Been Turning This Over In My Head For The Past Few Days And Trying To Articulate It To Myself Re. Ongoing

Been turning this over in my head for the past few days and trying to articulate it to myself re. Ongoing conversations about racism in fandom --

Because I am increasingly bored with the conversation around racism in fandom coming back to which characters get fic and which characters get shipped. I think that conversation becomes a symbol of racism in fandom because there are clear number to point to -- but simultaneously I think it also takes away from conversations around racism in fandom, because everyone zeroes in on the numbers and then it becomes a question of interpreting statistics and an argument about the quality of canons and a million tedious, heard six hundred thousand times before arguments about why someone may or may not choose to consume fic or art about a character or ship. Its uninteresting, it brings nothing new to the conversation and frankly I don't think it engages with the most upsetting parts of fandom.

But then what are these upsetting parts of fandom? This is really more qualitative and again, this is upsetting to a certain sort of (white) person who wants a simple quantitative fix which is why non-white fans, I think, get pulled into the trap of fixating on numbers as a discursive practice - to make people pay attention. I am not interested in having this conversation with white fans who are interested in absolving themselves of guilt or minimizing their own culpability or who are interested in ensuring that they are good people. I'm interested in the question of what is upsetting as a fan of colour? And well, the answer unfortunately embroils a lot of very well-meaning people who don't think of themselves as overtly racist but who have nevertheless absorbed racist and imperialist attitudes from immersion in cultures that privilege a certain worldview, which privilege a certain method of seeing, understanding and knowing the world and which obscure other possibilities of knowing and seeing the world. (Please note: I am trying to avoid cliched discourse phrases, because I am trying to make people think about what it is I am saying here, instead of fixating on words). Some of the most common ones I’ve seen:

The reproduction of imperial/colonial attitudes:

Fannish arguments about what constitutes imperialism/colonialism/genocide in the context of a particular piece of usually speculative media - the person in question is defining imperialism/colonialism/genocide with such a narrow lens that about 70% of imperial/colonial/genocidal violence in your country would be disqualified.

In an otherwise well-reasoned meta, you see someone using a historical source to make an argument about a reading that potentially opens up possibilities for a more diverse reading of an otherwise white text. However, this source is a deeply colonialist document and is presented decontextualized from that colonial history (with all the epistemic violence and outright textual racism that colonial knowledge about non-white people went with)

Explicit use of the language/imperialist attitudes linked to the noble savage or exotic other to "elevate" or "represent" a non-white character or non-white culture / non-white representational culture. (I see this one so often being reproduced by people who genuinely think they're doing something good here, because they're making an active effort to write/make art of non-white characters/cultures)

Using language with an uncanny similarity to colonial/imperialist denialism to defend their faves

Using settings with an imperialist backdrop/conflict that is largely about shipping a couple of characters (e.g., Any and all fic where characters serve in the Iraq or Afghanistan war as part of the us army) or is largely about a white character's guilt (e.g., 90% of Vietnam war literature and any time it makes an appearance in fandom with all those tropes)

The tedium of well-meaning representation:

On a similar spectrum as the exotic other spectrum, but the reproduction of cultural stereotypes - usually of a dominant culture within a non-white country (e.g., The preponderance of a very Brahminic, Hindu and frankly Jhumpa Lahiri-esque interpretation of harry potter being Indian). Or sometimes just the endless parade of stereotypes / symbols without any sort of complex emotions or relationships with them, only celebration.

Someone is writing about a character of colour! The character of colour spends the entire fic repressing their complex emotions about a white character who has hurt/violenced them in some way and instead dedicates themselves to comforting said character

Someone is writing a character of colour! The character of colour does no wrong and is a beautifully one-dimensional, boring piece of beige

Someone is writing a character of colour! The character of colour exists entirely to be an emotional sponge for the white character

Someone is writing a character of colour...who has no interiority

The reproduction of "I’m not a racist but" attitudes in heated fandom debates

"Racism in Europe is different, stop importing American ideals" there are Europeans who use the first part of this sentence in good faith to open up discussion/conversation, but usually this is meant to foreclose conversation and also, as a non-white person who lived in Europe: lol. Rofl. Lmao, even.

"It’s different here, because talking about racism here is racist and only racists do that" - I, once more, highly doubt this and maybe this betrays a little too much of the whiteness of the circles you move in

"I’m afraid of writing characters of colour because I will get yelled at" - great! Don't write them! Do you want a cookie, do you want us to call Bella Hadid. (Conversely: this one is funny, because I’m on the edge about whether or not I will run into out and out white supremacists (and I mean this in the sense of actual n*zis) in fandom while the most terrifying thing a certain sort of white fan can imagine is being dubbed racist)

Evoking anti-colonial/anti-racist non-white theorists in defense of white characters and their fictional actions - sometimes, it is good, in fact, to have a sense of proportion and understand that you need to be careful about what sources and texts you decide to pull into a fannish argument that is ultimately and frankly not very important in the grand scheme of things

The last category is like, pretty in your face, but the first two are unfortunately common enough that it is impossible to get into a fandom where there may be a character of colour or there may be a hint of imperialism to the text, without expecting to be made to wince hard frequently. The last is easy to spot a mile away and block, but the first really gets my goat, because to explain how these things can be upsetting to see, you have to delve into the history of imperialism and of seeing yourself reflected through the eyes of orientalists and colonists talking, for example, about the indolent hindoo or the wise and sagely hindoo or about the inscrutable oriental smile or the noble bravery of the Pashtun/Afghan/Arab/Bedouin and so on and so forth. It is basically impossible to articulate and describe, unless your interlocutor has read substantial bodies of 19th century texts - themselves bequeathed to you via the medium of a colonial educational system that insists on teaching them as "English literature". It is always from well-meaning people who would be, perhaps (and I prefer to hope) upset if they understood what they had evoked (ergo: immersion in cultures which obscure certain ways of knowing the world and knowing about how knowledge of the world is produced).

And ultimately, I don't know that fixating on shipping or character stat will get us anywhere near unpacking why and how these modes of writing or understanding characters are the easiest ones to fall into, why and how these attitudes are easy to reproduce and where they originate from. I don't know that stats are anything but dealing with symptoms instead of the malaise. But then, I think, dealing with this malaise is far far more exhausting and frankly, it isn't what I want to do with my fannish time - and I hate to think that any fan of colour, simply trying to have fun, must invest themselves in trying to cure the malaise, in order to be spared the ongoing one thousand cuts that come with being a non-white fan in international spaces.