#Yes racism against non-white people happen all the time here.

[enekorre]

Love seeing an American be racist on my years old post about racism in Europe and then block me. If I didn't have emails turned on I would never even have seen the comment. Fucking racist moron 🤪

[sleepynegress]

*sigh* Featurism...

So, I woke up to this shit on the Twit app and I've only hit on this issue before, but today I'm digging in. Colorism is something that is not addressed often enough, but intersected within that and even more rarely spoken about, is the issue of featurism. The young actress above just got cast as Juliet in the latest big staged prestige production of Romeo and Juliet, opposite Tom Holland. And as usual the blue-checks, everybody else including "black", and even Black regulars are all-in on the cruelty.

...But I want to breakdown a nuance that is too often skipped over when this happens. The two people named with her, give away the featurism game, here; a particularly nasty form of often internalized racism. I guarantee if the young actress looked like this?

She'd definitely still get racist attacks, but the particularly nasty shit I'm seeing attacking her looks wouldn't come. In fact, I could see some people thinking they are defending her with "but she's pretty!" or more specific... "obviously she's mixed" comments. -Something pretty much every Black woman with features that don't align with a narrow perception of blackness hear often (and we'll get to why I specified women in a minute). And don't get it twisted...

These aren't exclusively nor standard white features either (see: the many ethnic features w/in white ethnic groups that also get hit to a lesser and non-racialized degree such as large "hook" and/or Romanesque noses for example, which is definitely about anti-semitism, anti-Romani sentiment, and other disparaged/discriminated against ethnic minorities in Europe) and yes, blue eyes are naturally occurring within non-mixed and dark-skinned Black people due to a mutation called Waardenburg syndrome. But there is a REASON why fetishizing even certain ethnic features within the African continental diaspora has been a thing for a long time...i.e. "the dopest Ethiopian" from the Tribe Called Quest lyric is pictured as this:

and this:

and not this:

...despite them all being Ethiopians of various tribal ethnicities.

A wide-nose, a tighter curl, coil, or zig-zag pattern of hair, fuller lips and often, but not always (because I've given examples above where features "mitigate" skin color) darker skin. Zendaya is grouped with Tracey and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, despite being both lighter in skin color and having a Black parent and a white parent because her nose isn't what has become the standard surgical look...that too many celebs have. This includes the ones who got so-called "ethnic" work or just a slight 'refinement'. No, her nose is born w/it, made for that good African air, as I call it. Nostrils prominent, nose bridge wide:

I went make-up free as well, because even make-up practices these days, go for that narrowing highlight technique i.e. just below it's subtle.

Sza is a an example of it taken to extremes, even with the Hollywood standard "ethnic" refinement she did get.

The thing is... I don't blame or attack her for that. Because you see above that is just a taste of what happens. Lil' Kim was relentlessly bullied by the men in her life for her ethnic features for her whole life...and that is why she is off-limits to this day for me when it comes to all the work she's had done.

...And this is where I explain why I specified men being mostly exempt. It's because "Blackness" including all the physical features associated with it, is by default masculinized. ...Which is why Idris Elba is considered one of the most handsome men in the world, w/o the caveats that even Lupita Nyong'o often gets. Nobody calls Samuel L. Jackson ugly. He is even idolized and fetishized by a specifically white male gaze for how culturally "Black" he is perceived to be for all the wrong reasons, his signature "motherfucka" for example (and I could go off on a whole other tangent here, but digressing). All this to say... Featurism sucks. It's not talked about enough. Blackness in all variations is Beautiful. Tracy Chapman looking as young she does?? Hell, mark it down to both her dark skin (a natural UV protector) and not messing with her given features (and being a lesbian, men will age you. lol -I got jokes-):

P.S. THANK GOODNESS for Tems and her rising prominence as a beauty as well:

P.P.S. Even Jay-Z the billionaire rapper has had the comments over the years about his lips and nose, hence that lyric in Beyonce's Formation.

[god-i-hope-so]

You know anon who replied to my post about Buck. I'm a proud biracial person so you certainly won't see me, a BT shipper, be against an interracial couple. I see racism, even when it's subtle, I see when people are vague posting about race being a problem. And I've never seen a BuckTommy fan make a racist post about Eddie being Latino, not even make an allusion to it. Never. I'm not saying there's not a single BT racist fan, you'll find trash anywhere, but here on Tumblr, I have yet to see it.

Eddie is not a problem for BuckTommy shippers, he's not a menace to the ship, he's not in the way of anything. And him being Latino has been used by BoBs themselves since the beginning as an excuse to hate on Tommy, the ship, and us. We don't fucking care about Eddie being Latino, it's a non thing for BT shippers. We're not white supremacists with an agenda. Meanwhile, the moment we dared to like Buck being with Tommy, we were under Buddies/BoBs constant harassment. Because they didn't get their ship canon. And the hate and violence has been insane. The homophobia/queerphobia. The misogyny. The ageism. The racism against actual people in the fandom. And it created tensions we never asked for.

We never asked for anything except maybe to see a queer arc for Buck. We never ask for Buddie to not be canon. We never asked for Tommy to come back. We only hoped they'd give the fans queer Buck. Then we just went with what the show gave us, some liked it, some not. No one except the show runners and the writers knew what would happen and had the power to make it happen. None of us, whatever we ship, will change what people are PAID to do on a TV show.

All the rest? It's your interpretation, just like we all have. It's valid but not canon. Tommy acting like Taylor and being dismissive of Buck's feelings? Your interpretation but it's not canon. I'm currently rewatching the show for the first time and I see so many moments when Eddie is not a good friend to Buck. Not a bad friend, just not a good one. And I don't need theories about him being a supposedly closeted gay to just accept that those characters are written to be realistic, so they're not perfect. Eddie using his friendship with Buck to hit exactly where it hurts and tell him he's exhausting? Oh it was bad, but Eddie was pissed. So you know, it was a realistic and emotional response. It doesn't mean I started a hate campaign against him and his fan. First because it's a fucking TV show, but most of all, it's not important. It's part of the story and that's it. Sit back and enjoy, then join the fandom to make your ship thrive in fanon. No need to hate anything or anyone.

(oh and yes, BuckTommy has many names! Not always practical but it's not like it affects your life, isn't it?)

[faeriekit]

sorry I need to lose my mind for a couple paragraphs:

THIS old man is WHITEPASSING.

So, if you're wondering how the hell this dude is Whitepassing, please note that this is restricted to a single comics run rather than All Alfreds in the Known Multiverse™. Anyway, I was reading the Dark Knights of Steel vol 2 of my own accord (and against the better judgement of friends) because I apparently enjoy suffering when I got the to the "Alfred has secretly been J'onn J'onezz the whole time" schtick and my brain turned clean off.

Because. Implications.

To start, when they draw J'onn as himself as opposed to his "Alfred" disguise:

J'onn is still drawn with what look like typically "Black" features, albeit with a few Martian overtones: high cheekbones, a broad face, a flat, wide nose. His "Alfred" form is distinctly differently structured with a narrow face, sharp nose, etc etc. Couple that with a backstory explicitly referencing escaping from a war and attempted enslavement, this is a pretty strong attempt at an allegorical Black alien, even if, uh, you know. It's also Alfred. (And yes this is all ignoring that J'onn is usually portrayed as Black; I just wanted to see if his allegorical Blackness still held up in this particular comic run.)

And there's a lot to be said here about the long and storied history of having black caregivers raise privileged white children and the racism embedded therein but that's not what's happening!! As far as I've gotten (and this is as far as reading vol 2 of the dark knights of steel compendium, and only vol 2), Alfred did stay beside Bruce ever since Bruce's parents kicked the bucket, but.

No one else knew "Alfred" was a nonhuman.

Not Bruce. Not his friends (if he has any). Not his fellows in the army, nor anyone else in the entire world— because due to the inherent prejudice of the setting, everyone he knew would quite possibly turn their back on him or turn him in if his true history was revealed. The world at large was prejudiced against him and non-humans like him, and the solution was to hide or otherwise obscure both history and origin so that he could move freely without repercussions. Even Bruce in this run, the only guy "Alfred" is with at all times, is shown to be prejudiced against non-humans and explicitly hostile. Hiding is shown to be not just necessary, but the only surefire way to survive the Plot™.

So, uh. Just to make sure everyone is on the same page, do y'all know what Whitepassing is...? Ever since White people started bringing slavery to the shores of the new world in the 1600s, people were pretty quick to discover that as long as you were born light enough, people would no longer harass you for doing dangerous and scary things like wanting to own property or to stop being held captive and forced to do hard labor or wanting to keep your own kids. It was easy to do! Provided, of course, that you could 1) escape your circumstances in some manner, 2) give up every person you ever knew, including all friends, family, and references to thereof, and 3) pretend you're someone else for the rest of your life without ever breaking your own cover.

