Some seem to believe that calling people out on racism is some kind of horrible character assassination or social death sentence, but in most cases it isn’t. It’s just a learning experience. Below is some of the racist shit I’ve done in the SW fandom alone, for instance. My point in compiling these is not to say racism is normal or okay, still less that I am some kind of hero for owning up to these. Rather, what I’m trying to say is that racism is very common and that’s why it’s important to face and address these biases so we can avoid hurting real people. Obviously, due to the subject matter, this post contains descriptions of racism and specifically antiblack racism.
Note: I’m not including links because I deleted some of these posts, others are hard to find due to changes in my tagging system, and I don’t believe there is much value in linking and propagating them anyway. But these happened, and I have no reason to make up instances of my own racism. I could have forgotten or sanitized some things, of course, so if your recollection or sources contradict mine let me know.
- I said early in my time in fandom, mid-2016-ish, that I loved Finn and Rey’s friendship but also thought they had great sex appeal so I wanted them to be friends with benefits and co-parents. @diversehighfantasy, in whose notes I put this, very politely pointed out that this tied into a stereotype that interracial couples weren’t truly romantic and their relationships were all about sex. I deleted the post and apologized to her, which she graciously accepted. This isn’t to say her politeness worked and that’s how people should approach callouts–in fact if anything her politeness didn’t work, because I felt angry and defensive in a way that had nothing to do with how she broached the issue and everything to do with the way I had built an identity around being an egalitarian and moral person. I worked through it, and got over it. I was fine. That incident really made me think, and I realized later on that I had been “missing” a fuckton of romantic subtext, nah, huge blatant neon billboard text, between Finn and Rey.
- In my earliest Finn meta I had a very different and, I later realized, heavily distorted idea of Finn’s character. I thought for instance he was smiling in glee while he was shooting down Stormtroopers in the hangar scene. Later I realized on rewatching that scene to analyze it, not only was he not shooting at Stormtroopers, he was not smiling at all, just fiercely concentrating. This realization sickened me because I had to wonder how many otherwise well-meaning people who would swear they were not racist saw aggression in Black people that wasn’t there, and in situations with much higher stakes. Research confirms the existence of this bias (link), and that Black children as young as five are subjected to it (link).
- I also wrote a short Finnpoe fic that I realize, in retrospect, was racist as hell. Based on the fact that Poe had shot Slip, I had Poe wake up from a nightmare where he had killed Finn instead and wrote about Finn comforting Poe about that trauma, saying Poe would have been right to kill him. Like… yaigh. I’m happy in retrospect that the fic didn’t attract much attention. If I had been called out I would have realized sooner what was wrong with it, but I did figure out from later fandom discussions that this was part of a common pattern with Finn’s own trauma being disregarded and him being enlisted to comfort Poe or Rey. My fic does seem to me like a really egregious example of this trope, though. I tried to watch out for this tendency when I wrote other fics later on, and I think they have much improved as a result.
- I also reblogged and laughed about another blogger’s joke involving Adam punching John over unwanted hugging. This was ignorant and insensitive of me, obviously, and was another one of the instances that got instant pushback–deservedly so. Tbh the amount of violence Black people are regularly subjected to in places like the U.S. still boggles my mind, and as a nonblack and also otherwise very privileged person I will never comprehend the full reality of it. That doesn’t mean it was okay for me to ignore the implications of such a joke. And I did in fact feel uncomfortable and wondered if it was racist so I can’t plead ignorance, either–I just didn’t want to think too deeply about it and that was wrong of me.
That’s what I can think of at the moment. There were times I felt defensive and fragile, especially when called out by others, but again–that was my burden to work through, and it certainly wasn’t worth dismissing others’ valid points and hurts over. I was and remain perfectly fine.
And then they blocked me I think I made them mad sdgsdgk
I mean, rich of them to accuse @diversehighfantasy of strong-arming me when she did nothing of the sort. I already said she was extremely polite, but it looks like @permian-tropos felt threatened by proxy?? or something??
I also love how admitting that I misread Finn’s facial expression at a specific point is putting him on a “gigantic appalling pedestal to worship.” I know he enjoyed fighting back against the FO, on Takodana for instance, I mean how dare he feel good about doing something to strike back against his lifelong oppressors eh?
L.J.'s Obsessions 