So updates. @DrWilliamProct1 has emailed me an apology and I have now responded. I'm putting both up here because I want this information to remain clear and public so it cannot be twisted in any way at a later date.

Transcript: Dear Samari,

I am emailing to express my sincere apologies for the hurt and pain I have caused you with both the black comics series, the shift to multicultural comics, and the email exchange between Henry Jenkins and I.

I am autistic, and I was writing in a state of distress brought on by autistic meltdown, and did not follow my usual procedures in asking someone to check how I am communicating on this occasion. Consequently, I often do not recognize tone, whether in person, in email, or on >

social media. My comments regarding yourself were particularly inappropriate, and I am truly sorry for this. I was trying to be an ally and I failed miserably on this occasion. I admire you and your scholarship greatly. I will ensure that I continue working on understanding >

structural racism, and listening to people of colour as well as people in marginalized and disempowered positions, rather than engaging in debate as a white, male academic. I want to really try hard to be an ally.

I am deeply, deeply sorry,

Billy

// end transcript

Here is my response. The transcript will follow below this tweet:

Transcript: Dear Bill,

I want to acknowledge this email and it's intent. As a consequence, I do not accept this apology. I will note this publicly because I think it should be noted publicly, and because I would prefer that there remain public records of these interactions such>

that nothing can be misunderstood later.

First, I believe this email isn't an apology. By choosing to frame this as an event caused by anxiety and autism, you've sidestepped the fact that neither racism nor sexism are in any way a consequence of autism.

There is extremely good work acknowledging this, most prominently the work All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living with Racialised Autism (edited by Lydia Brown, Morénike Giwa-Onaiwu, E. Ashkenazy) as well as this article here.

As someone who cares a great deal about access and does labour on campus of this nature, I am not unaware of the disability community's acknowledgement of the pervasiveness or racism and sexism. Nor am I willing to allow this to slide on behalf of autistic people of colour and

marginalised genders. You do them a disservice and your claim that these are interrelated harms people of colour in your own disability community.

As someone who lives with anxiety and depression myself, I have never used it as an excuse for racism or sexism

nor do I believe that someone would be racist or sexist simply because they are anxious or depressed. That is an ableist and right wing position and it does you no favours to have attempted to mobilise it here. It also elides how many people of colour

(particularly Black people, given history and our contemporary moment) experience anxiety and depression as the result of oppressions such as racism and sexism.

Your effort to shield yourself from accountability by evoking disability in this manner does a disservice to people

in these communities and those allied with them, particularly as it positions your understanding of this as white male centred with room for little other.

Moreover, I am not unaware that this is not the first time you have used this excuse when confronted with your racism or >

sexism. Given that these incidents have continued to occur, I have to assume that despite having acknowledged these errors at the time, you have taken no real steps to prevent them from happening again or at least minimising the harm and damage.

If these were single or rare instances followed by genuine attempts at change, I would have been more open to this conversation, but as it stands I know this to not be the case from multiple accounts from multiple people from the larger media studies community, student community,

and administrative community.

I believe very firmly in holding care and space for people with disabilities, but I do not believe that disability precludes accountability. I work with enough people and have enough of my own issues with mental health to know that this is a foil

at best, a deliberate attempt to mask racism by attempting to position any further pushback as ableist.

I refuse this. Additionally, I do not believe you appreciate my work as I am aware that you have denigrated my work in conversation as well as that of Rukmini's on numerous

occasions. The media studies community has enough whisper networks that I don't have to provide any evidence for this; you will already know it as truth.

As a consequence, this is not an apology. This is a refusal of accountability. And so I refuse it in return.

Sincerely,
Samira Nadkarni

// end transcript

I have put in a lot of work thinking through disability justice over the last five years to make sure I do good work for the communities I serve. I am not letting someone try to do this without being really fucking clear. Also, /everyone/ should read All The Weight of Our Dreams.

And yes, I'm aware he misspelled my name.

Further updates: Multiple people have mentioned that apologies went out publicly/ semi-publicly, but they went out on the comics listserv to which neither Rukmini or I have access (and wouldn't want this). I wanted to see these to see how any larger narrative was being framed.

Here is @DrWilliamProct1's semi-public email on the comics listserv. Transcripts will follow the images as they are text heavy.

