seeing folks subtweeting and missing the entire fucking point because they literally do NOT know the context that comes from like at least a decade of fandom pushing back against fans of color talking about racism in super specific but also well-camouflaged ways

"who's out here conflating antis and folks being critical of racism in fandom?"

uh... fucking everyone? that's literally a massive problem fans of color who talk about racism in fandom in any capacity have been talking about for like a decade

again i ask how people who spend so much time on the internet reading are SO FUCKING BAD at understanding what they're reading on the internet

Like when someone goes "haha can you believe some sad anti fuck thinks shipping a white m/f ship is racist" they're literally Not Thinking about how there's been at least a decade of fans of color talking about racism in fandom and how it shows IN SHIPPING

Like from 2016, I know for a fact that Black fans who talked about the racism present in Rey/Kylo fandom and in how the fandom zoomed into Kylo as their great white hope *at finn's direct expense* were rewritten as antis regardless of HOW they talked about the ship.

Black Iris West fans defending the character AND her actress from misogynoir coming from fanboys and "Snowbarry" shippers were repainted as toxic antis by people who were sharing explicitly racist comments and @-ing Candice Patton with nasty comments.

Like...

Across the past decade of fandom (hello Merlin fandom, don't think I forgot your nasty ass misogynoir towards Gwen/Angel), Black fans who've brought up what fandom says or does to Black characters/fans/performers have been framed as anti-fandom.

If you're here in 2019 like "oh my god no one SAYS THAT about folks critical of fandom's racism" you've literally proven that you don't know shit about how fandom has honestly ALWAYS worked to silence fans of color and our complaints about racism in fandom.

There are fans of color who are in their 40s/50s/60s who can tell you how racism in fandom has played out and how they were frequently silenced for talking about race and racism pre-Racefail

"there's a difference between 'if you ship x you're racist"and 'there's structural racism behind the popularity of x'"

No shit? But who do y'all think are the main people who (need to) flatten the latter commentary into the former?

(Also sometimes it *is* easier/faster to say that x is a racist ship than to go over the reasons why it's racist for the fiftieth time to people who don't give a shit, but either way it's not like y'all are actually reading the nuanced critiques and learning from them?

A bunch of y'all lump all criticism together as the former, refuse to understand why anyone would call a ship or its fandom racist, and then condescendingly subtweet about how fans of color are weaponizing their POC-Ness so it's easier to assume Bad Faith.

So... )

Like after the fiftieth time of having to explain to yet another non-Black person why the Rey/Kylo or Barry/Caitlin or Kara/Anyone White fandom why the fixation on white characters that came along with racist-ly dunking on a Black character, it becomes easier to just say...

"Those ships are racist."

Because at the point where Black fans are seeing fans of that ship write essays about how Finn is a misogynist monster, Iris West is a bitch who needs to die, and all the Black people in Kara's life exist to serve her platonically of anything...

What else do we call these ships?

Because tweets are only so long y'all and again, it's NOT like the people doing this care what we're saying and would pay attention if we were nicer in the face of folks in fandom constantly dehumanizing and dismissing Black characters...

I feel like it's actually derailing when fans of color are talking about how folks in fandom dehumanize critical fans of color and dismiss us and someone else is like "racism is bad and some criticism is good, but what about antis who call people names" and here's why:

It's an attempt to end the current conversation and bring it back to what's actually important (to fandom)... which isn't checking the racism coming from fans and being directed at fans of color.

Imagine the ignorance of asking a fan of color to explain why they might feel sidelined by an award win for a space where whiteness (and white maleness in slash) is pretty much held up as The Ideal and criticism is explicitly unwelcome.

Imagine that.

(I once started a What Fandom Racism Looks Like video project on the discrepancies between shipping and stories for Black characters on the Ao3 in popular source fandoms and it was so depressing that I stopped the project at the data collection stage and never went back.)

