Episode 128: The K-pop Narratives
In Episode 128, “The K-pop Narratives,” Keidra Chaney returns to the podcast to discuss mainstream framings of K-pop fans and their online actions in support of Black Lives Matter. Topics covered include the flawed foundations of these narratives, the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of boosting hateful hashtags, and the continued anti-Blackness within K-pop fan spaces—and its connections to anti-Blackness within the industry itself.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:02:10] Keidra first joined us in Episode 101, “Stan Culture,” and the piece she wrote for us was “The Empowered Stan.”
[00:03:25] Our interstitial music is “More Questions Than Answers” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:05:40] Just one example of the many tweets encouraging people to overwhelm police snitching apps—
[00:42:06] Rukmini Pande joined us for Episode 89, and before that was in Episode 22A, “Race and Fandom Part 1” and Episode 29 “Shipping and Activism.”
[00:46:28] Several days after we recorded our conversation with Keidra, SM Entertainment did finally release a statement in response to fans’ pressure:
[00:58:47] The Teen Vogue story about anti-Blackness in K-pop written by a white journalist: “The BTS Fandom Needs to Check Its Anti-Blackness” by Claire H. Evans. (Note, they had already covered the K-pop/BLM activism story in a purely positive way a couple days before.)
[01:01:51] The OTW edited the “This Week In Fandom” roundup in question, and unfortunately the Wayback Machine doesn’t have a snapshot of the original version, but you can read what’s been left up.
[01:05:05] The Open Letter to the OTW. Note, since this episode was published, the OTW released a statement which directly addresses these demands. Our thread is now more of an artifact than anything else, but it does mention our plan to put out a follow-up to our 2016 “Race and Fandom” double episodes (Part 1 and Part 2). We’ll be striving to include as many voices as the podcast format can accommodate later this summer.
And—since this episode came out, there’s been a lot of great journalism about K-pop and the current situation! To start, our guest Keidra wrote “The ‘K-pop Fans Will Save Us’ Narrative Misses The Bigger Social Justice Picture” for Prism. Some other good stories: “How Media Shapes Perceptions of K-pop Fans” by Crystal S. Anderson at K-pop Kollective; “TikTok teen and K-pop stans don’t belong to the ‘resistance’” by Abby Ohlheiser at the MIT Technology Review; “On K-Pop Fans, POlitical Activism, and the Necessity of Nuance” by P. Claire Dodson at Teen Vogue; and “The Joy & Rage of Being Black In Fandom Right Now” by Elizabeth de Luna at Refinery29.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #128, “The K-pop Narratives.”
FK: There are so many narratives. So many.
ELM: Very, very quick summary, so this is the—we haven’t had a new episode in a month because we paused the podcast in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests two weeks ago. Over the course of the last month, there’s been a lot of mainstream media attention around the actions of K-pop fans, who have been doing things like flooding racist hashtags with fancams or crashing police scanner apps or, most notably, yesterday, reserving—it wasn’t just them, but reserving hundreds of thousands of tickets to a Trump rally, thus leading to an incredibly embarrassing actual turn-out.
FK: Right. And we have noticed that a lot of people who are writing articles about this don’t know what they’re talking about in a variety of ways.
ELM: [laughs] Examples include things like, “Will the K-pop teens save us?” “K-pop fans should just become president.” These are like actual statements I’m reading right now.
FK: Yeah I mean, you know, they’re humorous overstatement, but even in humorous overstatement it’s possible that’s…a lot…
ELM: But like, when it’s coming from like a political pundit with 100,000 followers, like, humorous overstatement—that’s like out the window, right? That’s, this is, these are people who do serious political commentary and they’re honestly saying things that are—anyway. Anyway! I’m not gonna get into it yet. Not yet!
FK: Right. Because we have interviewed somebody who actually does know what they’re talking about with this way more than either one of us does.
ELM: Or all the people we’re mentioning. Yes, but in particular us as well. [FK laughs] So. Keidra Chaney, repeat guest, one of our favorite guests in the past. She came on last year to talk about stan culture more broadly and she also wrote a piece for us called “The Empowered Stan” which was less about external perceptions of stan culture and more about internal dynamics around critique of your favorite artist and how that intersects with capitalism and the desire to be a good fan, which is like, an endlessly interesting topic. She is an expert and she, there’s no one that I think either of us would rather talk to in this moment, so we were thrilled when she was available to come on.
FK: Yeah, and the one thing that we should note is that we recorded this interview with her before the Trump Tulsa rally, so the interview’s gonna touch on lots and lots of the stuff that’s been going on but not that, and we’ll talk a little bit about that afterwards because, you know, now the story has developed.
ELM: “Developed” is a strong word. The story has continued.
FK: Right, fair enough.
ELM: All right.
FK: All right, shall we go roll the interview?
ELM: Let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, it’s time to welcome Keidra to the podcast! Welcome back Keidra!
