “too close” to the issue and couldn’t be seeing things straight.)
Read More »You can find the original thread here but I’ve expanded and edited my own thoughts to cover more of what’s happening with DARVO because it’s something I’m super interested in talking about because it’s happening constantly and people just… don’t see it or care.
Thinking about Elle’s thread on weaponized specificity and transmisogyny as well as May‘s thread riffing off of it. I don’t want to derail so here are thoughts on how I deal with weaponized specificity here.
It’s a goalpost moving form of derailing, obviously.
It’s something that excuses what people then do to you.
Read More »I hate this thing people across fandom do where they need people to:
And if you don’t do the things they demand of you (for some reason… but you do not know these people and they do not know you or anything about you), they will then never listen to you about what you’re actually saying… because you are bad and wrong for not listening to them about this thing.
So they won’t listen to you talk about racism in fandom. They won’t listen to you when you say that no one should be harassed in or because of fandom. They won’t accept that you can think that and also want people to understand that bigotry doesn’t belong in fandom.
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I’m “cheating” this month by using a meme I didn’t create! I can’t remember who the OP is, but if you know or are that person, thanks for that, link me to the original and I’ll boost it because it rocks. One of my friends tagged me in this meme, which uses Dr. Manhattan blasting someone into stardust from Watchmen and it’s perfect because this is… my experience.
There are so many people in different fandoms who think I need to take their wild and absolutely incorrect interpretation of my work seriously and… I don’t think I will.
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