The Door Is Open Wide

Unsurprisingly, fandom is still racist! (I mean, it's not like any of us can completely shake having been raised in a racist society. I know. I keep running into thoughts and assumptions that absolutely come from a place of internalized white supremacy. But we can do work to be our best, antiracist selves in our personal lives and our communities.)

So, since my last couple of posts on the subject, there's been a lot of discussion on Twitter.

First I wanted to link to some longform writing in the form of two relevant essays from Tumblr. They cover the sort of thing that we as white fans just don't get. For us, most of fandom is a happy escape. For BIPOC...not as much.

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Original post Feb 2020, most recent addition Sept 19 2021
Reasons why fans of color leave/don't interact with fandom

September 20, 2021
Why POC leave fandoms, an essay that for some f**king reason needs to be written

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The rest of this post is all Twitter links. I try to link to the first tweet of a thread, even if that isn't the tweet I quote. Timestamps are in my local time, simply to help contextualize the ongoing discussion and put it in chronological order. I'm using CopyCat to make linking easier, and that displays the users' chosen Twitter display names rather than their Twitter handles. (You can change both on Twitter, but it's much more common to change your display name than your handle.)

Okay, so this is picking up the discussion from the above-linked posts:

9:38 PM · Sep 8, 2021 naye:
"Remember that very forced "sure, we're totally against racism" statement the OTW made in June 2020? Absolutely nothing has happened on that front since. (In fact, the opposite has happened - racist harassers have gotten a pass by Abuse.) This is why I'm no longer an OTW member."

9:53 PM · Sep 8, 2021 Fiendish 大哥 Skuld:
"The lack of effectiveness of the AO3 abuse team is so bad that I have seen folks effectively shrug and give up when they are being harassed. They resign themselves to a long wait for a reply, more harassment, and a milquetoast response. The OTW needs to do better."

12:28 AM · Sep 10, 2021 Fiendish 大哥 Skuld:
"I've been following the rise and fall off right-wing social media platforms. It turns out when you have a policy of unmoderated free speech, all you get is porn, racism and harm. In a place like AO3 where you start with porn already, where are you left with to go?"

2:10 AM · Sep 11, 2021 Stitch:
"It's not *just* that the fans of color here "don't like" the horrifically racist content... it's racist. It's super racist and yet, people will fix their fingers to tell POC how much we need to shut up because we ~can't have~ a fan fiction purge - Of racist fan fiction."

7:03 PM · Sep 11, 2021 naye:
"Anyone who still doesn't understand why "the AO3 should be working to be less racist" isn't just a theoretical issue - something that can wait until a nebulous later point or isn't actually that important - should look at the gross linked post. This is what the AO3 welcomes. 1/2"

7:42 PM · Sep 13, 2021 Stitch:
"Telling fans of color to "make our own" ao3* rather than push for the OTW to actually hire a real professional to rework the existing policy and terms of service is just really fucking obnoxious and racist. Much like an overwhelming amount of fanwork oriented fandom, actually."

4:23 PM · Sep 14, 2021 naye:
"There is no facepalm like that when fellow white people go "well if the archive of our own is too racist for you maybe you should go make a non-racist archive and leave the racists in peace". Really? REALLY? You want the racists to stay. And the BIPOC to go. From OUR archive. OK."

This discussion (and possibly - probably even, given Twitter - others like it) then got subtweeted by people, including these two threads that took off with many hundreds of likes each:

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2:01 AM · Sep 19, 2021 niqaeli torres:
"just once, I want a single goddamned person positing shit they think the AO3 should enforce in terms of additional warnings (eg, racism) to explain to me who's going to *do* this enforcement. who are they volunteering for this trauma work? and it is trauma work, make no mistake."

3:29 AM · Sep 19, 2021 rahaeli:
"You can't have a policy without enforcement and you can't have enforcement without trauma work. A policy that places the burden of enforcement on the people affected by the behavior is unethical and one that removes the burden to those unaffected is ineffectual."

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The following are, as far as I can tell, reactions to these and similar defenses of the AO3's inaction on racism:

10:33 AM · Sep 19, 2021 Fiendish 大哥 Skuld:
""It's hard and it's going to take a lot of effort to figure things out" shouldn't be an excuse to not do a thing that is worth doing. The fact that I continually see white folks saying this just tells me that they want racism to continue in fandom and they want to enable it."

8:40 PM · Sep 19, 2021 Stitch:
"You don't have to become a LVL 100 Social Justice Scribe. Pushing back against racism in fandom can start small and it can start with YOUR OWN INTERNALIZED RACISM. It can start with privately correcting misconceptions and lies about people of color (celebs and fans) from friends."

10:22 PM · Sep 20, 2021 Samira Nadkarni:
"There is an specific element of saviourism in that thread that genuinely aggravates me. Implying that there need to be perfect solutions to a racist crisis implies that anyone calling for better needs to have already resolved racism so perfectly that no POC labour is needed."

10:42 PM · Sep 20, 2021 Jenny Hamilton:
"this right here is my deepest frustration with OTW/AO3. I don't think it is or should be the responsibility of fans to tell AO3 how to solve their racism problem. The problem exists. That is very clear. Therefore, OTW should be taking action to improve it."

...
it feels deeply frustrating that this problem, which by its very nature has no simple solutions, often turns into a slapfight over the worst-case scenario version of any specific solution that's ever been discussed by anyone anywhere on Tumblr

idk I just think a lot about the time I was talking to a friend (an archivist and labor organizer who is in fandom, incidentally) and I was like "dang how even COULD the OTW address racism in its spaces

and she was like "dang, yeah, I don't know, that's a tricky one"

and I was like "yeah"

and then she was like "I mean if I had to start somewhere" and then laid out a five-point plan feat. ideas that had never and would never have crossed my mind because I don't do this work.

sometimes it's good to remember that people who do a thing for their job have better ideas of how to do that thing than people who don't

just because the solutions you can think of seem problematic doesn't mean the problems are insurmountable and no solutions are possible.

12:57 AM · Sep 21, 2021
Dr Rukmini Pande:
"I am tired of solutions to systemic racism in fandom being proposed that...do not name racism. I am tired of fandom pretending that it can block/mute its way out of systemic racism and anti-blackness."

3:21 AM · Sep 21, 2021
Saathi 1013:
"I love [/s] how every proposed change to make The Archive more accessible to people of marginalized identities (like dealing w/racism) is met with borderline (or outright) hostile takes tearing the proposal apart w/no alternative solutions."

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...and I am sure the discussion will continue on. I would so dearly love to see some sign of the OTW having any plans, or taking any actions, but so far there have been absolutely no public statements or follow-up from their June 2020 statement from the OTW Board of Directors, Chairs & Leads promising to do better with antiracism.

ETA: someone linked this news post, which does mention the OTW Board discussing the creation of an "officer" role for someone who will research "diversity consultants".

The post is from July 2021. So literally 13 months after the statement, the Board had gotten to the point of...discussing getting a person to do research to hire a consultant (on "diversity" rather than antiracism). So. Clearly not a priority. But I'd still love to know more about how this work is going, and what the Board's plans are. If there is a timeline. Stuff like that. (The newsletter says you can email the Board with your questions, but I have done that several times, and never actually gotten a reply. So that's how well that works.)

It really is good to see (in the same newsletter) that they are starting to look at paying people, because volunteer work is thankless, and I know how badly it can burn you out. Having at least a few paid positions in the org is a super important step into making the whole thing better organised and less likely to collapse.

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All previous roundups as well as some of my own posts on the subject can be found under the Fandom & Racism tag on my Dreamwidth.

And to go fully meta, here's the link to this DW post on my Twitter.