Transcript:
Dear colleagues,
First of all, allow me to express my deepest, most sincere apologies for the comments that were shared on the list-serve yesterday. I have emailed Dr Samira Nadakarni and Dr Rukmini Pande separately, two scholars whose work I admire with great >

affection, to offer further apologies.
As members of the list-serve will know, I sent out a call for a series titled Black Comics Matter. I naively believed that I was being supportive, prosocial, and more than anything, an ally, although I fully recognize that the call seemed >

to suggest that I would be editor on the series. With hindsight, that was a mistake, and an enormous failure on my part.
After receiving a few emails that suggested I ask a black scholar to co-curate the series, and others that requested that the topic be expanded to include >

comics created by other nationalities and cultures. I thought this would be a productive maneuver, so I issued an apology email about my failure to understand the issues regarding not having a black scholar, or scholar-of-color, to lead, and to state that an Indian/Kenyan scholar

had kindly offered to co-curate the series, which would now be on multicultural comics.
An email on Friday evening criticized the shift to multiculturalism, and asking that the focus be on black comics helmed by a black scholar. To this, Henry Jenkins replied to the email on >

Saturday afternoon, announcing that we would be running two series in response to criticisms: the first one to focus on black comics, with a black scholar in the lead, and the second, to continue with the series on multiculturalism and comics.

Again, I thought this was a necessary step to repair and correct the offence caused by the items I list above, and I will not be involved at all with either series.
My exchange with Henry was underpinned by several factors.

Firstly, we were trying our best to resolve the issues that had arisen by seeking the opinions and thoughts of black scholars, as well as receiving emails from others. However, for my part, I had been alerted to several tweets had already framed me as a serial racist and a sexist

in workspace(s). Some of this was directed at my academic work, especially an article I published on the John Boyega controversy in Participations. I tried to be very careful and considered in the article, and if I failed to do so, then I apologize profusely.

This is not about me. I am not the victim here. But I think it is important that I explain that I am autistic, and all forms of social communication are difficult, to say the least. I fully appreciate that tone is something I often fail to get right (and indeed, >

do not quite understand as and when tone is problematic). It’s the primary reason why my academic work needs to go through excessive drafts, and to have feedback from others, before it is released into the world. >

For the past five days, I have been in autistic meltdown because of the public circulation of tweets accusing me of serial racism and misogyny. Being autistic is a trial by fire each and every day of my life, and this hit me hard.

I sincerely apologize for the hurt and pain that I have caused Dr Samira Nadakarni and Dr Rukmini Pande. I have much to learn about the right way to speak about race, and clearly, I have failed miserably in this endeavour, both recently and in the past. >

I also promise that I’m going to continue working on understanding structural/ institutional racism rather than engaging in debate with scholars of colour, and those in marginalized and disempowered positions. I recognize that I am in a position of privilege as a white man.

I am truly, truly sorry.

Billy

// end of transcript

I am not going to respond in an email because I am not on that listserv which conveniently would have precluded my response and left his statement as singular context. In fact, had I not made my response public, I would not have been informed of the points of the listserv email.

I think it is important to note that in every email on the MeCCSA list, the only contact email offered was that of Bill Proctor. In fact, when the new academic was brought on for the multicultural comics series, it only added her details and still involved his email address too.

From the email between @DrWilliamProct1 & @henryjenkins made public, I think everyone is aware that he thought it was "a shame" he should step back, that I would perceive this as "a victory," and that he would continue to act behind the scenes on the multiculturalism project.

So any claim to not be involved or to merely act as a facilitator at the origin of this project is something I would dispute.

Following this and a first round of email pushback, he then says he would bring on a Black scholar or scholar of colour, to my mind, in addition to him.

I would like to note that the specificity and need of a Black person working on Black comics is still not something that is yet to be something he either considers or understands. There is a false equivalence made between a Black scholar and any other PoC scholar.

An Indian/ Kenyan scholar was added to the project; implying that Black comics are somehow not about being Black but about a location point in Africa. This does not account for the histories of antiblack racism I noted in South Asian diaspora communities in African countries.

But it also (in a way that I find startlingly telling) strips Blackness from people and puts it to a continent.

If you are only now beginning to understand how massively incomprehensible it would be to have this man in charge of ANY project on race, I don't know what to say.

It should go without saying, but being Indian in Kenya is not the same as being Black. Nor does it invest non-Black PoC with any sort of authority to talk about a project that literally originated with a reference to Black Lives Matter. I am still so shaken by this nonsense.

Moreover, non-Black PoC apparently wrote in asking for there to also be a focus on other PoC. As I've said before, this implied that Black people shouldn't be centred in a project literally named Black Comics Matter in this political moment with all its pasts. That's antiblack.

There is work available publicly to talk about antiblackness within PoC communities so I am not going to do anyone's homework for them (though I offered starter links in my email), but any non-Black PoC academic jumping on board without seeing this as derailing speaks to praxis.

