Look I’m gonna be honest. Most of those things aren’t untrue. But ultimately none of these things are the reason why so many anglos are monolingual.
The reason why I and so many other foreigners speak your language while you don’t speak anyone else’s is not because we start learning English earlier in life, or because we have better language education (most of us don’t lol) or because there’s a negative perception of foreign language learning in anglophone countries.
The reason is much simpler: It’s because we have to, and you don’t. That’s all.
yes, english native speakers are monolingual because of english hegemony and not any unique disadvantage of language education. but the reason why people from countries that aren’t english speaking are able to speak it is not quite that simple—many people are multilingual without knowing english. english fluency is in fact associated with a greater level and higher quality of education (and urbanity, class, etc.) just relative to others from the same national context. i think it escapes most native english speakers that L2 english speakers they encounter online are not perfectly representative of people from the same country generally.
in south india for example, my tamil friend knew tamil as his mother tongue, and then kannada because his family had moved a dozen km across the state borders when he was young. but he learnt english at his expensive private school. english medium education is a mark of upward mobility in india. he also learnt hindi to some extent for his north indian friends and some due to bollywood. most people don’t develop varying degrees of multilingual fluency because of language learning programs – they do it because they’re continually immersed in the language. the sterile classroom of language education is a very limited.
most monolingual english speakers are monolingual in part because their nation states have violently destroyed the diversity of local languages that occurred historically in the region. this was a very recent process of genocide in north america and australia and aoteorea. but its also not difficult to imagine a world where an english person from england might have had need to learn welsh, irish and/or scots .
Reblogging for that last paragraph specifically, because like…
…Well, to yes-and, I really hope I’m not being too stupid/Captain Obvious about this, but I feel like also in a USAmerican context that sort of language suppression wasn’t just due to the obvious genocide, but also relates to the way immigrant languages also got systematically crushed wrt assimilation, like as another head of the same hydra.
IE, how the idea of “German-American” basically disappeared due to xenophobia from the World Wars, ditto for Italian-American identity, the whole “how the Irish became white” thing, to some extent the way AAVE as a form of black resistance against cultural assimilation is so openly and cruelly mocked, ect.
So, one of the core forces behind USAmerican linguistic ignorance is the way language is hierarchised, the question is; how does one apply this knowledge to actual praxis in the now?
…That’s not a rhetorical question for folks following me, I’m curious about folks’ thoughts.
Can I say it’s truly bonkers how people will be like scared of rap. Cause it’s racism obviously but the level of exaggeration yknow like the extent of it all is Crazy. People will talk about it like This is some heavy stuff… & dude has like an obviously-for-show supervillain shtick. He’s like sampling space ghost. What are you talking about
You see a black guy cosplaying doctor doom & think he’s being fucking fr about taking over the world
Maybe I’m media literate georg maybe I know how this works cause I’m into dark wave goth shit but like. Hey ? I’m gonna start explaining this to white people like ok so you know how johnny cash wasn’t actually an old west outlaw
…It’s weird that even though rap’s a relatively unknown territory to myself, I was able to guess immediately you were talking about the late MF Doom.
Which I bring up to yes-and because like, even having not explored his catalog (Which I really need to do)… beyond racism, why would you be scared of the guy?!
Like, when I first heard about his schtick, my reaction was like “Oh god, that’s really cool and fun,” like the Residents or GWAR, doubly so when I heard he did the Doombot thing IRL and the fact he named a side project after King Ghidorah.
Like, sweet genius, some people really are wildly un-adventurous…
wherever this is y'all should just start saying random words like they were slang. Every time they ban some of your made up words, make up a few more. Let them ban ten words at once and come in using ten more the very next day. Really make a game out of driving them nuts
Just walk around saying shit like “That’s so blizzy. I dig the dharma. Get sippy with it, homeswizzle.”
Literally make the slang you want be “insert random word” so that any random word can be the term and you pick it up from context. “Holy shine-button, that flicks bee-butts my grizbaby. Very dealt of you.” Make them ban the entire dictionary.
