#my apologies to everyone who is following me for tcw content | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cacodaemonia · 2 years

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I wanted to thank someone who recently messaged me with information I had been unaware of regarding @leias-left-hair-bun having said some racist and transphobic things and then been dismissive and rude to those who tried to explain to her why those things were hurtful. To be clear, this is not a call-out post so people will go harass her (if she comes back online). Don't do that. But since I didn't know about it, I thought others might not as well, and I'm sure many of you would like to be aware of this kind of thing, as I wish I had been.

I won't name names, but to the person who alerted me, thank you again! I spend very little time on Tumblr, block and filter a lot of usernames, and don't scroll, so I'm very grateful that this individual took the time to have a conversation with me rather than sending vague anon asks, like a couple I've gotten in the past few months and just went ??? at.

I also wanted to apologize for hurting anyone inadvertently with my lack of knowledge. I didn't intend to hurt anyone, but it doesn't matter that I didn't know—I should still apologize. And I realize that's probably worthless, but it's all I have to offer besides letting people know the basics of what happened.

@omiomicron, @leeleebee, @alamogirl80, and I approached LLHB (only one of us spoke with her so it wouldn't seem like we were ganging up) as people who have been friendly with her, though I know others have done the same to no effect. It was made clear that we wanted to help her understand why she had hurt people in order to prevent her from doing further harm, but also that we didn't think she had done harm intentionally. Harm is still harm, whether or not it was intentional, but in any case, she refused to accept any responsibility for the things she's said, and was more focused on semantics and her opinion on other people’s pain, rather than the pain itself.

I'm a firm believer that, when you know better, you should do better, so when LLHB simply insisted we would have to agree to disagree over some very serious, fundamental issues, we decided the conversation was over and blocked her.

As I said, this is not a call-out post, but I think the matter is serious enough that I had to point out who was involved or it would just be another useless vague post. Everyone is racist to some degree or another because of the society we live in, and that's not an indictment of anyone's character, but if you are given an opportunity to change your views and behavior, and don't take it, that's something that shouldn't be overlooked.

The specifics of this instance aside, I want to talk about why this situation occurred in the first place.

The individual who kindly contacted me also pointed out how things become very siloed on Tumblr, since people often have to block others for their own sanity. I, for example, block many usernames and filter those usernames from tags and post content so that I don't see their posts when people I follow reblog from them.

Related to this, a couple months ago a friend of mine pointed out something I hadn't realized: in TCW fandom there's a small group of very aggressive, vocal antis who lumped in "problematic" shippers with racists, pedophiles, TERFs, etc. We were constantly bombarded with vague but abusive messages made up only of buzz words meant to evoke moral panic over fictional writing. The messages were so abusively vague and hurtful that it was a matter of protecting one's mental health to ignore them. I want to make it clear that calling out racism is not harassment nor being abusive. However when antis conflate legitimate criticisms of racism with shipping discourse it is very hard to separate out which were genuine call outs of racism and which were harassment under the guise of performative action. Antis do use racism as a buzz word in their harmful repertoire but not all racist call outs are anti behavior.

It's really unfortunate, too, because I and many people I know started out supporting the unwhitewashTBB movement and those heading it. Most of us have the same anti-racist goals in RL, after all—though I choose not to participate in activism on Tumblr because I personally think it's one of the worst places for it. But when I saw how hateful and cruel many of the people in that movement were to others (including BIPOC with differing opinions on fandom issues), I stopped reblogging their stuff and eventually unfollowed and blocked them. My opinions on racism and whitewashing haven't changed, but because of that movement's obsession with policing others' opinions on fandom matters, and viciously attacking anyone who disagrees on fandom matters, I stopped supporting them.

To be clear, this is not an excuse for my own ignorance of LLHB's behavior, but more an observation of how unproductive it is to try and lump fandom discourse together with RL issues like racism. While fandom racism and racist media is a big issue and people should be educated on it, the problem is people are unable to separate fandom discourse from it. This is the package deal of being in fandom but a clear separation of fiction and reality would minimize incidents like this.

In any case, all this has made me realize that interacting on Tumblr in anything more than a cursory, fandom-only way is a waste of time for me and only opens the door to cause harm. I'll also admit to being pretty damn salty that, while I stood up to the antis to take the heat off others and try to make people less fearful of openly shipping clone characters together, only one person could be bothered to tell me I was associating with someone who had said nasty things and point me in the direction of evidence.

I'm in fandom to escape from the trash fire that is real life, as are many of my friends—BIPOC, white, queer, neurodivergent, etc.—and I recognize that my ability to nope out of this situation is a privilege that many people don't have. But I'm not going to sacrifice my own mental health to be involved in a community that is toxic and harmful towards anyone who has differing opinions on fandom issues. It's not just racism anymore but rather anything that doesn't fit into some groups' ever shifting moral goalpost. I am not on Tumblr 24/7, and I don't feel that anyone should be held accountable for missing out on the avalanche of posts related to fandom discourse and drama. Personally, I don't have the spoons for any of that bullshit.

I still don't condone racism but from now on I'll be filtering anything relating to discourse, RL issues, antis, fandom police, etc. and will probably not read or respond to comments on or reblogs of this post.

#fandom wank #fandom #cw racism #unwhitewashtbb #cw transphobia #fandom police #antis #fandom toxicity #leias-left-hair-bun #tcw

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