Forgive me for my bluntness, but any scholar who puts decolonial in their biography but isn't going to cede space or push back against antiblackness in the PoC community isn't a scholar you want touching a project that centres race and culture. It is bad politics, bad scholarship

It is a refusal to consider what solidarity means, and it is a refusal to acknowledge that this could not be a decolonial work if its very existence was predicated on erasing the naming of Blackness from the title. I don't know how anyone else misses this. It's so stark.

To be clear: I would have had no problems with the announcement of two projects, as was eventually decided, so long as that was how these projects originated. But the way this was framed and articulated suggested that this was in no way the originating point of this idea.

As a consequence, this did do the work of validating antiblackness in the PoC community. Because that shift from Black to multicultural made it seem like there was only one space and PoC had to compete to get it. And predictably, antiblackness played out.

The choice to later separate the projects at no point addressed this. And again, how does anyone do any sort of antiracist or decolonial practice without understanding this: that a project that has shown this turn inevitably must then reckon with that origin point and choice.

To be honest, that is an ambitious project &, with the right editor, could offer something to this moment that the comics community could have greatly benefitted from: an understanding of how inured we are to competing for resources that we have forgotten the work of solidarity.

However, none of the people involved (two white men, one brown woman) had even begun to see this, let alone process it, let alone have the ability to build skills for it, let alone do it justice. The project would have been the equivalent of any vague multicultural project.

This is why I noted that the project remained problematic. In fact, as the comics listserv email went public, I was in the process of responding to that email to lay all of this out. I was aware that I would likely be vilified for it. It still had to be done.

I cannot emphasise this enough but the genuine reckoning hidden under white white men being real colonial and bad about it, is the fact that this consciousness isn't something comics scholarship is addressing. And how could it under these circumstances, with these editors?

This is what I mean by the sheer paucity of the field. Anyone who isn't fighting is complicit. Anyone who isn't working to address their antiblackness is complicit. Anyone who isn't going to think about the sheer complex frames of immigration, detention, police brutality, >

disability, poverty and resource distribution, geopolitics, carceral systems, queerness, and more... how do you come to this work? With what limitless confidence does anyone assume that basic media literacy equips them to do this? That this project isn't speaking to these things.

Forgive me my bluntness again but none of the people involved have the range. There absolutely are scholars that do, some younger and some established. But that wasn't what was being communicated. This WOC was a complicit shield for this project not acknowledging antiblackness.

If I seem far more able to respond than Rukmini, it is because I was already braced to lay this out. I expected that by telling @henryjenkins and @DrWlliamProct1 that their basic racial literacy was unequal to the task they'd claimed for themselves, I'd pretty much end my career.

I'm extremely okay with this. The skills I build are invested in community and community always needs skills. And also, I make almost nothing in academia so I work as a maritime journalist and that's where I make all my bank. So I was as secure as I could be for this to happen.

To come back to the email @DrWilliamProct1 sent the comics listserv, he notes that I named his history of racism and sexism. I refuse to out any names but yes, people talk and if you've been part of academia long enough, POC networks are an actual thing.

I know of multiple occasions where scholars or students who have challenged his statements have been then told that they have exacerbated his anxiety by naming his missteps and that he is autistic. As my response above shows, that's no excuse for this repeating into a pattern.

I have never hidden this knowledge, though I previously did not name @DrWilliamProct1 directly because if repercussions were to result, they would likely affect Rukmini and not me since I basically avoid him and his projects like I avoid stale fish. However, I put up signs.

I am part of enough networks for young scholars, some formal and some informal, that I felt not warning them would likely lead to people going into these interactions unprepared. For fan studies, he has been actively hostile to Rukmini in the past and I am VERY ride or die.

The Participations paper he references is one in which he claims all the racist bile aimed at John Boyega somehow isn't "real" racism but just fannish anger at messing with canon to include Black stormtroopers.

I'll wait for a minute for you to process this. It's A LOT.

Before everyone jumps into my mentions, yeah, I know, that's a bad take. But you know what? It's published in a journal. It went through peer review. People thought that nonsense was worth reading. It boggles the mind but there it is.

This, by the way, is where I really want to point attention though. Who were the editors? Who were the peer reviewers? Whose critical race theory was so completely disconnected from reality that they let something like this through. More, do they even HAVE that critical ability?

I've been in media studies long enough to say: very possibly not. I think this went through a bunch of people who specialise in a very ~postracial idea of transmedia and reception theory. I might be wrong but I'm kind of batting 100 on the predicting racism front for 3 months now

I don't know how anyone looked at what was happening in fandom or with John Boyega (or even Kelly Marie Tran) and said, "well, this doesn't look like ~real racism."

This, by the way, was published AFTER Rukmini ripped its basic theory apart to show its flaws at FSN.

