The Door Is Open Wide

Hi. Been gone a while. It's been good for me to take a break from Dreamwidth. However:

I wanted to post something here as soon as I saw EndOTWRacism's Call to Action (now on Dreamwidth!), because it was very much along the lines of the fandom & racism link round-ups I've been doing on and off for the past three years. But - wow. And I do mean this both in the best and worst ways: it's been like drinking from a fire hose.

After watching discussions on ways in which AO3 in particular allows for racist harassment, (and how they should not do that) go around in the same tiny circles on Twitter and DW, it's suddenly exploded over every single social media I am on. (Special shoutout to Mastodon, where Punk has been doing a lot of signal boosting, and satsuma has a been posting daily recs from the End Racism in the OTW collection!) There have been so many threads, post, and excellent discussions that I literally haven't had the time to both keep up and also round them all up to share.

At the same time, the backlash has been equally everywhere, which has been… horrifying. Because okay, at this point I'm just going to say it:

If you are on social media being loudly anti anti-racism, those two "antis" cancel themselves out, and you are now just arguing for racism.

So. Seeing so many people in fandom be racist enough that they choose arguing for racism has been rough! And it's not something that's great fun to share, especially knowing I have white friends who will shrug it off knowing it doesn't affect them, and racialized friends who can't shrug it off. It makes it hard to know if sharing the extremes of racist fandom rants is a net good (because it highlights what's going on and might be eye-opening to some), or a net evil (because it inflicts harm on those already targeted by racists in fandom).

But it's the Glorious 25th of May (a real celebration of Terry Pratchett; a fictional celebration of a People's Revolution), a week into the #EndOTWRacism's proposed action period of May 17-31, and I wanted to share what I've done, and resources for everyone who wants to join in the action.

Write a letter to the OTW Board

The endotwracism account has instructions and a template for contacting the OTW Board here on Dreamwidth.

Here's what I wrote & posted today:

I'm writing today because I agree with the the #EndOTWRacism manifesto, which I'm sure you've seen by now. Your 2020 statement says that you apologize to those that have suffered from your inaction. It's high time to move beyond apologies, and on to actions to make OTW & AO3 a better environment for BIPOC fans. By now, I'm sure you will have seen that this movement isn't just some outside agitators. That antiracism is a question to prioritize. That it's something so many fans are passionate about that solutions to structural problems are being discussed, and that those many knowledgeable fans can perhaps be called on to make AO3 a better place for all in 2023, the same way knowledgeable fans came together and created AO3 15 years ago. I've written before with questions about your actions on racism, and never gotten a response. I hope that this time you won't let your silence speak for you, but will honor your commitments and do so with greater transparency and speed than before.

That's 993 out of 1000 characters, so I cut my polite salutations and simplified things a bit. That one time I sent them a long message by submitting it piecemeal through the form I never got a response, so… Fingers crossed for this time, I guess?

Change the title of your works, add them to the collection, make something new, engage with other works!

On May 17th I changed the titles of many of my works to "End Racism in the OTW" | [work name] - it's not too late to join in that action! As of right now, the phrase "End Racism in the OTW" gets almost 5000 hits, and "End OTW Racism" gets over 5100. These works were not all added the first day - I checked, and then it was still under 1000 in total. There's a whole week to go until May 31st, so that's a quick & easy way to make those who maybe haven't encountered any of the #EndOTWRacism stuff to take notice.

There is a template for what you can put in the author's note to explain what's going on here on Dreamwidth. (I totally failed to notice the bolded "You do not have to do this with every work that you’re changing the title of", and have posted a mini-essay at the top of all works with the updated title. Whoops.)

I've also put some of my old works into the #EndOTWRacism AO3 collection, which currently has 1444 works in 562 fandoms!

A wonderful thing to do if you don't have works on AO3, or don't feel comfortable updating the titles or anything, is to comment and kudos on the collection works in your fandoms. ♥

At the start of the action week, I got really inspired by people creating new works from scratch just to go in the collection, and actually managed to pull together a 1:51 minute Trigun Stampede vid in just a few days. You can find it here. I've already gotten some really great comments though, so if you want to engage with fanworks in solidarity of the #EndOTWRacism action, I suggest finding works that may not have gotten any love yet.

Change your icon/banner

There are DW & AO3 icons among many other things in endotwracism's Social Media Toolkit!

On Twitter I also offered to modify people's icons using the graphics in the social media template, which some people have taken me up on. I'm extending that offer to anyone reading this! Just let me know which icon you want decorated, and I'll do something like this or even this.

Shoutout to merelydovely on Twitter who I first saw doing this & who also has a standing offer here on Twitter.

Resources

• End OTW Racism account on Tumblr | RSS feed (mirror of Tumblr) on Dreamwidth
• endotwracism's account on Dreamwidth
• End OTW Racism account on Twitter
• Great #EndOTWRacism summary and background, posted May 16th by satsuma
• Brilliant, detailed meta on OTW's issues, that also has a very enlightening comment section (CW for mentions of CSAM), posted May 20th by chestnut_pod
• Bullet point summary of what you can do for #EndOTWRacism posted May 24th by runpunkrun (a great read if my wall of text is too overwhelming!).
• Punk also recently posted a guide for attending OTW Board meetings

I also want to highlight some of the official #EndOTWRacism's Tumblr post account that aren't on their Dreamwidth. (ETA: The RSS doesn't show these anymore, so these link to Tumblr.) In my opinion, these add a lot of context, and I feel like anyone engaging in any discussion about the #EndOTWRacism action really ought to have read all of these before trotting out yet another slippery slope strawman or going off on some tired whataboutism.

• To address the claims that moderating “extremely racist” content is a “slippery slope” to Archive-wide censorship
• Will the campaign include advocating for a policy that bars any fanwork based on media that would be?
• On needing a comprehensive harassment policy
• If AO3 made the changes that you are advocating for, how would that affect those fics, for example?
• Timeline of OTW Hiring of a Diversity Consultant
• Hi! While the sentiment behind your blog and call to action is admirable a number of things are waving red flags 
• Hello! I was wondering what the intended effect of re-titling works on Ao3 is?
• We want to make a few things clear
• Thank you for this. We sincerely hope others follow your example. & You're very welcome! 

Finally, some really good Tumblr posts reblogged by the EndOTWRacism account - again linking to the Dreamwidth post:

• pretty-weird-ideas: A solution to the current AO3 Harassment TOS being seen as unfit for certain types of harassment (such as racism) would be to codify the already present TOS.
• indifferentvincent: RE: End OTW Racism Derailment
• beatrice-otter: You’ve probably seen [tumblr.com profile] end-otw-racism in the last few days, trying to get people to support their efforts to get the AO3 to actually DO something about the racism problem that AO3 has admitted that it has.
griseldagimpel: Steps AO3 Can Take to Minimize Racism in the Archive
• elumish:In light of some of the backlash to the End OTW Racism protest, and particularly the concern that an anti-harassment policy would lead to abuse of reporting mechanisms or censorship of unpopular authors/ships, I want to remind everyone...