I hope somebody from there saw this and is doing it. My whole family excels in this kind of rebellion, btw.
I spent one single year in a private high school, and they had a dress code, and the dress code said t-shirts must be a solid color and have a pocket.
Now i didn’t mind solid color t-shirts, but i hated how the shirts with a pocket looked. So after failing to get away with wearing pocketless shirts… I borrowed a sewing machine and made a solid colored t-shirt with a pocket over the belly button like a silly little kangaroo. Facing the principle the next day, i pointed out that the student handbook clearly stated that all t-shirts must have a pocket. I asked him if my shirt had a pocket. I asked him to show me where the rules detailed the location on the shirt that a pocket must be. It was a private school so they simply suspended me for a day (which went on my record) and when i got back the student handbooks had all been reprinted with a sentence added to it specifying that t-shirts must have a breast pocket on the left side of the chest. Being the cause of a whole new student handbook edition gained me a small amount of notoriety, but i was so low on the social totem pole at that school that it didn’t do much for me.
The next Monday, i showed up with a t-shirt entirely covered in pockets, front and back. In the principle’s office again, I asked him if my shirt had a pocket on the left side of the chest. I asked him to show me where the rules said there must only be one pocket. I was suspended for a day and the next day there was ANOTHER student handbook reprint, and the school threatened to bill my parents the cost of reprinting all the student handbooks if they didn’t get me in line. My parents basically laughed at them but asked me to not make them have to fight my school as they were already short on time and money. So i gave up on that and began amusing myself finding neck ties that met the letter of the dress code but pissed off the administration.
I could tell you a couple more things i’ve done, but i’d rather tell you what my brother did.
To promote recreational reading in The Youth, my younger brother’s public high school instituted a 25 minute “free reading period” in the day. Every student had to spend that time reading. You could read anything, you could even read a magazine, but you had to be reading.
My brother thought the whole thing was a stupid way for the school to spend their time, and especially stupid to be applied to him. Our whole family reads excessively – when i was in high school i was reading, on average, one entire book every day. My brother was more well adjusted than i, so i’d guess he was only reading 3 or four books a week, tho, while i was reading a lot of fiction with a little philosophy and history, he was reading a lot of, like, theoretical physics.
ANYway, he was like, this is stupid for many reasons, i’m going to sit quietly and use this time to catch up on some of my homework. But the teacher he had during that time period didn’t like that and made a big deal out of insisting he actually spend the time reading. He was sent to the principles office, where he explained that he did not need extra reading time, cited studies that indicated the “free reading” time would accomplish nothing and was a waste of time for both the administration and the student body, and ended with a reminder that what he WANTED to do was sit quietly and do school work, which any school should be happy about.
The principle said he understood my brother’s position, but that he couldn’t make exceptions for a single student. As per the instructions to the whole school, it didn’t matter what he read, it could even be unpublished writing, but he had to be reading. My brother, already veteran gamer both on a computer and around a table, immediately saw an exploit and seized this mistake (gods, my family really can be the worst lmao).
He asked the principle to put in writing the rules as stated AND that he would not make an exception for a single student. The principle, not understanding the kind of people we are, gave it to him in writing. At which point his fate was sealed.
So the next day my brother came in with a packet of paper he had printed at home. When the time came for “free reading” he took out his packet and began reading. When the teacher came over to make sure he was reading, she was enraged to discover he had a packet of about 25 pages completely full of the repeated letter “a”.
“I’m reading it tho” was his response. “This meets the definition of reading” “No it’s just a letter, you can’t be reading it unless it’s words.”
The next day he showed up with pages completely filled with “words words words words.” He was sent to the principles office “See, those are words,” my brother said, “so i must be reading.”
