Tumbling Like Alice

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
nonbinary-nicolo kaydeefalls

Anonymous asked:

completely unsurprising to see you out here whipping up a harassment committee to try and force the otw to let you harass people on AO3 into deleting fics for ships you don't like. don't you have anything better to do, you ridiculous anti?

beatrice-otter answered:

This is the sort of thing you get as a white person when you try and point out racism in fandom. Imagine how much worse it is for people of color, especially Black people.

But also, let’s note the irony here.

  1. There is a long and extremely well-documented pattern of racism in fandom, and fans of color being harassed by white fans, that goes back … pretty much as long as fandom has existed. For a lot of fans of color, they have exactly two choices: they can swallow down all the racism (from microaggressions to major in-your-face aggression) and allow it to continue … or they can point it out as a problem. In which case white supremacists in fandom will try to destroy their lives for daring to challenge them.
  2. AO3 is not the primary place where such harassment happens (because communication between people is so limited), but it does happen, and AO3 has historically been really really bad about dealing with such harassment when it gets pointed out to them. AO3 was founded by a majority-white group, and they had a massive blind spot about fandom racism. AO3 has historically not made any distinction between “this fic is about a harmless kink that someone got offended by, but this other fic is active and targeted harassment designed to hurt people.” These two things are not the same, and shouldn’t be treated the same.
  3. In 2020, AO3 admitted that they had a problem, and announced that they were going to change some things to do better. Those things included practical tools like muting and blocking (which they have since rolled out the first stages of). The promised changes also included things like hiring a diversity consultant to help them figure out what of their organizational culture and policies should change, and looking at the Terms of Service and abuse policies to see what could/should be changed.
  4. AO3 put out the practical tools, but has not addressed any of the other things they admitted were wrong.
  5. A bunch of people think that AO3 should keep their word and want to know what they’ve done in the last three years. Notably, that is the extent of the pressure. @end-otw-racism has explicitly said multiple times that they are not advocating for any specific policy, whether censorship or banning people from AO3 or any other, they just want to know what AO3 has spent the last three years doing, and what conclusions they’ve drawn, and what their plans might be going forward.
  6. I reblogged their posts a couple of times, and made one (1) post that had a summary of why this is an issue, with links to a couple of other people who had done much deeper dives into the issue of fandom racism and racism on AO3 specifically. In that post, one person was referenced (but not named) with a link to some discussion of things that they had done. This person was referenced solely as an example of why the policies and procedures needed to be looked at, because they were in charge when those policies got written. I included no details about them or what they had done, and certainly nothing saying people should go harass them; I just linked to enough information for people to decide for themselves if that was a person whose judgment they trusted to come up with fair policies. And said, “hey, it’s messed up that people get harassed over this, if fandom were less racist and if AO3 had better abuse policies, fewer people would be harassed.”
  7. You come into my inbox on anon to harass me with all sorts of blatantly and obviously untrue things (including that I’m trying to stir up a hate mob to harass people), for daring to say “hey, there’s a racism problem, we should do something about that.”

Thank you for proving my point! My entire point was that there is a racism problem in fandom, and racists harass people who dare to talk about it, and you showed up immediately to harass me!

If anybody is wondering why the lovely folks behind @end-otw-racism haven’t linked their fannish pseuds to the blog pushing for accountability, nonny here is why. If one post brings people out of the woodwork like this, imagine what organizing the effort would do.

But also, if you’re wondering “well, nonny has a point, why did you link to a place where someone could learn the name of the person you’re accusing of racism if you didn’t want to harass them?” here’s why:

When people in fandom talk about racism and don’t specifically name names and link to publicly available facts, there is a wave of people who don’t believe, many publicly. “If that were true, I would have seen it!” (you didn’t want to see it and/or your whiteness insulated you from it.) “If that were true, they wouldn’t have vagueblogged, they’d have named names!” And then people harass you for stirring up trouble when there’s no proof of anything wrong. If, on the other hand, you do name names and link to publicly available facts, you get a wave of people like nonny here claiming that pointing out racism is the same as harassing the people who said/did the racist thing. There is nothing you can do (short of being silent) that will prevent people from harassing you. But if you do name names and post links, then at least some of the people who follow those links will go “hey, you’re right, that is messed up.”

On the subject of censorship, it’s important to remember that there’s a difference between free speech (which usually doesn’t harm actual people or incite harm and should be protected even if you don’t like it or find it gross) and hate speech (which is harmful to actual real people and thus should not always automatically be protected). The people most invested in calling it censorship when you reject/limit hate speech, and making hate speech have exactly the same protections as other expressions of free speech which do no harm, are racists and fascists.

But I also want to talk about the irony of you calling me an anti. Because that’s the thing that tipped your harassment attempt from annoying to funny (as someone who rarely receives hate).

Antis are “anti-shippers,” (aka “feelings yakuzas”). When they see something they don’t like in fandom, they want to stop it and drive the people out of fandom who do it. But they know that if they name accurately the thing they don’t like, the vast majority of people will not support them. Usually because the thing in question is harmless. So in order to get people on their side, they do two things. First, they find a way to twist the thing they don’t like until they can conflate it with something that is harmful (like pedophilia). Second, they take that harmful thing and accuse anybody who disagrees with them of being that thing. So, if you don’t agree that shipping a 17 year old and an 18 year old is wrong, you’re a pedophile, and they are perfectly justified in harassing you and spreading lies about you because they are saving children from a pedophile.

As for whether I am an anti, a cursory search through my blog will reveal regular and frequent reblogs of stuff about how absurd and harmful anti rhetoric is, and why censorship is bad. And why people can ship whatever they want regardless of whether I personally like it.

You saw something you didn’t like (a request for accountability for how AO3 is working towards anti-racist policies). You knew that if you honestly named what I was doing, people would not agree with you that it was bad. So you twisted that into something else that is harmful (a call for harassment and censorship of people who shipped things I don’t like and being an anti). Then you used that as an excuse to harass me.

It is exactly the anti playbook. Step By Step.

You, kiddo, are the one using anti tactics.

ao3 fandom racism