You may be thinking, wow, this sounds horrible and traumatizing! Sure does, and that's because it is! But it's a pretty well-known part of the Black community even today, because if you could pass, you had an infinitely better chance at making enough money to live. You could feed your kids. You could save up to own your own home. You could get a career that didn't physically break you down or disable you.

Passing is giving yourself as good a chance to live as anyone else could ever get, and all it costs is everyone and everything you've ever known. Of course people chose to pass. Of course people choose to pass even here and now.

And you know what? As soon as J'onn reveals his nature, someone close to the throne takes advantage of the knowledge to immediately kill him. Fucked up. It's notable that, in some way or form, J'onn J'onzz, Martian man from outer space, is always human-passing, but the sheer implications of being explicitly depicted as Whitepassing, even if only accidentally, blew my brain clean open.

Imagine passing in a world completely foreign to you. You don't know their customs. You don't know their language at first. You have to learn to adapt. You can't say your true name or show your true face, or everyone will know who you are— what you are. Eventually, you learn to let people close to the mask you've made, but you can never relax with them; you can say your wife is dead, but they cannot hear her name, or they will Know. You can tell them your child died in your arm, but you can't tell them where, or when, or why.

You raise a child to adulthood. They do not know your true form, and you pray they never will.

You tell them the name appropriate for their society, and that is what they call you.

Anyway. This old man is Whitepassing. I feel so bad for him.

(It's important to note that while this part of the storyline doesn't seem to go anywhere that wasn't plot relevant, that somehow didn't stop it from manifesting in the middle of this medieval aliens comic. Which. Wow. What a move.)

[1eos]

Sorry but I feel crazy for feeling :/ about how now people are going "make noise about this! Spread the word about what is happening! Make it know that this is bad!" About this like where was this energy for black folk 😭 feels so complicated like yes its fucked up but also am i crazy for feeling mad about how people ignore shit when it happens to black people but suddenly when it happens to white people then the whole site shouts about it? 😭 sucks because you can't even complain about it because YOU KNOW you will get people calling you names for it 😭 sorry I feel more complex feelings and sorry I feel more annoyed than anything 😭 I am one of the bad ones if I said "it sucks that everyone is ignoring the racism because this is happening to a white trans person" I would still be in the wrong to them and they'll point at me and call psyop 😭😭😭😭😭

youre not bad and you're not crazy either. cuz in the end of the day nothing's gonna get done if you won't listen to black ppl 🤷🏾‍♀️ as they say you're only as strong as your weakest link if you have someone in your community that is free to be attacked at will you're giving an in for everyone to be attacked. someone already made a post comparing the two situations but its similar to sex workers raising the alarm about how websites were trying to censor them and how it would only get worse if ppl allowed it and ppl really fell for the 'protecting kids' rhetoric and now here we are with that crazy kosa censorship bill. when ppl just straight up ignored that staff has the ability to moderate and go scorched earth but only want to do it against ppl they don't like and those ppl seemingly being anyone black :) that SHOULDVE been when non blacks woke tf up and started pushing back bc if u allow it to happen to one group of ppl its def gonna keep happening

and you, and anyone else who feels some time of way abt this, aren't in the wrong for feeling that way! its actually annoying as hell 😭😭😭 its like someone handing you the answers to a test but you still fucking fail bc you don't respect the ppl who gave it to you. and we all obvs feel bad for the ppl getting deleted and when it comes to the ppl actually being deleted they really aren't the problem. its the ppl on tumblr who rally around them saying stupid shit like 'this has never been done before' yes it has and im willing to bet YOU were reblogging those posts calling black ppl russian psyops for having an opinion thats beyond blue good red bad! and this lack of respect for people who will always be one of the first to face repercussion is why we can't get shit done bc after tumblr banned black ppl and erased the ferguson and blm tags nonblacks turned around and were encouraging folks to give this bigoted ass website money bc you have to 'support your favorite hellsite' girl what......

[alpaca-clouds]

Ethnic Diversity in the Middle Ages

The other big thing a lot of whiny white fanboys tend to cry about when it comes to fantasy and historical medial is the existance of non-white people within medieval Europe. Which to me still is just... silly. If you know anything about European history, you should not believe something like that.

Because here is the thing: The Roman Empire also included quite a lot of Northern Africa. Where, you will not believe it, Black and Brown people lives. Who then would at times become citizens of Rome and would take over jobs within the Roman Empire. The most notable group might be the Nubian mercenaries, who were counted among the best military forces in the ancient world. As such the Roman army often took them along while they were colonizing Europe. And as it was with those things... Some of those Nubians ended up settling throughout all of Europe.

It should be noted that we have both historical evidence from Roman times, though, as well as archeological evidence that shows us that there were Black and brown people living both on the British isles and in parts of Scandinavia even prior to Rome. And no, we do not know where those came from. We just know they were there.

But even other than that... Medieval Europe was not a computer game with invisible walls. Africa was there. Asia was there. And people traded.

I said it before: The first European sources about Japan we have are from about 300 AD from a Roman merchant, who has travelled to China and then heard about the Japanese islands. It is also one of the few sources we have of someone talking about the indigenous people of Japan.

But yes, people travelled. People traded. We all hopefully know about the silk road. The trade route that went throughout Asia and ended in Europe. All sorts of stuff was traded here - and people travelled, too. And at times they ended up staying whereever they travelled to. Maybe because weather or health did not allow them to travel back, maybe because they found community in the place they travelled to.

And yes, people traded with Northern Africa, too. Now, subsaharan Africa is a different story. Yes, some people crossed over from there. But most of the trade with those areas happening during the last two centuries of the medieval period.

It also should be reminded that indeed the Mohrs ruled over Iberia throughout most of the medieval period, with reconquista only happening at the very end of the middle ages.

And of course Europe was also raided and invaded several times by the Ottomans, the Huns and the Mongols. Of whom some remained behind in Europe, too.

All of this is not to say that medieval Europe was as ethnically diverse as modern Europe is. It was not. But it was also not all white (which is of course without even going into the fact that the concept of whiteness did not yet exist).

Oh, and also realize that racism as we know it today was not really a think for at least the early medieval period. It only started to develop through the crusades (which is to say from 1100 AD forward). Something that was however a thing is religious discrimination and violence against religious minorities, which is to say mostly against jews and muslims. These especially took off, once the crusades started, but happened even before that. Which is also why a lot of Jews from Europe fled either west, to Iberia, or east, to the Ottoman empire, as muslims at the time did not discriminate against them in the same way.

[midnightactual]

As this is a portrayal that heavily centers actual history as a background element, and has spoken heavily on historical matters and attitudes, I feel the need to weigh in on some "discussion" currently happening regarding the matter of historical accuracy.

I'm not going to make you read it. If you choose to do so, you do so at your own discretion. But I will make one thing perfectly, vibrantly clear: If you support erasing history for the sake of your own personal comfort, I don't want you following me and you can get the hell off my blog.

I want to start by noting that I've had to spend a lot of time thinking about how Yoruichi would've been responded to historically, and what she would've done historically, such as here, here, here, here, and here. I also want to note that I have been very loud and vocal about calling out casual racism toward PoC by the greater Bleach fandom in diminishing Yoruichi and Kaname.

Having now established my bona fides, I want to address some completely fucking stupid arguments I've had the displeasure of seeing recently:

said it was for "historical accuracy" which is also a bullshit cop-out

No, what's bullshit is you pulling a Ron DeSantis and engaging in historical erasure while acting all high and mighty about it. I regret to inform you that the past sucked and people in the past were not enlightened, and if they somehow lived for hundreds or thousands of years would not be enlightened simply by continuing to exist into the present. You're apparently quite intent on erasing the historical fact of racism.

And you know what? If the shoe was on the other foot, if someone was playing a Nazi character but chose to completely ignore the historical factuality of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, you would probably be saying the exact opposite thing you are now. You would be decrying them for erasing the horrors of the Nazis and white-washing their political agenda to make them more palatable as people.

Don't even try and deny it. So what's really at play here is that seeing something made you feel icky. Well, you can't have it both ways.

History isn't something to be presented accurately only when it matches what you think is good and right. History is ugly and complicated and messy. You gonna go out and torch DVDs of Roots or The Color Purple next? Because that's what you're already doing here. Might as well go whole hog and actually commit some physical historical censorship!

You're out here censoring the past and giving aid and comfort to the people who would—and are!—happily doing the same by normalizing it. They argue the exact same shit that you do: that seeing discussion or portrayal of racism makes them feel uncomfortable! So guess what? That means you're friends with the actual real racists out there actually promoting a racist agenda, and you're no better than they are.

You will not defeat racism by pretending it never existed anymore than you will by pretending it doesn't presently exist. Good god. Stop it. Get some help.