“no that’s not reading, there’s not a single sentence on these pages” The principle must have been stupid, anyone who ever met someone from our family could have seen what would happen the next day, when he showed up with pages full of “These are words in a sentence.” over and over
He was again sent to the principles office. The principle discovered that, like a man with a monkey’s paw, he could not define reading in a way that met the rules as stated but would prevent my brother’s shenanigans. He tried to insist my brother read from a recognized publisher, but my brother pointed out that this was not the rules as given to the rest of the student body, and the principle could not make an exception for a single student. The principle tried to tell him that he was making an exception for him anyway, and my brother told him that unless he was given an exemption from “free reading” time entirely, he would not recognize any rules that violated the written agreement they had. The principle implied my brother would face consequences for this behavior, and my brother implied he would talk to the local paper about being repeatedly harassed for *checked actual notes* following the rules he had been given, all in an effort to prevent my brother from sitting quietly and doing actual schoolwork.
My brother returned to class shortly thereafter with a note from the principle explaining to the teacher that my brother was exempt from “free reading”
anyway, the moral of this story is, when a rule is ridiculous, you can often find a way to make the authority figures look ridiculous for trying to enforce it.
so again, i hope these kids just start using any and all words in a way that sounds like slang. Start using school-related words as slang “what’s up, my exponent? You ready to get absolutely conjugated this weekend? it’s gonna be sooo decimal!” Let them ban THAT. Make them pull their hair out trying to avoid admitting the rule they want to make is “don’t be cooler than we can understand”
…As an aside, isn’t it fucked that some of these banned phrases treated as “brainrot” are AAVE, or at least come from AAVE?
Like, I’m not sure about others, but I’ know pretty directly that the ’m pretty sure that at least Rizz, Bussin and Baddie are from that dialect, and it seems fucked that they’re being thrown under the bus like that…
Logged on to Twitter to discover a palestinian woman was reported to the fbi by liberals by saying kamalas not ready for Chicago, a city with a huge palestinian population. It just made me think of post 9/11 of Muslims and arabs being reported on by their neighbors and coworkers that is scary and awful
This is deplorable behavior. Is this what you’re gonna assume of palestinians and allies who continue to protest. Call the system that’s already institutionalized anti palestinian racism and Islamophobia upon them
They truly do not believe that kamala was threatened they just wanted revenge against the group they feel responsible for kamala likely losing the election
Btw, non UK users here, would be genuinely super helpful if you could boost posts relating to the far right violence happening and also counter protests. A lot of UK users don’t really follow each other, and also it just helps to increase the chance of people who could go to counter protests seeing posts about what’s happening when. I know posts about our politics; and non USAmerican politics really; don’t get a lot of traction on here, but like despite the UScentrism of the English speaking user base it’s really helpful and beneficial to share these things. The situation is likely downright horrifying to those being targeted right now and it really should be a priority for us to go out and counter this to the best of our abilities
Realised since this is getting notes I might do well to summarise briefly what’s happening. 3am for me so don’t just take this post as your only research please ! Have a read of the news too
On Monday the 29th of July, someone went with a knife and violently attacked and killed 3 children in a dance class in Southport, near the northern city Liverpool.
Online misinformation rapidly spread by racists and nationalists, and a local mosque alongside Muslims generally were (very incorrectly!) blamed for this horrific attack. A ‘protest’ for ‘justice’ was planned by the far right that quickly escalated into a violent riot on the 30th. This riot occupied a local mosque and was aimed heavily at threatening the local Muslim community.
These riots have already injured people and have potentially already killed. The safety of many people in this country is heavily at risk. We need to be talking about this, I can’t state that enough. Calling these pogroms is not incorrect by any means. Over 50 planned protests have been found in the next few weeks too. We need international outrage and concern, and for those in the UK we need to talk about this to one another, warn those in our community who may be at risk, and whenever possible, counter protest. The counter protest work done already has clearly scared a lot of fascists, we need to let them know their racism is not tolerated.
The sites I’ve been using to keep track of protests are standuptoracism and hope not hate, however I’d recommend checking your city/counties ANTIFA group, and looking at international ANTIFA. Anyone with good suggestions for keeping track of these planned riots please add on.
If you’re in North London we’ll need lots to come out on Wednesday night in Islington, don’t let these rat bastards win a fucking thing
I’m pretty proud of Birmingham right now because we had rumours of fash coming to Bordesley Green and Brummies turned out en masse against them. Dunno if the fash were never coming or they got scared off but it made me happy as hell.
