@thisdiscontentedwinter: There’s nothing you can do as long as you believe talking about fandom’s collective biases is a personal attack.
Loll, okay!
“There’s an answer, but I’m not telling you.”
Nope. I’m being serious and straghtforward. I can’t give you a “solution” if you’re set on the belief that that this whole discussion is a personal attack on you.
I do have a set of suggestions, which I link to down at the bottom, but first a few words. Because my suggestions are absolutely not going to work if you only look at them resentfully as something to placate the fandom racism police or whatever.
To expand what diversehighfantasy said: in order to understand the answer, you have to realize that you are a snowflake and we are talking about a blizzard. Your motives for preferring a particular character may have nothing to do with race, but are still a part of a blizzard. You are one tiny part of an overall trend across fandoms. If there is an avalanche, and most of the rocks are sandstone and you are granite, well, that’s great for you but it doesn’t make you not a part of the avalanche. You did not cause the problem and you, by yourself, cannot solve it. Nobody can solve it by themselves because it is fundamentally not about any one person. It’s not even about any one character, or pairing. It is about the larger trend of society, or, in this case, fandom.
There are three types of racism (or sexism, homophobia, or any other large-scale bias). (I didn’t come up with this, but I can’t find the tumblr post where I saw it.)
1) individual hatred, i.e. that person who genuinely and consciously hates black people or Jewish people or gay people or whatever. This is what White people usually think of when they think of racism–that personal hatred.
2) general trends in society and general attitudes, pervasive stereotypes, etc. In real life, this is the sort of thing that results in white ex-cons being significantly more likely to get hired than black men with no criminal record. (Yes, there are studies that prove this, and there are many other manifestations of this.) In fandom, it’s the tendency to focus on white men and ignore people of color.
3) Institutionalized racism, such as Jim Crow laws.
When white people talk about racism, we focus on 1 and 3. Like, okay, the Jim Crow laws are gone! (They’ve been replaced by subtler versions that target black people without specifically naming race, but okay, sure, the most egregious versions are off the books.) And I, personally, have no animus against Black people, so therefore nothing I do can possibly be wrong!
It completely ignores the fact that even back when racism was openly, legally enshrined and open hate was acceptable, the general social trends were often more harmful. Because for every one person who hates black people enough to join the KKK, there are hundreds who don’t “hate black people” but just want to keep things “normal,” which on a gut-deep level means “focused on white people.” Which means either “no black people” or “only a few token black people” or “only black people who are culturally acceptable” or “sure, there can be people of color, as long as they’re in the background.” The thing is, when your gut starts getting uncomfortable, humans very often don’t understand why. So we start making up reasons, especially when the truth doesn’t match up with what we want to believe about ourselves. And these trends still very harmful even without laws to back them up! And they don’t require any hatred to perpetuate!
There is only one thing required to maintain these trends: a subconscious belief, on the part of most of society, that “normal”=white, and a reluctance to look at the mechanisms that make it “normal” and keep it “normal.”
That’s what this conversation is about. Are we (you, me, and fandom as a whole) going to just go with the flow of the larger culture and prioritize whiteness? (And maleness, and ableness, and all the other things that go into “normal”?) Or are we going to work to do better?
I think we absolutely can do better, and we should do better, and what’s more I believe it’s possible to have fun and enjoy fandom and fannish activities while we do it. And, no, it’s not about saying “you can never like X character or anyone like them, ever again!” and it’s not about “you’re a bad person if you like Y!” and it’s not about “how can I shame people into liking only approved, morally and social justice-approved characters for the “right” reasons?”
You want concrete advice and tips on how to contribute less to the general level of white prioritization in fandom? I have some in the following blog post:
It’s all about that first step. If that’s not a step one is willing to take, the rest is spitting in the wind. The response you got (~good points but my whiteslash is special and not part of the problem~) was just what I expected.
Great essay, btw – especially that it doesn’t expect people to drop the ships they like, but focuses on the inevitable next fandom. It’s still a difficult proposition because Fandom is such a bandwagon culture, and fans tend to migrate from fandom to fandom together.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2uCzJ2j