FOR REAL like bro this is a story abt ghosts and friendship and talking plushies you think i give a SHIT about """ historical accuracy """

Ah, yes, Bleach, a manga which literally centers the fact of a character being discriminated against for his appearance (Sajin) as a plot point, which literally spends about 40% of its runtime on a genocidal war of extermination over "racial differences" (Shinigami vs. Quincy), and which routinely showcases pre-modern Japanese attitudes and conceptions (bushidō) could not possibly ever comment on the fact that these distinctly non-modern pseudo-Japanese characters do not and should not behave in modern ways.

Despite the fact that it does so constantly, with things like Rukia speaking archaic Japanese and having to read manga to catch up, and Yoruichi thinking nothing of co-ed bathing with Ichigo, a Japanese attitude which was prevalent until the 1970s.

I've been waiting for someone to try and have the argument with me that Yoruichi is a sexual predator for exposing herself to a minor twice, once willingly, despite all the long history establishing the fact that nobody thought anything of it for centuries. It might as well be you lot. Come on then, come at me.

What, it never crossed your mind? Then you clearly have no idea what manga you're actually talking about. Bleach also features cannibalism of children, by the way, just in case you forgot. It's literally in the first chapter.

[eolewyn1010]

Farewell, Darkover - part 4

I definitely had a much better opinion of her books then than I now think they deserve. There is knowing of MZB's crimes and how it makes her careless handling of consent and normalization of abuse sickeningly close to real life, yes, but there's also stuff that, in hindsight, makes me wonder how poor my reading comprehension actually was.

The racism, for one - racism was said to be an unknown concept on Darkover... because everyone there was blindingly white, to the point that no one even had dark eyes! When Terrans came to Darkover and some of them had brown eyes, the Darkovans described them as having animal eyes, and were surprised that said people could talk at all. Nah, that doesn't sound wrong, does it? They asked people with darker skin if they had gotten that way through illness. I remember it was set up as a curious innocence on part of the Darkovans - but MZB wrote this. She must have known how it sounded. No innocence on her part. It didn't crop up much, granted, as her protagonists in general didn't get darker than pantone 727. Oh, wait, I was wrong! Ysaye was dark-skinned! What happened to her again? Yeah, her asexuality was overwritten by a psychoactive drug so she wound up having sex with someone equally drugged, she was pregnant afterwards and couldn't even remember how she got that way, an abortion was performed on her against her will, and then she painfully burned to death because of the psychic power reflexes of someone telepathically stuck in her head at that time. Lovely, especially the bodily autonomy. Such feminism.

Additional to that, there was a specific kind of chauvinism that MZB introduced by way of her "special" groups - and that's something her narrative never attempted to excuse. It was presented as a plain fact that those with psychic gifts (on Darkover those with laran, in MoA those with the Sight) were superior to "normal" humans and had a claim to nobility by virtue of their abilities. Not even abilities they worked for, no; something they were born with. I remember one specific line from a Darkover book in which someone thought that, for him, having sex with a non-telepathic person would be like coupling with an animal. Yeah... how do I put that? That is vile. Putting other human beings down to the level of animals? I realize that telepathy would make a difference in how one perceives the people around oneself, but defending this as one's right to superiority? On the basis of an innate trait? Social Darwinism much? And remember that this kind of elitism was something MZB only ever presented as the natural order for her magic societies.

The acclaimed feminism is something else that isn't really there when you look at the books up close. A whole part of Darkovan society considered women as property to be sold, which no one really thought was an injustice to fight against. Darkovan women were mostly at their father's and husband's mercy. Similar to what The Mists of Avalon did, there was made a theoretical point of how virginity wasn't really that valued - except in practice, there was still a lot of slut-shaming over a damaged hymen (learn some anatomy, geez) and over how a pregnant girl was dishonored and couldn't marry well anymore, so there goes that.

For MZB's ideas on women having to serve as brood mares? I'll let her speak for herself: "Darkover Landfall stirred up a furor because some outraged feminists objected to the stand I took in the book, that the survival of the human race on Darkover could, and should, be allowed to supersede the personal convenience of any single woman in the group. [...] to those who refuse to accept the tenet that "Biology is Destiny", I have begun to ask them to show me a vegetarian lion or tiger before they debate the issue further." - quoted from here. TERFs must love her. But sure, have all the women in your colony raped into a dozen of pregnancies - with no say even to whose children they have to bear and birth. Why would humans have a claim to spread there in the first place? They weren't native to the world. I gotta say, I only found this particular quote in my most recent look at the subject. When I read Darkover Landfall, I was sure the whole point of it was that the beginnings of Darkovan society were rooted in a terrible crime against half of the population. I had no idea that MZB was defending this viewpoint extra-diegetically.

And then the more basic stuff. How every beautiful woman who chose a place in society away from sex and marriage was deemed a "waste", how the worth of a woman was, even thousands of years after said first colonization, measured by her fertility, to the point that it was considered subversive that the Renunciates vowed to only bear children whenever the fuck they want, how most marriages were arranged without consent, how women treated each other as competition to be bitched out instead of allies. There's nothing particularly progressive about this. Women's rights, in MZB's books, are only something for her "specials", for the few chosen individuals who are born with the right genes and / or stand in the center of the narrative. Everyone else can go hang.

[indielowercase]

white trans woman refusing to discuss the nuance of race. being a white woman means they still have privilege over even cis black men and other men of color. when they refuse to consider that in these conversations that thats racism. openly talking about how they hate all men including other queer men/masc folks, men of color, disabled men all men who face bigotry at the hands of society makes them a bigot

being trans doesnt erase their whiteness and the only people i see using tme/tma have been racist white trans people funny how the trans women of color i know never use those terms and how its extremely common that those terms are used to harm and harass trans masc/men especially those who are not white and how trans men and yes even cis men still face misogyny at the hands of society. it goes hand in hand with homophobia. the tme/tma binary is also transphobic to people who are intersex and non binary

transmisogyny exists and is terrible and the solution isnt being horrible to other trans people who have different experiences cause again thats a very white and usually american way of thinking cause god forbid other cultures and how they deal with things exist

ok i'm back from sleep and work

so this is opinion, not proof. you haven't given me anything i could use to confirm this for myself. while i understand why you'd want to send these on anon, all that together makes me considerably less likely to take you on your word.

with just the info provided and gleaning from conversations i've read, it sounds like you're discussing her individual privilege over another individual in discussion on tumblr. this doesn't tell me anything about the actual interaction. saying a white trans woman has privilege over a black cis man is uhhhhhhhh questionable at best we'll say. she may have been racist, the other party may have been misogynist towards her. neither may have happened and one, the other, or both could have just been assholes. i have no idea.

your personal interactions with people aren't the only ones that happen, online or otherwise. i've seen very thoughtful discussions of tme/tma as tools in certain contexts to discuss structural (not individual) oppression of trans women that doesn't happen on a larger scale or systemically to people who are not trans women. then again i've seen it listed alongside other identity markers in people's bios (always tme not tma tho), which makes me feel weird because it's like saying "antiblackness exempt" instead of your race so like there's that. it's useful as a description of transmisogyny specifically but not as like an identity category that's fucking weird but that's also not how i've seen it used the majority of the time (this may be a personal experience difference between us)

i haven't seen it used as a cudgel against trans men. i have seen trans men use it in discussion while trying to claim transmisogyny effects them too (always within the context of discussion of transmisandry) which is something i don't understand at all. i'm a trans man in a pink collar job and while the pay gap for a man working in elementary education (me) or as a nurse (not me) effects any man working in that field, i think it would be weird and inaccurate to say we experience misogyny because of that. this sounds nitpicky but being effected by it vs being the target/experiencing a particular bigotry or structural bias feels like an important distinction to me. the structural forces of bigotry are used as a method of social control, yes, much like homophobia and racism. it's a tool used to make sure "we" aren't too much like "them" because being "them" is bad (because we treat them badly and also their identity category is incapable of doing anything outside of what we prescribe to it.)

or, put another way, white people aren't structurally effected by anti-asian racism because kids at comedian john mulaney's elementary school were racist to him because they thought he looked asian.

nothing here aligns with any terf ideas. someone saying they hate men does not a terf make. if you mean gender essentialist please say so instead.

i would like to say, you're damn right the solution isn't to be horrible to other trans people.

[fozmeadows]

race & culture in fandom

For the past decade, English language fanwriting culture post the days of LiveJournal and Strikethrough has been hugely shaped by a handful of megafandoms that exploded across AO3 and tumblr – I’m talking Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Dr Who, the MCU, Harry Potter, Star Wars, BBC Sherlock – which have all been overwhelmingly white. I don’t mean in terms of the fans themselves, although whiteness also figures prominently in said fandoms: I mean that the source materials themselves feature very few POC, and the ones who are there tended to be done dirty by the creators.