Caption: Mohammed Idris at his cafe that was destroyed following a night of trouble in the Donegall Road area. PICTURE: MAL McCANN
Source: ‘They don’t want us to feel safe’ – businesses pick up the pieces after overnight violence in south Belfast | Ryan Mc Aleer | 4 August 2024 | The Irish News
Heres a fundraiser link set up to help support the businesses that were destroyed
Block the writing-prompt-s blog. I don’t care if you like them I don’t care if they’re important to your ability to practice your creativity. They chased a genocide survivor off of tumblr with harassment and baseless accusations. This is a serious fucking problem and it’s more important than 1 writing prompt blog.
They also run drawing-prompt-s and badjokesbyjeff for those unaware
This is already getting more notes than I anticipated so here. And Ahmed got the help of another blogger to make the announcement that he will not be returning to tumblr due to the hate and harassment he received in no small part thanks to writing-prompt-s’ harassment and then this is the best that his little shitfans have.
I cannot emphasize enough how much white people have obssessively played the victim of hate campaigns and false accusations while LEADING them in this situation. Fucking laughable trying to paint “the largest blog on here” as a victim of a witchhunt for skepticism. Motherfucker went out of his way to shit on a genocide survivor and helped the mob chase him off the platform. White people will never ever ever take responsibility for their actions.
This isn’t about inherent badness this is about white people knowing they will always be believed before brown people because of systemic racism and abusing it.
Just like you’re doing right now by making this about you and your personal feelings about how people talk about white people’s racism.
Flashback Friday: Originally posted April 29th, 2020
This was a comic I made at a fan’s request.
Autistic POC are severely under-diagnosed and underrepresented in autistic spaces. I can’t speak for them, but there are plenty of Autistic POC creators out there who you can learn from!
I suggest Fidget and Fries on Facebook and Instagram.
Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.
have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.
and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.
black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.
if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you’ve ever met. it doesn’t have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don’t know much, look it up and learn about it together.
This is Juneteenth.
white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.
I guess Chilchuck has brought us right back to ‘adults who are short are child-coded and if you like them you’re a pedophile’ discourse huh
ALT
I will say, on an extra-depressing note, I’ve had the misfortune to run into people into sh*tacon pedoshit saying that sort of thing, but citing it as a favorable point.
Which like, holy shit, that’s its own level of awful and not helping…
Bad Idea: World of Darkness fangame called Italian: The Paizano
The joke here BTW is that World of Darkness actually did something akin to this in the 90s in terms of “making an IRL ethnic group a minor supernatural type,” but it was so much worse.
Specifically, they used Roma. But, let’s just say they didn’t use the word “Roma” for it.
That one thankfully died a swift and immediate death, because the shitstorm was pretty much immediate on release, because it turns out that even in the 90s people had standards…
This is a fascinating article, and it really does show that at the core of the rural-right-wing’s ideas of “independence” is this very ugly idea of a need for constant imperialist violence against others.
Like, this goes way beyond a “necessary defense of livestock” thing, it’s pretty clear that there’s some fucked up subtext at work, and also like:
Wolf No. 5 stepped into one of Ash’s traps in late October, just before the first snow. He found it in the daytime, its glossy black coat contrasting with the forest browns and greens. After killing it, he pulled back its lips and examined its teeth, to assess the animal’s age. “Big ol’ black sucker,” he said. Lifting a hind leg, he checked the genitalia, and said, “Big black male.” Ash usually did not comment on coloring, but he made seven other references to the fact that this wolf was black, eventually headlining his YouTube post “Caught a big black male.” Repeating that haters did not upset him, he gazed into the camera and declared, “All it does is motivate me.”
This shit isn’t even subtext anymore. And hot take, I think these sorts of people should be oppressed more.
Not rural folks for clarity’s sake, there’s decent folk there and I’m not Bob “Eugenics For the Star Trek Future” Chipman, just people like these assholes.