So everyone in the audience knew (peers), Bill Proctor definitely knew, and she's maybe one of the main critics for race and racism in fandom so, you know, maybe she might be the right person to actually critique this?

And when I mean critique, I don't mean in peer review. I mean, she literally dismantled his argument and all but proved he doesn't know race from a cabbage in a field. And his response to this has been to repeatedly vilify her.

So, naming bad praxis that is racist happened.

And so did his response. Again, I'm going to remind you, racism and autism have nothing to do with each other. And there's no way to misinterpret someone telling you that your argument is enabling racists in fandom to claim canon is any sort of viable reason for racism. No.

And this happened with people in the room. This was at a conference. This paper was STILL published.

I want you to really think about this.

If you don't think people approaching the field aren't reading this as a "big name, big project" thing, you're wrong. What do POC see?

This is so utterly basic. When you read work in the field by a well known scholar that effectively tells you that racism is justified or just "misunderstood" fannish emotions, and you're a scholar of colour, is this a field you want to be inhabiting with extremely limited power?

Every damn day I'm aware of what a fucking hero @RukminiPande is because she saw that. She saw that & she saw the costs. Look at the resources, both institutional, and networked, that @DrWilliamProct1 has. Compare that with Rukmini in India with, at the time, first book at press

And she fucking stood up ANYWAY and, with every critical skill she had, dismantled that argument to the bones of what it was. And people in fan studies have responded ever since by tone policing her. (Yeah, welcome to FSN2019. Links here https://stitchmediamix.com/2019/05/13/fsn2019-and-making-a-statement/)

If you want to know why @DrWilliamProct1 was worried about Rukmini responding more than me? It's because she already showed him that what he was doing was wrong. And this has at no point been confronted by the larger fan studies community. Instead, "respect" is urged.

So, just to be clear, when racism is enabled, you better respect the person doing the enabling. You can't call their scholarship racist. You can't call them a racist. They'll put BLM all over their profile and if you speak, you're the one punished. Everyone up to speed?

And a large part of fan studies has been complicit in this. People will privately message and say lovely things, but when it comes to standing publicly in a conference space or in a journal space or actually withdrawing/ refusing work that enables racism, that asks too much.

Forgive me my bitterness. That happened last year & here we are again. You know the first thing @DrWilliamProct1 responded with when Rukmini was tone policed? It was to ask her to explain tone policing. This is who thought he could write about antiblackness & curate this project.

So yes, I openly mentioned his history of racism, sexism, and the enabling of racism. I could not rely on fan studies to do it so I noted that anyone approaching the project should research their editor because if reading that article isn't a real heads up, what even is?

The fact that @henryjenkins supports him in his network & was leaving him to co-ordinate the project suggests that either he is okay with this, doesn't understand how institutional racism works, doesn't want to hurt his friend, or doesn't care. ANY of those scenarios gives pause

Wow, did not know this but I'm kind of staring straight into camera even more now. https://twitter.com/leahmholmes/status/1300221278071250949

In the first email I sent, I spent a great deal of time laying the bones of this out. I genuinely wanted to believe that @henryjenkins probably didn't know this or had heard a carefully curated version that privileges whiteness & networks over everything else. I took it out.

And I did so because I did not want blowback at @RukminiPande (which @DrWilliamProct1 set in motion anyway) and because I didn't know that I could trust @henryjenkins to do the right thing in a choice between supporting his friend or a junior WOC he has previously supported.

That the email that was leaked validated this (again, why am I the Cassandra of racism in media studies?) pretty much told me that I was right to have done this. What I did not predict was the email being public and finally being able to talk about this.

What redressal are we looking at when we look at who is editing things, who is solicited, whose work is being made available, whose critique is heard, whose whispers get to have weight (Hint: it really isn't us. We're not even close to powerful or established enough.)

So did I draw attention to a history of racism and sexism for @DrWilliamProct1 on my twitter? Yes. Very much so. Did this likely make him angry and anxious? Yes, very likely. Did he reflect on WHY a junior scholar of colour would say this? I'm gonna go with no.

And just to be clear, I don't leave it to racists to define racism. Fan Studies should really learn to do better.

I've already addressed the claims of autism, anxiety, and race.

That's me on this email. If anyone wants to put any of this on any listserv, go for it.

I am very careful with call outs because I would prefer call ins. I just don't think that's possible with me and Bill Proctor. So I'm leaving it here, and I'm done with that. Thank you for reading all of this.

I will read both of Henry's letters and process before responding.

Oh, and as a final note, I'm not Dr. Nadkarni. I left my PhD because it was toxic and I had to make a choice. I might reapply and I might not. That doesn't lessen my abilities and critique in any way.