Periodically, this has led POC in fandom to point out, extremely reasonably, that even where non-white characters do get central roles in various media properties, they’re often overlooked by fandom at large, such that the popular focus stays primarily on the white characters. Sometimes this happened (it was argued) because the POC characters were secondary to begin with and as such attracted less fan devotion (although this has never stopped fandoms from picking a random white gremlin from the background cast and elevating them to the status of Fave); at other times, however, there has been a clear trend of sidelining POC leads in favour of white alternatives (as per Finn, Poe and Rose Tico being edged out in Star Wars shipping by Hux, Kylo and Rey). I mention this, not to demonize individuals whose preferred ships happen to involve white characters, but to point out the collective impact these trends can have on POC in fandom spaces: it’s not bad to ship what you ship, but that doesn’t mean there’s no utility in analysing what’s popular and why through a racial lens.

All this being so, it feels increasingly salient that fanwriting culture as exists right now developed under the influence and in the shadow of these white-dominated fandoms – specifically, the taboo against criticizing or critiquing fics for any reason. Certainly, there’s a hell of a lot of value to Don’t Like, Don’t Read as a general policy, especially when it comes to the darker, kinkier side of ficwriting, and whether the context is professional or recreational, offering someone direct, unsolicited feedback on their writing style is a dick move. But on the flipside, the anti-criticism culture in fanwriting has consistently worked against fans of colour who speak out about racist tropes, fan ignorance and hurtful portrayals of living cultures. Voicing anything negative about works created for free is seen as violating a core rule of ficwriting culture – but as that culture has been foundationally shaped by white fandoms, white characters and, overwhelmingly, white ideas about what’s allowed and what isn’t, we ought to consider that all critical contexts are not created equal.

Right now, the rise of C-drama (and K-drama, and J-drama) fandoms is seeing a surge of white creators – myself included – writing fics for fandoms in which no white people exist, and where the cultural context which informs the canon is different to western norms. Which isn’t to say that no popular fandoms focused on POC have existed before now – K-pop RPF and anime fandoms, for example, have been big for a while. But with the success of The Untamed, more western fans are investing in stories whose plots, references, characterization and settings are so fundamentally rooted in real Chinese history and living Chinese culture that it’s not really possible to write around it. And yet, inevitably, too many in fandom are trying to do just that, treating respect for Chinese culture or an attempt to understand it as optional extras – because surely, fandom shouldn’t feel like work. If you’re writing something for free, on your own time, for your own pleasure, why should anyone else get to demand that you research the subject matter first?

Because it matters, is the short answer. Because race and culture are not made-up things like lightsabers and werewolves that you can alter, mock or misunderstand without the risk of hurting or marginalizing actual real people – and because, quite frankly, we already know that fandom is capable of drawing lines in the sand where it chooses. When Brony culture first reared its head (hah), the online fandom for My Little Pony – which, like the other fandoms we’re discussing here, is overwhelmingly female – was initially welcoming. It felt like progress, that so many straight men could identify with such a feminine show; a potential sign that maybe, we were finally leaving the era of mainstream hypermasculine fandom bullshit behind, at least in this one arena. And then, in pretty much the blink of an eye, things got overwhelmingly bad. Artists drawing hardcorn porn didn’t tag their works as adult, leading to those images flooding the public search results for a children’s show. Women were edged out of their own spaces. Bronies got aggressive, posting harsh, ugly criticism of artists whose gijinka interpretations of the Mane Six as humans were deemed insufficiently fuckable.

The resulting fandom conflict was deeply unpleasant, but in the end, the verdict was laid down loud and clear: if you cannot comport yourself like a decent fucking person – if your base mode of engagement within a fandom is to coopt it from the original audience and declare it newly cool only because you’re into it now; if you do not, at the very least, attempt to understand and respect the original context so as to engage appropriately (in this case, by acknowledging that the media you’re consuming was foundational to many women who were there before you and is still consumed by minors, and tagging your goddamn porn) – then the rest of fandom will treat you like a social biohazard, and rightly so.

Here’s the thing, fellow white people: when it comes to C-drama fandoms and other non-white, non-western properties? We are the Bronies.

Not, I hasten to add, in terms of toxic fuckery – though if we don’t get our collective shit together, I’m not taking that darkest timeline off the table. What I mean is that, by virtue of the whiteminding which, both consciously and unconsciously, has shaped current fan culture, particularly in terms of ficwriting conventions, we’re collectively acting as though we’re the primary audience for narratives that weren’t actually made with us in mind, being hostile dicks to Chinese and Chinese diaspora fans when they take the time to point out what we’re getting wrong. We’re bristling because we’ve conceived of ficwriting as a place wherein No Criticism Occurs without questioning how this culture, while valuable in some respects, also serves to uphold, excuse and perpetuate microaggresions and other forms of racism, lashing out or falling back on passive aggression when POC, quite understandably, talk about how they’re sick and tired of our bullshit.

An analogy: one of the most helpful and important tags on AO3 is the one for homophobia, not just because it allows readers to brace for or opt out of reading content they might find distressing, but because it lets the reader know that the writer knows what homophobia is, and is employing it deliberately. When this concept is tagged, I – like many others – often feel more able to read about it than I do when it crops up in untagged works of commercial fiction, film or TV, because I don’t have to worry that the author thinks what they’re depicting is okay. I can say definitively, “yes, the author knows this is messed up, but has elected to tell a messed up story, a fact that will be obvious to anyone who reads this,” instead of worrying that someone will see a fucked up story blind and think “oh, I guess that’s fine.” The contextual framing matters, is the point – which is why it’s so jarring and unpleasant on those rare occasions when I do stumble on a fic whose author has legitimately mistaken homophobic microaggressions for cute banter. This is why, in a ficwriting culture that otherwise aggressively dislikes criticism, the request to tag for a certain thing – while still sometimes fraught – is generally permitted: it helps everyone to have a good time and to curate their fan experience appropriately.

But when white and/or western fans fail to educate ourselves about race, culture and the history of other countries and proceed to deploy that ignorance in our writing, we’re not tagging for racism as a thing we’ve explored deliberately; we’re just being ignorant at best and hateful at worst, which means fans of colour don’t know to avoid or brace for the content of those works until they get hit in the face with microaggresions and/or outright racism. Instead, the burden is placed on them to navigate a minefield not of their creation: which fans can be trusted to write respectfully? Who, if they make an error, will listen and apologise if the error is explained? Who, if lived experience, personal translations or cultural insights are shared, can be counted on to acknowledge those contributions rather than taking sole credit? Too often, fans of colour are being made to feel like guests in their own house, while white fans act like a tone-policing HOA.

Point being: fandom and ficwriting cultures as they currently exist badly need to confront the implicit acceptance of racism and cultural bias that underlies a lot of community rules about engagement and criticism, and that needs to start with white and western fans. We don’t want to be the new Bronies, guys. We need to do better.  

[holdmyhopeinyourhands]

I don’t understand the praising for making a statement against racism. Like why are you proud of them for making a statement on something that is an issue everyday for people and will never been an issue for rich white people. The drivers aren’t doing anything incredible by saying I stand with Lewis when one of them said he wouldn’t take the knee because of the “violence” involved with BLM movement. People don’t want statements they want to see them actively calling out the shit that happens to Lewis and how he’s targeted by people within the sport.

Sigh. Okay let me try to explain this. As a black woman (speaking from experience) of course I would love it if people actually stood up from me and did something about the racism and discrimination I face. But people rarely do that unfortunately and it's disheartening and frustrating and depressing. It makes you feel alone and isolated. So when companies or coworkers make generic posts saying they got your back...it means a lot. It just does. It's not huge and they could do more. Oh they could definitely do more but even that little scrap (pathetic I know) of support can make a world of difference for someone who's been fighting alone for so long. So when I stand here and say, hey, I'm happy Lewis is getting some support, I mean it. I really really mean it. From the bottom of my heart, I mean it.

Because last season Lewis got these generic comments too (even more generic in fact) but when he was interviewed later in the season he said it was the first time he hadn't felt so alone after experiencing racism and this man has been in this sport for 15 years! Like fifteen fucking years and it's the first time he's felt supported. So yeah, are the copy past comments enough? No. Are the generic, non confrontational statements of support all we need? No. But my God it's all we got right now. It's all Lewis got right now and it clearly means something to him so yes, if while we fight this battle and try to raise awareness and make this sport more inclusionary and better, if while we work towards that, while Lewis works towards that, if that means Lewis will feel a little less alone by his fellow drivers showing some modicum of support then by God I will take it and I will give them a little applause of gratitude. I rather he feels loved for fraction of what he deserves than get nothing at all. Sue me. Is it desperate, pathetic even to accept so little? Maybe. Maybe it is but I don't care. I'll take what I can get and keep working harder to gain more.

[rantrambles]

Ever get so upset you make a Tumblr account to vent?