I’m getting fed up by the French people saying “People are rioting all over France” as a way to absolve themselves from what’s happening. If your reaction is to go “not all white people” you are part of the problem.
I could go on for hours. And there’s thousands of videos. White teenagers looting a shop. The police arrive right after ask them if they saw who did it but don’t check their bag (filled with stolen stuff) and the kids most likely blame some North African or Black teens and get away with it. Meanwhile in an other video a Black man was just walking alone and eating a sandwich the police pushed him on the floor and started pushing him for no reason. The people who filmed were white and they sarcastically said “We are wearing all black with our face partially hidden but the cops didn’t even come and see us. That’s totally not because we are white”. In an other video the cops arrest a North African child he looks 13 at most and they put him in front of them so the protesters don’t come near.
The white people protesting actually know what’s happening and are not using their participation as a way to absolve France of white people off their complicity with racism. It’s the one in the comfort of their houses who are
You’re uncomfortable because my posts make you feel like an accomplice (if the shoe fits…) ? Well the situation and what’s happening is scaring me, those kids getting beat up and killed they are my friends, my little brothers, my future children. Have some fucking empathy.
Adding to it.
The previous article I shared about the far right militias beating up people and arresting them? In Lorient the cops admitted that they let them do it on purpose because it was helping them… and some of the members of the militia said that the cops actually told them where to go exactly and which places they should avoid.
None of us will be truly free until ALL of us are free.
This is all a game for white people.
The performative activism reached its peak. A group of white leftist found nothing better to do than to chant “everyone hate the police” during the trial of some of the young men of color who got arrested in Lyon. The result they got kicked out of the court angered the judge and now the trial will be closed hearings only… the family won’t be able to come support their loved ones and the judge is going to take it out on who? The Black and North African people who were arrested.
All of that so the white leftist could get a minute of glory and present their performative activism. Fuck them seriously. They did this to satisfy their guilt and the men of color getting judged will pay for it. Fuck you.
Some white French bitch wrote a fucking fanfiction… a fucking fanfiction in which the cop dies at 88 years old at home surrounded by his loved one but the poor cop suffers so much from the guilt… and he is scared he dies and find Nahel who forgives him and smiles at him and talk with him and Nahel drives him to help him get in Heaven. And the cop tells him “You shouldn’t be driving kid especially after what happened”
The amount of disrespect and some people are fucking praising her?!?!
Mais vraiment je suis à deux doigts d’insulter des darons. C’est de putains de fils de para.
There will be no investigation (so no judgement) for the far right militia who were helping the police with their approval.
The Organization for Transformative Works (Archive of Our Own’s parent org) is abusing their volunteers, including the moderation team that deals with things like photographic depictions of real children in sexual scenarios. This came to light in the context of an anti-racism protest. The moderators are not equipped to handle the content they’re currently asked to moderate, which is more of a legal problem than “This fanwork is racist.” The racism is still a problem for the organization, but the framework to deal with it is a long way off. Many more details are available here.
If reading that makes you want to become a voting member before 6/30/23, the deadline for the next board election at the OTW, but you can’t afford 10USD to do it with, and you’re willing to share your PayPal/Venmo/mailing address with someone who can help you out, please leave me a comment on this post, which is coded such that no one will see it but me unless you specifically tell me to unscreen it.
This is exactly what I was trying to communicate, yes! It’s not that racism has magically stopped being a problem at all, or that it should be minimized. It’s that the job of fixing the racism requires tools that are elaborations of the structures and tools that the org should already have. But when people said, “Okay, how *does* moderation work on the AO3?” the answer is “It’s really not working at all and it’s hurting a lot of people.”
This is not in any way “racism can wait while we solve other problems.” This is “We can’t solve the problem of racist content without improving the organization and its moderation.”
I’ve read an amount about this debacle in the last few days that is not good for my mental health, and while I want to tell people 1) do not do that, I’d also like to tell them 2) as someone who has done that, the connection between the two issues gets more and more obvious the more you read.