Keidra Chaney: Hi! Thanks for having me back!
ELM: We’re so excited that you’ve come back. We were counting—it’s been like a year, I wanna say? Counting down the last 365-ish days?
KC: Wow.
ELM: For you to return? No, seriously. [all laugh] It was one of our favorite conversations last year!
FK: It was.
ELM: So, like, uh…you know? Just sayin’.
KC: Yeah! It’s great to be here.
ELM: Sorry about the circumstances of you coming back, but we’re happy to see you! So yes. There’s a few things going on, top-level bullets, I feel like I’m in Google Docs a lot recently. [FK laughs] K-pop stans mobilizing to flood racist hashtags and to jam up police surveillance tools and to do other kind of mass digital actions around the Black Lives Matter protests to mainstream media learning about K-pop and being surprised that they were doing this.
FK: What is it? What are these people? Where did they come from?
ELM: —and perpetuating a narrative that K-pop fans are a certain type of fan, specifically like young white women who previously had never heard of politics. And three, the media and I would say broader fandom spaces too, being pretty bad about acknowledging the anti-Blackness that has long been endemic in K-pop spaces and has not abated in the last few weeks. Do you think those are the three top-level…?
KC: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a great like bullet-point description of what’s been happening. There’ve been specific things that have happened that have sparked a lot of conversation, debate, fighting, harassment within all of this, but that’s a top-level description of the big things.
I think it all really started with the Dallas police surveillance app, I think that was when I first started to see that sort of mass action really start to happen, at least when—
FK: And what happened there is, right, people started sending in—it was like a snitching app where the Dallas police were asking people to send in images of people doing bad things and uh… “bad things”...
KC: Illegal.
ELM: Antifa, Flourish, antifa.
FK: And, uh—I was wonder—how did we get from “anti-fascist” to “an-TI-fa”? Isn’t that a weird, like, intonation? Anyway, whatever.
KC: It’s “AN-ti-fa,” though, it should be—
FK: It should be! Anyway. Thank you, I’m glad that I’m not the only one who every time I hear “an-TI-fa” thinks “oh, are they an-TI-fascists?”
KC: [laughing] Right?
ELM: Hold on though, some people pronounce the word “anti” “an-ti,” and some people pronounce it “an-teye.” There’s two different ways to pronounce it!
KC: “AN-ti-fa.” “AN-teye-fa.”
FK: But I understand “AN-ti-fa,” I just don’t understand “an-TI-fa.” No one says “an-TEE.”
KC: Yeah. The “TI,” the “EE.”
ELM: Kinda a cheerful way to say it! All right, all right.
FK: So, anyway.
ELM: Just wanted to make sure that was on the record.
FK: So they flooded the “an-TI-fa” snitching app with fancams, which suddenly everybody in the mainstream media had to learn what a fancam was, which was a big step for a lot of people, right?
KC: Yeah. And I think when the police app, when the Dallas app basically had to shut down because of all the fancams that were being flooded onto the app, I think that’s when we got the attention of some reporters and the general public, because they had to really get into why the app was shut down and that it was specifically K-pop fancams and K-pop fans that were heading that. So that was when I think it really started to hit the mainstream.
And then after that there were some white supremacist hashtags that were collected and taken over by K-pop fans posting fancams, and there’s some debate about how useful that was overall. Like, shutting down the police app was one thing, but as a lot of people have argued, even if you’re using that hashtag to—co-opting it by putting K-pop fancams under it, it’s still making the hashtag trend, so what is—it’s still giving attention to the hashtag and it’s still allowing it to trend, so whether it has fancams under it or not like, is it really doing the work of countering the hashtag if it’s giving it more juice and allowing it more exposure on people’s timelines? So.
ELM: I think that—I’m sure we have listeners who aren’t Twitter users, but Twitter in particular was where I thought this was a problem because the way it works is on the side of your dashboard, there are a series of trending topics with a number of tweets that have ben made about them. And I don’t know about you guys, but like, most of the time I don’t click on those unless I’m like “Why the Hell is that guy trending?” And then I’m like “Oh, he’s problematic or whatever.” But most of the time I just kind of take the temperature by being like “Oh, man, 50,000 people are tweeting about this thing that really surprises me,” right.
So seeing like #WhiteLivesMatter trending on my feed and watching it just shoot up one morning, and clicking on it and being like “What is going on?” And seeing that it’s all K-pop people being like “If you think this, you’re a clown!” Right? And seeing the same thing with—not related to Black Lives Matter, but #IStandByJKRowling, and that was alarming, because you know, you saw 20,000 people had said that. And frankly that one I was like “My God, people are really just falling in line for her no matter what she spews. Fandom sucks!” And then I clicked on it and it was like, three people being like—
FK: But it also kinda doesn’t matter—
ELM: “Finally!” [laughs]
FK: —like, whatever it is, because when you look at how people talk about it—that still gives Fox News the headline that this thing is trending and that’s positive. They can still say that officially. And that reaches even more people than the actual trending thing is going to reach, right.