I haven’t even listened to The Penumbra Podcast yet but it’s on my list because it’s insanely popular and the cosplays I’ve seen are hot as hell (A+ to all the cosplayers I’ve seen you’ve done great work). Now, with the recent news surrounding the podcast, I’ll wait till it’s done if I ever do get into it. I’m Asian and part of the LGBT community but I’m not nonbinary so I can’t say much about the trans represention in the art but I wanted to add my two cents on the matter as a person of color and someone examining the situation from the outside. Also, before I get deeply into it, I’m not the only person of color with opinions on this matter so if people have their own frustrations and criticism with the racism in The Penumbra Podcast and/or the new artist they hired, definitely listen to them too. These are my own personal opinions, and I’m sure other people will disagree and that’s fine. We’re all going to have different views on this so bear that in mind. Also, feel free to correct me or add anything if I’ve missed some information. Here’s a great breakdown of the whole situation for those that don’t know what happened. Finally, I was very hesitant to post this, but I felt it was important because I make a statement at the end on how race should be presented in a podcast format so if you are interested in making a podcast and want to have a diverse range of characters, please skip to the end to read those thoughts.

I’ll start off by saying, I’m not even that upset with the new artist that The Penumbra Podcast hired. I know that statement alone is controversial but I don't personally know them, and I’m not going to judge who they are as a person by a few pieces of art they’ve made. They are the least of the problems that I have here. Since the announcement and the backlash, I’ve been scrolling through the artist’s Instagram account and I can tell why people find the designs offensive, but I’m also comparing the designs to the artist’s other work, and I honestly believe that’s just their style. They’ve exaggerated the features of just about every character they’ve made, regardless of race or gender. From what I’ve seen the sharp angles and overly round curves in the anatomy that make some of the character’s features more jarring are how they prefer to draw. I’m sure they’re capable of drawing more realistic proportions but for the most part they’re art aims to call attention, be bold, and create distinguished features. Not inherently a bad thing on its own.

And yeah I’d understand the issue if this were a scenario where the artist heard how these characters acted in the podcast and thought “hey, obviously this character is a black woman because they are super strong and therefore must have big muscles, no other woman could look like that” or “hey, this character has to be Asian because they act super seductive sometimes better draw them as such.” But from my understanding the race was already decided by previous official artists and a general description of the characters were already generated by the audience, similar to how The Magnus Archives leaned towards drawing scrawny Jon with black, greying hair and dark skin. The new artists couldn’t really change those features even if those features aren’t described in canon because a depiction that strayed too far from popular fandom interpretation would make the character’s unrecognizable to the fanbase. 

I think the reason this became such a big issue for most people is because the new Penumbra artist used their exaggerated art style when making these characters and people of color and nonbinary folks already see themselves drawn as these exaggerated caricatures all the time (with those images being used to further discriminate against them). I’m sure the artist didn’t mean for their art to be offensive, but that of course doesn’t change how it was received. 

According to some, the poses and expressions the artists chose did not fully represent the characters entirely and only served to further perpetuate harmful stereotypes, and I’ll have to take their word for it because I still haven’t listened to the podcast so I have no idea how the characters act. But again much of the criticism is based on the one line-up and doing a deeper dive into the artist’s work I managed to find artwork that was much less offensive. Here some art where Vespa is depicted in a non-violent pose and one where Vespa is in a threatening pose but not an overly violent one. Here is Peter drawn in a non-seductive pose. Hopefully, the artist truly does keep the criticisms in mind as they work on the new official art. I’m just not the type of person that wants to get the pitchforks out and cause this particular person to lose a job they seemed really excited about over their old character line-up, especially when that person is also part of a marginalized group.

Again, that’s just my opinion on that particular artist. Those who are offended by their art are still valid in how they feel, and the artist should absolutely take their criticism to heart to better how they represent the characters.

What I’m more upset about is that I think The Penumbra Podcast should never have released official art for their characters in the first place and that’s their mistake that they refuse to own up about. They have made it clear that the story was never meant to portray characters of colors, a fact emphasized by the fact they hired mostly white actors from the start. They only started releasing art of the characters to get a profit. And the thing is they know what they did was wrong. All I had to do was search Penumbra Podcast racism and there is a note on their website saying that they archived some old official art.

“We have discontinued all Penumbra merchandise that uses the original character designs, and in the meantime, any profits on the sales of that merchandise will go to the For The Gworls project. We also realize that the depiction of these characters as POC, while not appropriate for us to use in our marketing and merchandise, has nonetheless become personally meaningful to many POC listeners. For that reason, and because we do not wish to distance ourselves from our mistake, we are keeping these images on our website for archival purposes. Though we do want to make it clear that many of the main/featured voice actors are white and that we did not write the characters to represent any specific POC experience, you are, as always, free to imagine these characters in any way that you like.”

I went to their shop and they still sell posters and pins with the character’s faces on them, but they are donating it to a good cause so hopefully that stays the same. However, I still find it a little uncomfortable that they are still selling character merch and have plans to continue selling character merch. They have no right to dissuade the fans that already found representation in the characters, but they also have no right to profit off the representation that was built, regardless if they made the story. 

Let’s compare this to another piece of popular media. I love Avatar the Last Airbender and, I liked the ATLA voice actors just fine but there should have been more people of color doing voice acting behind the screen too. The voice actors for that show were mainly white too, however, the creators knew that they would be making poc characters. That’s what makes the difference. Did they still choose to go with mostly white voice actors? Yes. Could they have done better and pay more people of color? Also yes. But I’m not as furious at them because they did their research on the cultures they were basing the ATLA world off of and intentionally gave us a show where Asians could see characters that looked like them represented on the screen. The Penumbra Podcast did not do any of that. Again, they openly admitted that it was never their intention to make the character’s people of color when they made the podcast so that goes to show no research was made to properly represent specific cultures. The color of the character’s skin in their official designs therefore became more of aesthetic choice rather than representation, and it wasn’t even their aesthetic choice to begin with!

Race isn’t a color you can just throw onto the character because you feel like it. So I want this to be a lesson to anyone that wants to make a podcast: if you want to include poc characters please do some research into the cultures you plan to represent the way you would with any other form of media. Just because the audience can’t see the characters and just because it’s harder to smoothly introduce the character’s appearance doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be lazy on how you present the characters. Do research before you start writing the first episode and take the time to hire poc actors. Hiring poc actors is actually the least that can be done to show representation. Also, since the audience cannot visually see the race of the characters on a podcast and it can’t typically be described the way you would in a book, you’ll have to be creative. It’s not my job to say how, but my suggestions would be, before the fans come up with their own image of the character, you need to establish race in the first few episodes or release character profiles on a website so that the fans know you canonically intended the characters to be of a certain race even if you aren’t able to mention it in the actual podcast. If you are unwilling to do any of these then the best route is to avoid stating race at all and allow the audience to build their own representation into your form of media. However, once this happens, you are not allowed to profit off popular fan interpretations. You lose all rights to create official art or images of the characters. You cannot use “we have a diverse cast of characters” when you market your story. It doesn’t matter whether you created the content or not, you did not create the representation for those minority groups.

It’s one thing for fans to build their own inclusivity into a form of art like a podcast, but it’s another thing for the creators who never worked to make the representation happen to take advantage of the representation that the listeners built for themselves. Thank you for attending my TedTalk.

[fatehbaz]

hi maybe you’ve written about this before but i’m working for someone who is part of the ecological landscape alliance and we’ve been having big talks about the concept of “invasive” species vs “native” plants and how the concept is rooted in xenophobia, and also talking about how maybe invasive plants aren’t that bad?? this goes against everything i’ve ever heard anyone talk about invasive species but i really don’t know all that much about it. sounds silly maybe coming from a farmer but i really don’t have a super firm ecological understanding, most of my plant knowledge is agricultural based and im really curious to learn more and was hoping you could point me in the right direction?

Yes, I definitely run into this disk horse all the time. Especially the “maybe invasive plants aren’t that bad” discussion. It seems the native/alien stuff is most often mentioned in disk horse about the Anthropocene. Basically, you’ll sometimes see statements like: “Is anything really natural in the Anthropocene?” I have also seen, and spent a lot of time contemplating, how belief in the categories of “natural” and “alien/invasive” in discussion of ecology might be rooted in or at least inadvertently support racism/xenophobia.

But I am still wary of the “native vs alien” and “no creature or landscape is really natural, not any more” disk horse, at least as explored by some white/settler-colonial academics, for exactly the same reasons: because it might be rooted in or support racism/xenophobia. Because the proposal that “nothing is native, nothing is invasive” itself can actually engage in a sort of “settler absolution” that obscures how there really is a contrast between imperial and Indigenous peoples, and the “nothing is natural, nothing is invasive” proposal could excuse the colonial/imperial introduction and expansion of monoculture by accepting the spread of industry/agriculture/non-native species as an inevitability. And these concepts can actually work to generalize conditions of ecological degradation and apocalypse, as if to say that “all humans now live in such a damaged world, we’re all victims” (even though many non-white, especially Indigenous, people actually bear most of the violence and burden of living in “post-apocalyptic” ecologies.)