While “abuse of volunteers” is the headline here- and it should be! - a major component of how that came about is that the Policy and Abuse Committee have been forced to go through the Legal committee every single time they want to do something about any form of bad behavior that they haven’t already been given permission to respond to. For instance, let me highlight this comment from Azarias, the PAC volunteer whose whistleblowing is at the center of all this:
“Let me ask Legal” was a frequent response from PAC chairs about novel and ambiguous cases. For example, I had a ticket about a hateful username that sat with a previous chair “consulting with Legal” for about two years before I gave up asking for updates and accepted there would not be a username policy.
This is from a June 13th comment on the AO3 news post, “An Update from the OTW Board of Directors and Chairs.”
And speaking of comments on AO3 news posts, you know how any time a new post mention anything to do with functions meant to curb harassment, the comments always immediately get swarmed by racist trolls? Here’s another comment from Azarias on June 14th!
Regular PAC volunteers aren’t allowed to touch newsposts, unless something’s changed. Not even if you submit a report through the abuse form - those have to be assigned to PAC chairs to handle when they have time.
Newsposts are only moderated by committee chairs. Which chairs? All of them. Or none of them, if they don’t feel like it. I think there was a general understanding that the chairs of whichever committee owned the post had first dibs on moderating or answering comments, but afaik there wasn’t a set of rules saying anyone had to. And they would need to check in with other chairs first, if they did decide to moderate comments. […]
Believe it or not, this is an improvement over the previous system, in which newspost comments were not moderated at all.
Institutional racism may be a complex and thorny issue that requires complex solutions, but, you know, call me crazy, but I think maybe the front page of AO3 could have looked a lot less racist all this time if the people whose job is to stop harassment had been allowed to… stop harassment. Instead, they’ve just been having to look at horrible shit that they can’t do anything about until they burn out, and when they talk about it the legal committee not-particularly-subtly accuses them of 900+ felonies. (No, that last part is not a joke.)
The people who told Azarias that she wasn’t allowed to remove works with embedded gifs of live-action porn with an identifiable child’s face edited onto them are the same people who are stopping PAC from banning someone with the username ‘ilovehitler1488’ for having that username.
On behalf of someone who wasn't involved in fandom spaces during all that stuff you have talked about and doesn't know what most of those terms mean, could you explain a little more? This is mostly confirming what I already suspected about ao3 (and fandom in general) but it's good to know exactly what I'm talking about
So in a nutshell, LJ Strikethrough was back in 2007, when livejournal was the centralized heart of most fandoms. And the owners of the platform one weekend without warning just kinda up and purged a bunch of explicit fandom journals. (Strikethrough refers to the fact that a deleted and/or purged journal would have a strikethrough over the username).
Fandom of course was not slow or quiet about expressing its outrage, and Livejournal quickly backpedaled and said they’d been notified of problematic content by a concerned group of users, a right-wing Christian group called Warriors For Innocence.
Thing is…..this was ALWAYS bullshit, and everybody knew it.
Oh, its not that Warriors For Innocence didn’t exist, or that they hadn’t likely been spamming the hell out of LJ with complaints about content….
Its that they weren’t remotely anything new, had been around forever, are STILL around today, and NEVER HAD ANY KIND OF ACTUAL POWER.
Warriors for Innocence, you’ll find, had been an online presence for YEARS before LJ Strikethrough, and fandom content on LJ? Had been present and consistent for YEARS before LJ Strikethrough as well.
There is absolutely no stretch of the imagination in which WfI ‘just’ became aware of LJ fan communities and started spamming LJ with complaints in 2007.
And there’s absolutely NO reason why LJ would have all of a sudden felt any more compelled to GIVE their complaints any weight or feel beholden to cave to them in 2007….
Other than the fact that…..sixapart, the owners of the livejournal platform, were trying to sell said platform to a Russian corporation.
Now as to racefail…..again, in a nutshell, it was a MONTHS-long series of conversations and arguments between fans of color and professional sci-fi/fantasy writers of color, and white fans and pro sf/f writers.