I want to make sure everything is pretty well-organized as folks who don't follow me or Rukmini and/or who don't talk to fans of color dissatisfied with the state of fandom and how it's framed as ~uptopic for all~ might come across this thread and get lost so... thread-ception:

This past weekend the AO3 won a Hugo Award for Best Related (work?). Yesterday, the brilliant Dr. Rukmini Pande wrote a thread validating the conflicted feelings of fans of color towards a momentous moment for what's been a racist space in fandom: https://twitter.com/RukminiPande/status/1163807782832750592?s=20

You can see Rukmini and I talk underneath several of her tweets about the issues she brings up and that fandom doesn't want brought up.

I made my own thread about not being part of the "Our" in AO3 as fans of color: https://twitter.com/stichomancery/status/1163816540640182278?s=20

Rukmini then made a thread about how critical fans of color are (mis) treated in fandom, building off of one of my replies to her about how people talk about me my work in dehumanizing ways: https://twitter.com/RukminiPande/status/1163827510594826242?s=20

So in case you're lost: two fans of color are talking to each other and on our own about racism we've experienced and witnessed in fandom and why the AO3's win and the "validation" of transformative fandom is a) complicated as hell to navigate and b) may lead to further silencing

Our POVs:

a) that fandom prioritizes whiteness in characters/fans and deprioritizes people of color and dehumanizes them when they're inconvenient

and

b) that a lot of people purposefully lump "anti[fan]" with critical fan to allow dismissing/dehumanizing critics of color

are what people have been subtweeting and trying to dismiss and/or derail since about an hour or two after Rukmini's first tweet picked up some traction.

But there's no racism in fandom and no deeply pressing need to protect whiteness in fandom spaces?

Cool cool.

(So if you see posts about how "no one's calling fandom critics antis" or "we're just against people using conversations about racism as a weapon" or similar from about the past 24 hours SPECIFICALLY, there's a huge chance they're subtweeting AT LEAST the two of us.)

A moomoo: "I'm white and i know it's not my place to express firm thoughts about racism in fandom not/existing, but here's a 5+ tweet thread about how the main problem isn't fandom, it's the source writers not giving us a focus on characters of color to build from"

That idea that transformative fandom is mainly (incidentally) racist because it's the source media that won't provide powerful/strong/well-written characters of color for fans to love falls apart when you look at how fandom does(n't) Engage with western media about chars of color

Like transformative fandom is full of people actively choosing not to focus on characters of color because white characters exist.

Again: the popularity of Clint Barton from Thor onward, Hux in Star Wars, Martin Freeman in Black Panther... It's legit endless.

There are tons of diverse source material that focuses on well-written characters of color. Transformative fandom either isn't consuming it or, when they consume it, zooms right into two white characters who barely talk to each other/don't like each other.

That's a fact.

I talked about this in 2016!
( https://stitcharchive.wordpress.com/2016/05/07/racism-in-fandom-isnt-entirely-the-fault-of-the/)
( https://stitcharchive.wordpress.com/2016/08/13/i-need-fans-to-stop-exclusively-blaming-the-source/)
( https://stitcharchive.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/plunniewhisperer-stitchmediamix-criticizing/)

I've talked repeatedly about how in the shippy sections of MCU fandom, the almost *immediate* response to the Black Panther announcement and the film itself was to turn Wakanda into a vacay spot for white characters and Wakandans into their not-so-savage mammy figures. https://twitter.com/stichomancery/status/1164597772806447104

I'm talking ENDLESS white queens/kings of Wakanda, T'challa and Shuri being killed off or otherwise indisposed so white characters have to handle Wakanda, Wakanda as a hot honeymoon spot for Stucky or Stony, Darcy Lewis (Thor 1/2) in Wakanda PERIOD

It was a lot.

Black Panther is one of the best movies in the MCU. Period. That MCU fandom pretty much uses it/its settings to prop up other ships/characters - like not even the Black ones in the MCU previously - is a sign that the problem isn't with source material 100%... it's with fandom.