But actually, I don’t think I can be too helpful here.

I still have a lot of contemplating to do, about how categories of natural/invasive in ecology might support the violence of categorizing people as natural/invasive. Don’t really know where I stand yet, y’know? So I don’t want to be too quick to come to a conclusion. I don’t even really want to offer opinions here. That said, I am very sensitive to language, and the language that I use. So I do appreciate that there is an effort to interrogate the negative consequences of describing things with words like “alien”. Also, the categorizing of lifeforms is and always has been a mess.

I don’t have many reading recommendations. The “native vs alien” and “nothing is really native, actually” proposals are concepts that I brush up against but don’t read too deeply into, even though this disk horse has been popular-ish in dark ecology and academic ecology/environmental studies circles for at least 10 years or more by now.

I guess, for my thoughts on native vs alien, what counts as “natural”, invasive species, and how the disk horse can excuse settler-colonial/imperial racism, I would point to this post I made about Pablo Escobar’s feral hippopotamuses in Colombia.

One introduction to the concept, which I think is an enjoyable read (though I don’t necessarily agree with all of his implications), is this essay by Hugo Reinert about the category of “natural” and the “purity” of a species: “Requiem for a Junk-Bird: Violence, Purity and the Wild.” Cultural Studies Review. 2019.

Anna Boswell’s very famous article about stoats and non-native species in Aotearoa kind of dances around this same issue of naturalness: “Settler Sanctuaries and the Stoat-Free State.” Animal Studies Journal. 2017.

-------

Generally, I agree with the implication that there is no “remote” or untouched corner of the planet where ecology has escaped human influence.

On that aspect, here’s a post I made about “planetary urbanization”.

But the native/alien disk horse can be extended to problematique degrees, with proposals that sometimes remind me of sci-fi goofiness, like fans of dark ecology or weird fiction or Mieville/Van der Meer got a little too excited about “the boundary between human and other-than-human has become so blurred that there may as well no longer be distinctions between native species and invasive species”, like they got a little too drunk on theory and just decided that “everything is in flux!”. Criticisms, then, of the “nothing is native” disk horse include how this oversimiplifies ecology and might enable/excuse settler-colonial invasion.

A lot of the “invasive plants are good, actually!” disk horse I’ve seen shows up in Australian literature written by settler scholars, which might be pretty telling.

Basically, it seems some scholars will take Alfred Crosby’s “neo-Europe” and “ecological imperialism” concepts, and then say something like “look, the damage is done, so much of Earth’s soils/landscapes are altered by introduced plants that we may as well accept it as the new baseline/normal ecology, and work from there.” As if to point at how North America has been entirely overrun by non-native earthworms and then to say “well, the worms are going to inevitably destroy hardwoods forests, soils of the Great Lakes region, the boreal-temperate transition zone, and maple trees which supply place-based maple syrup foodsheds, so we may as well accept that we live in a damaged world.”

I don’t know if I’m entirely satisfied with this.

-------

Other related concepts brought up in the same  discussion of “nothing is really native” might include “invasion biology” and “assisted migration.” I see these concepts brought up in academic writing from the University of California system, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and “environmental humanities” generally. Basically, these writers/scholars will point to the past ten thousand-ish years of the Holocene, and how humans have had such profound influence on global ecology that “introduction of non-native species” and “mass-scale anthropogenic climate/ecological change” are not just recent developments since Industrial Revolution or Indus/Yellow/Mesopotamian statecraft, but even older. For example, I’ve talked a lot about how, in the Late Pleistocene or early Holocene, the Asiatic steppes and parts of the Great Plains could have apparently been more like intermittent woodlands before humans engaged in deliberate fire-setting to better target megafauna herds, meaning that the human role in creation of vast “naturally-occurring” grassland regions may be underestimated. This dove-tails with the better-established fact that the forests of Central America and eastern North America in the early Holocene were/are actually more like cultivated food forests managed by Indigenous people.

The argument, then, may also point to yams, sweet potato, and coconut as examples of creatures with what now appear to be “old” and “established” widespread transoceanic distribution ranges which actually may have been introduced via assisted migration by humans.

The argument, basically, says: Well, let’s say hypothetically that humans didn’t play a role in spreading sweet potato or coconut. By chance, if ocean currents “naturally” introduced these species, if these plants “naturally” colonized whatever lands they were swept off towards, doesn’t this mean they could essentially be “natural” to anywhere they might arrive and successfully establish themselves? Therefore, does it really matter if humans helped them get there?

This seems to be related to the “no plants are actually invasive” proposal. As if to say: “If English pasture grasses have successfully reproduced themselves in Patagonia, Aotearoa, South Africa, the Canadian prairies, etc., what does it mean that their migration was assisted by humans?”

But this is where I have reservations: It wasn’t just any humans that “assisted the migration” of monoculture grasses from Europe to the prairies of Turtle Island. It was specific humans, with deliberate intent, upholding specific institutions, protecting their own well-being at the expense of other humans and lifeforms, enacting specific violence against specific victims.

-------

Another aspect of this which I see mentioned often is how early human/Polynesian settlement in Oceania and the South Pacific is an example of how mass anthropogenic ecological change doesn’t always involve statecraft, mass mono/agriculture, and imperialism. Aside from the famous decline of creatures like the moa, Polynesian islands were also home to relict species of large land turtles and ancient terrestrial/semi-arboreal crocodiles until human arrival in recent millennia. Writers will also point to human settlement in the Caribbean, where human arrival coincided with extinction of remnant populations of endemic Pleistocene ground sloths. (This also happened on Mediterranean islands, which hosted endemic species of hippopotamus and goats until recent millennia.)

Again, though, this is where white/settler-colonial academics advocating “nothing is natural” can kind of obscure settler-colonial violence, by pointing to history of anthropogenic environmental change and saying “see, all humans provoke extinction.”

Thus, you’ll see these scholars invoke Anna Tsing or Donna Harraway, referencing the “arts of living on a damaged planet” or “living in post-capitalist ruins.” Essentially, advocates of “nothing is native, any more” might say “we all live in a post-apocalyptic world now, so we should get used to it.”

This, coming from white/settler-colonial academics, sometimes rubs me the wrong way, as if it’s sort of like wish-fulfillment, or “an adventure” for comfortable white academics to engage in low-stakes thought experiments about extinction, naturalness, and apocalypse from which they’re actually largely insulated, at least compared to the poor, non-white, non-academic people who cope with the worst of environmental racism and ecological collapse.

This, again coming from white/settler-colonial academics, is also of course more than a little grating, since it kind of co-opts or culturally appropriates the “Indigenous/Native people actually live in a post-apocalyptic world” concept proposed by Indigenous scholars. It kind of takes from Indigenous/non-white people, and then generalizes the apocalypse as something that all humans now live with in seemingly equal measure, obscuring the fact that many people are actually forced to cope and/or live with more-serious-of-an-apocalypse than others.

-------

At the end of the day: Sure, kudzu or English pasture grasses or coconuts or European earthworms or domesticated cattle might be generalist species which can successfully inhabit landscapes across the planet. So whether humans introduce them via agriculture, or whether they "naturally" expand by some accident or by drifting across ocean currents, they might exist in this strange ontological space between "native" and "alien" which confounds human conceptions of what "belongs"? And this is worth considering! This is good to think about! But there are still, and always have been, those "small" landscapes, those isolated pockets, those relicts and remnants in shaded stream corridors, where small populations of endemic species teeter on the verge, with highly-specialized adaptations to highly-specific microhabitats. You're not going to "assist the migration" of or "accidentally introduce" a cave-obligate salamander from a limestone cavern or a temperate rainforest-dwelling land-slug to a desert biome.

But, again, I still think it is good to stop and ask ourselves whether categories of “natural” and “alien/invasive” in ecology make sense, are outdated, or if they reinforce racism/xenophobia. And, again, I haven’t read enough -- I haven’t grappled with these questions enough -- to have an opinion which I’m comfortable sharing, so I don’t want to discourage this disk horse too much.

Anyway, hope some of this is interesting. Sorry. Again, I don’t really have any good recommendations.

[emerald-studies]

How to be an ally

(I fixed ALL the links so fucking reblog)

1.  Check In On Your Black Friends/Acquaintances

In my opinion, I believe the best way to be an ally is to reach out to your Black friends and check in on them, consistently. If you can recognize the times we are living in are absolute hell, you should be checking in on the most effected. None of my friends have checked up on me to see how I was doing or just to talk. They didn’t even bring up the protests until I did. It feels very very lonely and scary to not be checked up on by the people who say they support and love you. So, I’m making this the first point because I don’t want anyone else to feel this way, not trying to complain.

