The Door Is Open Wide

This text (lightly modified) is something I put together to answer a comment I got on basically, what's the AO3 doing that's racist and needs reforming?

Well.

I'm white, and I'm so not a scholar or a person who has thought or written deeply on these subjects. Those people are out there - I've linked to many of them - so please listen to them and what they have to say. I'm not going to link a lot of sources here because these words are pretty much all my own, and I'm going to be fucking up and getting things wrong because of my position of privilege and ignorance which I don't want reflecting badly on them. But I'll do my best to answer, drawing on the things I have learned, and I'll include my own experience as a matter of perspective.


So, for me as a person who has literally never had to deal with racism or any other kind of abuse in fandom it was a lot to absorb and wrap my brain around. My first reaction was "but I love the AO3 and hate racism so they can't be racist!". I'd internalized that I am racist (because our society at large is, so it's a thing those of us raised with privilege have to spend our lives unlearning). But the AO3? The AO3 saved fandom after Strikethrough! The AO3 is the Archive of Our Own. It's my happy place that has made more creativity and fun possible than I could even have imagined back in the days of Geocities and even Livejournal.

When the AO3 won a Hugo last year I was there in the room and seeing all the people rise when the award was accepted because we are all part of this I was ecstatic.

And in a nutshell, the racism problem on AO3 is this: That feeling? That joy, and the sense of AO3 being an amazing refuge from a terrible world where the worst thing that ever happens is that I roll my eyes at a ship or tag? That is something that Black fans and fans of color don't have. And that's what has to change.

Starting at the beginning, the AO3 was founded by a group that was mostly women. They worked on feminist principles and instituted things such as the amazing tagging system and the opt-in Warnings: Major Character Death, Graphics Depictions of Violence, Underage and Non-Con. It's easy to see how those four were picked: they are subjects that can easily hurt (and when I use that word I mean do actual harm to) readers. To protect our fellow fans, we authors on AO3 have the option to make sure people don't even have to see things like the title, tags and summary of a fic that contain those kind of fics. Which is great!

Now here's the thing: the subjects of racism and slavery are incredibly painful to a lot of people. I think we can all agree on that. But the founders of the AO3 didn't think to make it one of the major warnings on the site. Why? I don't know. I wasn't there. But it strikes me that this as a decision by a group mainly made up of people who have never personally experienced racism, and who weren't actively working towards anti-racism at the time.

But the AO3 also says it's "in beta", which means that they're still developing and trying to make a better site, right? Trying to make an Archive of Our Own. And for many, many years now fans of color have been speaking up on the topic of warnings and racism, suggesting it be added. The response from the AO3? Silence. Here's how I know: I only found out about this discussion last year through the tireless work of the same people I've been linking to in the current discussion. I've never seen the AO3 address the fact that they are making a safe space for fans who are triggered by sexual violence and underage content, violence and death (universal experiences, unfortunately) but not racism. Which is a universal non-white experience in fannish spaces. (To put a quick end to a slippery slope argument I've seen: yes, this goes for transphobia and the like too! You should listen to marginalized groups when they say "this hurts us, can you make it easier for us to avoid?". And if you can't do anything straight away, you should make sure the conversation about this is public, so those people who are hurting know that you are listening to them.)

So that's one facet of the racism issue. Another is how bad the AO3 is at handling abuse, and how people facing racist and other hate and harassment have been raising this issue for years. What I was completely unaware of until like, this week, is that the AO3 is one of the places people in fandom are most vulnerable to abuse. On Twitter you can lock your account and block users from interacting, on Tumblr you can block people, on Dreamwidth you can lock your posts and block people - but on AO3? When it first started you couldn't even moderate comments. This is a thing now, and you can lock your stories to registered users only. But for authors who have protected their other social media accounts, AO3 is where their harassers can get to them. Of course harassment can happen to anyone, but it disproportionately affects people of color and other vulnerable minorities. Making sure they can feel safe should be a priority, and again: silence.

One of the good things that changed recently after input from concerned users is that the AO3 made it possible to reject gifts and opt-out of being listed as co-authors. Before that what was happening was that awful people were writing horrifying "fic" - like stuff straight up written to traumatize the target of their harassment - and then gifting it to them, or even making them co-authors on it against their will. From what I heard, it was difficult (if not impossible) to get the AO3 to shut that sort of thing down.

Now that avenue of abuse is gone, which is great. But many others remain, including bookmarks (authors can see all comments on bookmarks) - and of course the fact that you can't block people on AO3. Would blocking solve everything? Of course not. Is it technically feasible? I've heard various takes. Could they at least acknowledge that it's a known problem and publicize what steps they are taking to solve it? Yes, they could - but they haven't.