And I do mean MONTHS. When precisely it began, depends on who you ask - some people cite a series of posts by sci-fi writers Jay Lake and Ben Peek saying that the sf/f genres needed to be more open and accommodating to fans of color and put more effort into representing marginalized characters, with this inciting pushback from (primarily white) fans who objected on the basis of ‘why should two white cis male writers be raising this conversation.’ While others cite it as beginning with a post by white sci-fi writer Elizabeth Bear called “Writing the Other” with this inciting pushback from primarily fans of color who objected on the basis that the post was patronizing and offensive as hell, and so were all the white writers and fans who rushed to her defense.
But regardless of when exactly it began, it most definitely did last MONTHS, with all kinds of back and forth across multiple writer and fan blogs, flamewars, etc….it ‘reignited’ with the publication of Patricia Wrede’s alternate history fantasy novel a few months after Bear’s initial post (if it ever really died down at all), and Jemisin and Nalo Hopkinson and a number of other writers of color were pretty constant presences in pushing back against the vitriol from white fans and writers, so they’re good places to start when looking up posts from the time period.
In particular though, one of the key elements that kept cropping up throughout racefail - and see if this sounds familiar - is that a recurring theme was white fans and writers being as angry at the anger expressed by fans of color as they were about the topics of racism that incited all of this (if not angrier). There were a LOT of not-so-subtle opinion pieces about how fans of color didn’t deserve to be listened to on this subject if they couldn’t be polite. Which - anyone who has followed me long knows my opinions on tone-policing (spoiler: they’re not good).
But by and large, the objections to Racefail were pretty much unilaterally about the fact that it was a conversation about racism in fiction that was happening on a large enough scale and with people of color speaking in loud enough voices that white fans AND writers COULDN’T avoid hearing about it or acknowledging it….
Because make no mistake -
THAT was what was really pissing them off.
And then, not so coincidentally, racefail started to die down…..as more and more of fandom began migrating to other platforms….and centralizing fandom fiction on Ao3. Which - its not like I was ever tight with the particular writers who spearheaded creating Ao3, so I can’t actually speak to when and why they were inspired to create Ao3 specifically, though I do concede the timing fits for it to have been directly inspired by the events of Strikethrough…
BUT I can speak to the fact that Ao3 had existed for a good year or two by the time it really started picking up steam….
With this happening in 2009….
Right on the heels of Racefail….
Which took place almost ENTIRELY on livejournals from various sci-fi and fantasy fandoms….
Again, just to reiterate….in 2009….
A FULL TWO YEARS AFTER STRIKETHROUGH, BECAUSE LJ VERY MUCH WAS STILL A FANDOM HUB TWO YEARS AFTER EVERYONE SUPPOSEDLY ABANDONED SHIP FOR Ao3 IN ORDER TO AVOID FURTHER CENSORSHIP.
Nah.
Bull to the power of fucking shit.
(White) Fandom abandoned LJ in 2009, when fans of color got too vocal on the subject of racism to be ignored any longer.
And its not REMOTELY a coincidence that the new centralized hub of fandom, Ao3, just so happens to be infamous with fans of color for….ten years and running….ignoring every single criticism brought to them about the rampant racism present in many fandoms on their site, among other things.
Like, there is direct linkage here. Cause and effect. This is not a random series of events and never was.
Just like, after a good couple YEARS since people were even TALKING about Strikethrough anymore, let alone even recognized the fucking NAME “Warriors for Innocence”…
Strikethrough didn’t start getting pointed at as the ‘reason’ for the demise of livejournal fandoms…
Until well AFTER Ao3 was the new face of fandom.
Can’t imagine that has anything to do with fandom wanting to push a narrative that wasn’t “well actually, livejournal kinda died out as the go-to place for fandoms cuz white fans couldn’t get fans of color to stop talking about racism while they were on there, the way they happen to be able to thanks to Ao3.″
But I mean hey, what do I know? I was only there, after all.
Anyway, I think that’s the terms you were looking to have explained anon, but let me know if there was something else you were looking for.
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