2.  Learn More About Black History

It’s important to learn about the Black activists that our history books left out. Yes, Martin Luther King Jr. was, and is, important but we need to reflect on why he was pushed on us so much in our history classes, compared to other Black leaders. Is it because our government would rather us walk down the street holding signs than actually defending ourselves against the cop who’s beating us?

Here’s a master list of activists to start you off.

3.  Go to Rallies and Protests (If you can)

Find protests and rallies in your area by looking on Twitter and search #yourcityprotest. Or watch your local news channel to see where they are (if they’re being covered on the news). Also search on Facebook. Wear a mask.

4. Donate and Sign Petitions

If you don’t have extra money to donate, that’s fine. If you still want to be an ally then sign all the petitions you can. Take a day to research all the ones you can sign/haven’t signed and sign them!

(Also you don’t need to donate to change.org! Directly donate to non-profit organizations and victims’ families!)

George Floyd - change.org

George Floyd - amnesty.org

George Floyd - colorofchange.org

Get The Officers Charged

Charge All Four Officers

Breonna Taylor - moveon.org

Breonna Taylor - colorofchange.org

Breonna Taylor - justiceforbreonna.org

Breonna Taylor - change.org

Breonna Taylor - thepetitionsite.com

Ahmaud Arbery - change.org

Ahmaud Arbery - change.org 2

Ahmaud Arbery - change.org 3

Justice for Oluwatoyin Salau

Pass The Georgia Hate Crime Bill

Defund MPD

Life Sentence For Police Brutality

Regis Korchinski - change.org

Tete Gulley - change.org

Tony McDade - change.org

Tony McDade - actionnetwork.org

Tony McDade - thepetitionsite.com

Joao Pedro - change.org

Julius Jones - change.org

Belly Mujinga - change.org

Willie Simmons - change.org

Hands Up Act - change.org

National Action Against Police Brutality

Kyjuanzi Harris - change.org

Alejandro Vargas Martinez - change.org

Censorship Of Police Brutality In France

Sean Reed - change.org

Sean Reed - change.org 2

Kendrick Johnson - change.org

Tamir Rice - change.org

Tamir Rice - change.org 2

Fire Racist Criminal From The NYPD

Jamee Johnson - organizefor.org

Darius Stewart - change.org

Darius Stewart - moveon.org

Abolish Prison Labor

Free Siyanda - change.org

Chrystul Kizer - change.org

Chrystul Kizer - change.org 2

Andile Mchunu (Bobo) - change.org

Eric Riddick - change.org

Amiya Braxton - change.org

Emerald Black - change.org

Elijah Nichols - change.org

Zinedine Karabo Gioia - change.org

Angel Bumpass - change.org

Sheku Bayoh - change.org

Visit these sites for more info:

http://www.pb-resources.com/

https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/

5. Educate yourself and others.

Articles:

- “America’s Racial Contract Is Killing Us” by Adam Serwer | Atlantic (May 8, 2020)

- Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (Mentoring a New Generation of Activists

- ”My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” by Jose Antonio Vargas | NYT Mag (June 22, 2011)

- The 1619 Project (all the articles) | The New York Times Magazine

- The Combahee River Collective Statement

- “The Intersectionality Wars” by Jane Coaston | Vox (May 28, 2019)

- Tips for Creating Effective White Caucus Groups developed by Craig Elliott PhD

- “Where do I donate? Why is the uprising violent? Should I go protest?” by Courtney Martin (June 1, 2020)

- ”White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Knapsack Peggy McIntosh

- “Who Gets to Be Afraid in America?” by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi | Atlantic (May 12, 2020)

Movies/TV Shows:

When They See Us

American Son

Hello Privilege, It’s Me, Chelsea

The 13th

Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story

What Happened Miss Simone?

The Two Killings of Sam Cooke

Who Killed Malcolm X?

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

Homecoming: A Film by Beyonce (Lighter in tone)

LA 92

Dear White People

Videos:

- Black Feminism & the Movement for Black Lives: Barbara Smith, Reina Gossett, Charlene Carruthers (50:48)

- “How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion” | Peggy McIntosh at TEDxTimberlaneSchools (18:26)

- American Oxygen - Rihanna

- Formation - Beyonce

Podcasts:

- Malcolm X Speeches

- 1619 (New York Times)

- About Race

- Code Switch (NPR)

- Intersectionality Matters! hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw

- Momentum: A Race Forward Podcast

Books:

- The Autobiography of Malcolm X

- Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About RaceBook by Reni Eddo-Lodge

- Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

- Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Dr. Brittney Cooper

- Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon

- How To Be An Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

- Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

- Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad

- Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

- So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

- The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

- The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs

- The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

- This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherríe Moraga

- When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson

- White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo, PhD

Follow:

- Shaun King: Instagram | Website

- Antiracism Center: Twitter

- Black Women’s Blueprint: Website

- Color Of Change: Website

- The Conscious Kid: Website | Instagram

- Equal Justice Initiative (EJI): Website | Twitter | Instagram

- NAACP: Twitter | Instagram |

- Ziwe | Instagram | (She has discussions about race with White people, kinda grilling them, every Thursday at 8 p.m. EST. Super thrilling to watch.)

Here’s Some Music Too:

Change Gonna Come - Sam Cooke

Chain Gang - Nina Simone

Missisippi Goddamn - Nina Simone

Fuck Da’ Police - N.W.A.

This is America - Childish Gambino

I’m Not Racist - Joyner Lucas

Fight the Power - Public Enemy

Freedom (Live) - Beyonce

I Can’t Breathe - H.E.R.

American Oxygen - Rihanna

Brown Skin Girl - Beyonce

+

My Playlist With A Few More

Black Artists Matter Playlist

What a large list! It looks so overwhelming! Don’t worry, you don’t have to read/watch/listen to everything. It takes a lot of effort!

Jk.

[mostly-mundane-atla]

Got it. What about Inuit, Yup’ik and Inupiaq stereotypes? Are there a lot of harmful ones to avoid? I do know you shouldn’t make eating meat their entire personality, but what else?

Okay, this is going to get dark, so if you need to blacklist any content warnings (mine are tagged as "[insert content here] mention", do that before reading and if you need me to tag anything specific, please tell me and avoid this post until I get to it.

And again: Disclaimer that simply having an eskimo coded character fall into these stereotypes is not inherently racist or wrong. Keep this in mind as writers of color, and thereby Native writers, often get a lot of shit for writing our experiences as we feel them. Not to mention, yelling at someone trying to do justice to a dark topic, even if they don't succeed, is a shitty thing to do. Some of these have subtextual backing in canon. Remember that although we are looked down on for crimes, wrongs, or unpleasantness we're assumed to have commited, it's the members of our community who suffer most for it. There is value in understanding the pain that comes from the community that's supposed to protect you, and I don't believe the writers of the series had any malicious intentions toward us for writing characters that fall into any of these stereotypes. Recognize the nuance or get off my blog and find someone else to back up your discourse.

I'm going to use the term Native in this context. Natives come from many different cultures and cannot be assumed to be the same, but many of these stereotypes are used against more than just Inuit, Inupiat, and Yup'ik peoples. This is why I find it to be the most appropriate term in this context. I will add my understanding of where these stereotypes came from and why they're harmful, but I am only one person and a full understanding of the topic requires more than one point of view.

"Natives are drunks." The United States used alcohol on Natives the same way Britain used opium on China. They introduced it to us and blamed addiction on our own "weakness of character." This assumption of alcoholism carries with it assumptions of untrustworthiness. For a real life example: I was on a grand jury (a jury that decides whether a case is worth taking to court) years ago and one case was an older Native man accusing his brother of physically assaulting him. For some reason, a nearly all-white jury was deemed to be a jury of this man's peers, and two or three white men violently insisted that it shouldn't be brought to court because it happened at a party and therefore it was just some alcoholics from the village wasting a judge's time. Eventually, after some discussion about how no alcohol was mentioned, it was decided the case should be presented to a judge. I would also like to point out that the Native man in question was entirely sober, well put-together, spoke more cohesively than other cases that day, and had a bad limp.

"Natives are child abusers/molesters." This one actually links to the first stereotype mentioned, and a lot of what I've said on this blog about how abuse perpetuates. There was a lot of physical, mental, and, yes, sexual abuse in the US run schools, especially the Christian ones and boarding schools. (I've heard people mentioning that the priests would more often target the boys because they couldn't get pregnant.) When one gets regularly exposed to this sort of thing, they come to accept it as normal. This normalizing of abuse is bad enough for the one person, but it also affects the way they interact with others when put in similar situations as the abuser. They're hurt and traumatized and weren't effectively told that it was wrong and they shouldn't have been put through that, so they perpetuate it on people as vulnerable as they were when it happened. Movements have started in hopes of bringing awareness and getting help for these people before they can carry out the cycle further. Abuse between adults is also a tricky issue because the ways people are taught to give or not give consent are counterintuitive to cultural norms around verbal and nonverbal communication. See: the "they didn't say no" argument.