The other facet of abuse is that while a lot of people use the AO3 in good faith and try to be mindful of fellow fans that is unfortunately not true for 100% of the user base. There's always gotta be someone out to just be a dick - and on AO3 there are people who are being racist dicks. I have seen thread after thread of people talking about contacting the AO3's Abuse Team to report what they have experienced as targeted racist harassment in particular tags. These people have gotten very patronizing "this is not a real problem" kind of responses. And it's true that the AO3 shouldn't censor content, but if someone was posting G-rated fic marked "No Archive Warnings Apply" and then filling them with the kind of content that the AO3 does give you the option to warn for that person could actually be banned. (ETA: If this was systematic and in bad faith rather than an honest mistake. As pointed out in a comment, the Abuse team don't ban people for failing to use warnings properly.) But if someone does the same with racism rather than sexual violence? There's literally nothing stopping them from this.

Why? Because there's nothing in the Terms of Service about racism or racist abuse, and for something to be considered abuse it has to be in the Terms of Service. So that's leaving a lot of people in position vulnerable to abuse where the AO3 doesn't have their back. I find this line particularly striking:

Not everyone agrees about what is offensive and unacceptable. Individual users are encouraged to try to resolve problems on their own before contacting the Policy & Abuse team.

Of course it isn't a simple thing to change your Terms of Service, and the Abuse Team are all volunteers and they're working super hard and doing a fabulous job. But if it's to be an Archive for everyone, wouldn't it make sense for the AO3 itself to call out certain behaviors - including racism - as completely unacceptable? Rather than putting the burden of "resolving problems" on people of color who are experiencing the abuse?

And again - the thing is that this might seem like a lot where the AO3 can't change overnight...but this discussion didn't start this week, or even this year. It's been going on for as long as the AO3 has existed, pretty much (since I'm focusing on the AO3 here and not the larger question of racism in fandom). Which brings us back to the AO3's silence on all these matters, and the fact that instead of showing that they are listening to people who are hurt and vulnerable they are responding with a resounding silence.

One of the things that have brought all of this out in the open right now is everything happening in the world around us. With #BlackLivesMatters, pretty much every business with a Twitter account has put out some kind of statement. Most of them were boilerplate blandness, but at least the matter of racism was being acknowledged. The AO3, though? The first (and so far only) time they have mentioned anything about the situation wasn't even on the AO3, but in the OTW's newsletter "This Week in Fandom".

On June 10th they finally broached the issue of racism - but in a way that really amplified that silence about their own organization. The entire newsletter is written in a way that was very much "Look at all the racism fans are fighting elsewhere". This is a huge missed opportunity to address all the points made above, and acknowledge that people have been talking about these things for a long, long time. The OTW cited two noted scholars on the topic of racism in fandom who were so disappointed in the framing and in the lack of engagement in these questions that they asked for those citations to be retracted. I'm trying not to riddle this with links, but the text of their request and the OTW's response can be found here, and is very enlightening.

So this leads us again to the fact that there was a news roundup that acknowledged fandom's involvement in anti-racism, but the AO3 - who have a news section, and banners for fundraising, and other channels of communication - have made no public statement about any anti-racism as of today, June 17th 2020. Not one thing. (ETA: A Statement from the OTW Board of Directors, Chairs, & Leads was released on June 24th.)

Several people have written good stuff on statement vs actions and of course actions are more important, and of course statements can also be flawed. But as Jenny Hamilton on Twitter puts it:

here is why I think statements are valuable:

1) they establish a shared reality
2) they establish shared values

So at this point in 2020 when there is a global mass movement for #BlackLivesMatter, the AO3 hasn't even established that they see and acknowledge the reality of people who experience racism, and they haven't established that they think anti-racism work is important.

Which, again, if this is the first you're seeing of it probably seems like something that can be easily excused and isn't that bad. But as a part of this ongoing pattern, the fact that the AO3 is not actively and vocally anti-racist? Means that it is racist, in these structural ways that people have been pointing out for years. The AO3 prides itself on being feminist, but feminism without anti-racism is literally just feminism for white people and...that's really not where I want an organisation I love to be at.

To read more, I recommend checking out my previous roundups:
June 14th - links and resources
June 15th - links and resources
June 16th - the OTW's response to people contacting the Board re: racism
June 16th - links

I will also put the list of recommended reading on fandom and race that acafanmom put together:

• Fleeting Frustrations # 7: Archive Frenzy and Being (Un) Grateful To Our Fannish Foremothers
• Squee from the Margins: Interview with Rukmini Pande
• Queer And Unusual Space: White Supermacy in Slash Fanfiction
• Pattern recognition: A dialogue on racism in fan communities
• Why I Think RaceFail Was The Bestest Thing Evar for SFF by NK Jemisin
• "Yes, the Evil Queen is Latina!": Racial dynamics of online femslash fandoms
• Transformative racism: The black body in fan works

Finally, adding the collaborative brainstorming Google Doc that coynsundry started:

Anti-racist changes to the AO3 Platform

ETA: All roundups etc on this topic can be found in my tag fandom & racism.