Tag: sam wilson

Fandom Math

StitchLeave a comment

A tag wrangling decision that coddles racists in fandom and emboldens racists to be condescending and antiblack in response to Black fans speaking about it is a racist tag wrangling decision. An archive practice that protects racists’ feelings is a racist archive practice.

Full stop.

This is a decision that was made in order to coddle racists still mad about Sam Wilson being the new Captain America. This was a decision, made just over two weeks from Brave New World‘s release, to prioritize the One True Captain America, center whiteness in fandom, and remind Black fans that we don’t get to have anything at all in fandom.

These films are not different franchises and it’s not a new continuity. There is no need to separate them at the franchise level in the tags. And had Bucky become Captain America instead of Sam, they would not have made this decision. It’s a decision made to insulate them from the reminder that this change has happened and that Captain America is now (and has been for a couple of years) a Black man.

And everyone in the comments and tags condescending to or mocking Black fans as if the ones talking about how bad a look this is are too unintelligent to understand how archives work or what racism looks like? The ones alternating between calling Black fans armchair activists and saying that we should tackle the “real racism” on the archive first – something I’m certain they’d get in the way of discussing too because these people literally will not let Black fans speak on what we see?

Those antiblack assholes can go straight to hell too alongside every single person responsible for that tag wrangling decision.

The Techniques of Erasure

Stitch16 Comments

Word Cloud - Techniques of Erasure

This is part one of a hybrid essay-rant series focusing on fandom (the collective community) and its intense race/racism problems. If you’re new to my blog and to this project, start here with the introduction post. Make sure to click the links and read the content because they’ll add further nuance to the essay here.

In addition to talking about race and racism, this post also mentions incest (with regard to how fandom interprets familial relationships to suit their shipping needs).

One thing that becomes overwhelmingly clear when it comes to the treatment of characters of color is the lengths that fandom is willing to go to in order to get them out of the way of their favorite white character ships. There are so many techniques that we could tackle, many of them framed subtly enough that it’s difficult to combat them, but for the purposes of this post we’re going to look at five of the most popular:

  1. Distancing
  2. Willful misinterpretation of relationships
  3. Theorizing that a character of color is really evil (and therefore shouldn’t be shipped/the relationship should be placed under suspicion)
  4. Deciding that a character of color in a POC/White Fandom Darling ship is actually asexual and/or a “strong [race/ethnicity] man/woman/non-binary person that don’t need no significant other”
  5. POC reduced to an agony aunt character to get white characters together

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