"The Stoic Native." There are a number of reasons one culture might emote less than another, especially around people they don't know. This doesn't mean that we don't feel or are too strong or brave to feel. Our emotions are our business and we don't owe anyone an explanation.

"Natives are part of the land." For some reason, a lot of non-Natives have trouble grasping that Indigenous Peoples are human beings in our own right. A lot of media portrays us not as people in the same sense that the outsiders are, but as extensions of the land or the spirits of the land. It's true that generations upon generations of living somewhere means the land will change to reflect the people, but that is due to the influence of people living there and how their culture says to interact with it. This trope reduces us to symbols of "a simpler time" or just as often white people's ideas of nature conservation. It's dehumanizing and infantalizing, ignoring our cultures and civilizations, treating us as either innocent martyrs for someone else's cause, or pests that are done away with once the land is developed.

"The Native Princess." Sometimes the only way non-Natives can see us as people is by pushing cultural norms and forms of government they're more familiar with onto us. Naturally, this means assuming that our civilizations were as successful as they were because they were like the non-Native author's. This is especially gratuitous in the case of Inuit, Inupiat, and Yup'ik peoples because we don't have anything resembling a monarchy. Yeah, this one is explicitly in the text so I can't expect much to be done with it

"Native women are always available to men." I don't know what it is about cultures that consider themselves more "advanced" seeing ones they consider "primative" where women have more autonomy in the relationships they have with men and fewer restritions on their bodies. I don't know how they misinterpret "she can do that here" as "she's there for the taking" but it's so gross and I would like it to stop. Sexuality being more open and not inherently sinful doesn't mean the women don't have standards or won't turn anyone down.

"Natives are broke and/or homeless." This is just the typical racism mixing with classism to make something even uglier situatation. The result is a lot of treatment you see non-Native POC get, such as being followed at the store because they expect you to steal something.

There are more, I'm sure, but these are the ones I get the most. Note that again, it's not inherently bad to write a Native or Native-coded character who drinks or has a lot of partners or is particularly connected to their homeland or poor, but take care to handle it with some sensitivity. Understand that there are implications to these things and real harm can be done by legitimizing racist stereotypes.

[neon-junkie]

Hey everyone,

This will be my final post addressing the fandom conflict that has quite frankly gotten out of hand. Although it’s very likely this post will be picked apart, no matter how well intended it is, I will no longer be addressing, interacting, or responding to any further accusations made against me. Of course, if people have questions from a genuine place of interest, I will be happy to clarify anything for you, either via DM’s or non-anon asks. I will not be answering anonymous asks on this, as I do not want anything else posted on this topic. 

As a side note: For anyone tempted to wade into the debate, I sincerely ask you not to get involved. Do not make yourself a target, do not feel you need to ‘pick a side’, and please do not think you have an obligation to reason with either side. It seems to be well past the point of that, so please find people you get along with in this fandom and curate a space for yourself away from all this conflict.

Warning: This post will contain uncensored slurs, mentions of racism, paedophilia, transphobia, LGBTQ+ phobia, death threats, threats of violence, targeted harassment, and abusive language.

To start off, I want to apologise to everyone who has somehow gotten drawn into this mess by either defending me, following me, or interacting with my content. This whole situation with me began well over a year ago when I wrote a crack-smut fic featuring Javier/Micah, posted back in August 2019. A crack fic is defined as “a work of fan fiction that is absurd, surprising or ridiculous, often intentionally.” It was inspired by a camp interaction between Micah and Javier, and like many other fanfiction writers, I decided to write smut about it. The fic was titled ‘Dirty Fucking Greaser’, and if that shocks you, I’m sure you can imagine how shocked I was to be informed afterwards that ‘Greaser’ was in fact a very serious 19th century slur for a Mexican individual. My first encounter with this word as insult was via RDR2, where it was used like a very casual insult. My only prior knowledge of this term was in regards to the greasers youth subculture, so the severity was lost on me. This obviously does not excuse my ignorance, and I should have researched the term better, but this is just again to apologize for that oversight, the insensitivity, and to highlight that my use of this term was not meant maliciously. Following this being pointed out, I proceeded to make 3 separate apology posts [Unfortunately I can only find the third one: HERE], renamed the fic, and added slur warnings in both the tags and the fic description. When I continued to receive complaints and increasingly aggressive abuse (which included being told my apologies weren’t good enough and I should delete my account and even kill myself), I attempted to delete the fic and mistakenly abandoned it instead. I contacted AO3 to see if it could be removed, but they said there was nothing they could do. I contacted their DMCA takedown team, who also said they couldn't remove it. Please note that all this happened 7-8 months ago, and has been dragged on for almost a year. 

So, from this one unfortunate incident, I’ve been branded a racist, and someone who attacks POC, when all I have done is tried to defend myself and correct my past mistakes. I could have done this more gracefully in the past, but frankly when you’re suddenly the target of unrelenting callout posts and nasty anons, it’s very hard to be open to criticism of this sort, but this is what I’m trying to move past.

Over the course of the year, this one mistake has spiralled, and the crusade against me has somehow coincided with moral conflicts over certain characters and ships. This has devolved into dehumanizing abuse, witch hunts, death threats, doxxing, anon hate, and much more unpleasant behaviour.

I have been in fandom for a very long time, and at the heart of all fandom circles is the fear of censorship and subsequent purges, so the ‘ship and let ship’ mentality was more or less the pinnacle of fandom philosophy. And yes, this can be problematic in some contexts. People have their right to be uncomfortable with content, have a right to be offended by content, but that is not content meant for you. This argument has devolved into ‘what material is morally right to engage with’ and that is a mentality in which fandom will not survive, because for every person who is telling me I’m an awful person for writing about Micah, there are three other people telling me how much they appreciate me making that content. For every fic in which I characterize Javier and Flaco a certain way, some people are made uncomfortable by it and others tell me they enjoy it. And this isn’t just white people, but POC too, which makes it very difficult to know whether I am genuinely in the right or the wrong, especially when it comes to the concept of ‘fetishization’ which I have been made aware I need to educate myself on. I intend to do so, but I disagree with the common accusation that finding non-white men romantically and sexually attractive is inherently fetishistic and makes me racist. It’s pushing a catch-22; don’t find POC sexually attractive? Racist. Find POC sexually attractive? Racist.

I am always willing to be (politely) approached about anything my readers may be concerned about, but if it’s something I’ve specifically tagged for (such as themes, scenarios, etc.) I’m afraid you consented to reading it and with that I cannot help you. You are just as responsible for curating your space and what you see/read just as much as I am responsible for tagging it appropriately.  

On the topic of racism, I want to bring up my prior use of ‘white racism’ which has obviously been a point of contention among both white and people of colour. The (literal) black vs white concept of racism is incredibly American-centric, and as someone from Europe, which has a history of oppression against white cultures and those of people of colour, it feels inaccurate. However, this has recently been discussed with me and I came to the realization that while growing up, especially in the UK, ‘xenophobia’ and ‘racism’ were marketed as one and the same. So, with this little revelation in mind, I will no longer be using ‘white racism’ (Or ‘reverse racism’) to identify the abuse I have been receiving, but will instead call it by what it really is; dehumanizing, debasing, xenophobic, puritanical.   

Very briefly, I will also touch on the NewAustin situation, which has also been dredged into this. I did not ‘chase a POC from tumblr’. NA was a minor who for some reason was on my 18+ blog and took issue with me, likely from the ongoing discourse regarding my fic and initial mistake, as well as my interest in Micah. They were subsequently harassed into deleting their account by anonymous hate following various conflicts with other users for their support of me or their ships in general. I have never encouraged my followers to target anyone, and have always asked to be blocked and blacklisted by those who do not like me or my content. When NewAustin messaged me following the deletion of their blog, I was admittedly indifferent to the point of being unkind, and accused them of sending the hate themselves. This was based on the anon hate being racially-driven without there being any prior knowledge or publication that NA was a person of colour. This aside, I should have at the time, whether I believed it was my followers or not, condemned this behaviour. Regardless of the issues I’ve had with these people, it is never ever ok to send hate to anyone, no matter the motivation behind it, and that should have been stated at the time.

All I can do at this point is acknowledged and apologize for my past mistakes, and try to improve myself going forward.  

It is not my place to dictate the morals of the character/ship-aspect of this argument, and I am not interested in waging a war of opinion. This post is simply to clarify how I am involved in this, and why I am so viscerally targeted. You can draw your own conclusions, but I am no longer interested in this endless back and forth.

To my mutuals/followers, I stand by my request to not interact and to block and move on, as this is what I’ll be doing too.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope it makes things from my perspective a little clearer.

-RAT <3

EDIT: Just after this post was made, the fic in question was finally removed. I had to go through a DMCA take down, which can take months, since I originally abandoned the fic, thinking that meant delete. I explain this in more detail above. Said fic is gone, and has been gone since this post has been around.