KC: Right. And if they’re not looking at the context of it, like, I would just say for myself and for a few black fans just seeing that in your timeline anyway—regardless of whether it’s a fancam and it’s anti-the-hashtag, you don’t wanna see #WhiteLivesMatter on your TL.
ELM: Absolutely.
KC: It’s alarming! It’s not fun. It makes you feel unsafe. It makes you feel unwelcome. And I think yeah, it’s kind of counterproductive overall, even though I think it was done with the intent of countering that and kind of taking the power away from it. I don’t know if that particular approach, I think it gave just more life and attention to the hashtag, kept it in people’s feeds and kept it in people’s minds a lot longer than it probably would have been.
ELM: Yeah, and it was interesting too to—to look at the way that was working on Twitter side-by-side with the black squares on Instagram, and there was a lot of commentary—people who missed that one, I don’t know how, who started that you should put a black square up.
KC: Yeah, that’s a…I honestly don’t know. I think it was, it’s like a—like many viral ideas that just take off for some reason, it sounded good in theory to somebody but that’s another situation where it is counterproductive. Because the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag is actually used by hashtags involved in the movement to share useful information and it was being clogged up with black squares and, you know, no actual useful information. So it was actually doing harm for information sharing, because it was just basically filling it with no information, useless information, especially in the midst of the protests. Like, this was a time where the hashtag was important to be freed up for information to be shared quickly, and it was doing the opposite of that just by having black squares and a few vague comments about Black lives or whatever.
ELM: Right, right. So it actually seemed like inadvertently, that did the work that flooding a hashtag—you know, if you’re antagonistic towards a topic…
KC: Right.
ELM: That, that actually caused real harm because it made it difficult for people to share information, whereas a lot of the stuff I was seeing from K-pop on Twitter was amplifying stuff that people weren’t trying to—you know, people aren’t using Twitter trending topics to organize information. That’s not a communication means, you know. So to watch a racist hashtag or a transphobic hashtag go from 5,000 to 50,000 in a matter of hours, it’s like, you’re not blocking anyone’s discourse here, all you’re doing is just creating more volume, you know?
KC: Exactly, exactly. But I think that’s, you know, one of the things—one of the things that K-pop fandom’s really good at is creating volume.
ELM: Volume! [laughs]
KC: Yeah! It’s one of the things that—it’s a source of power. I think I said that in the last talk I had with y’all, is that being able to trend quickly, being able to mobilize quickly, being able to like shoot a hashtag up to the top of trending topics quickly is a source of power that a lot of pop music stans and K-pop music stans in particular really value. It’s how they show “Hey, we’re out here, we are legion, we have power,” and I think that was a response that made sense, I think, to fans, to say “This is something we can do.”
FK: Right.
KC: Not necessarily thinking through what that really means and to what end. What purpose it serves. But it’s something that can be done quickly.
ELM: Right.
FK: It seems kind of, yeah, it seems kind of perverse that it would be the negative side of things and not the positive side when you think of the way that trending hashtags could help, actually. If you get #BlackLivesMatter trending even higher than it already was, if you went into #JusticeForBreonna or something like that that’s not necessarily trending at all times and making that trend could’ve been really powerful. But then I think about like—going for something positive like that kind of requires that you have content to your speech.
KC: Right.
FK: That may sound really rude to say, but it’s a lot easier to say like, you know, “fuck these Nazis” than it is to say “I proactively support this group,” right. It would be even harder—having #Defund or #AbolishThePolice as a hashtag, how amazing would that be if you could get that trending? But then you’d have to get a bunch of people who were willing to proactively make that statement in a positive way! [all laugh] That’s a big step, we’re not just taking down an obvious racist here, we’re actually having to make a positive moment.
KC: Yeah. And to their credit, to some fans there are folks who are using that opportunity to link to petitions and other kind of meaningful actionable content—information on bail funds and stuff like that. So you’ve got folks who are using that opportunity to lift up voices of those on the ground and different activist organizations. But I think in general being able to do something quickly and, I mean, to be honest, an opportunity to drop a fancam in. I mean, a lot of this is just “Here’s more views for my fancam! Let me drop it in here,” it’s quick and it’s easy to do, and you just say “#BlackLivesMatter, #FuckThePolice, here’s a fancam,” and then peace out. [all laugh] It’s a low lift! It’s a low lift.
I think that’s the downside of any online activism that isn’t based around actual organizing principles with some strategy and thought and intentfulness behind it, it’s always gonna be kind of used for self-promotion on a certain level. That’s why online activism kinda has to be paired with something more substantial to actually be effective.
ELM: I wonder, do you think too—one thing that’s been really striking about the activism of the last two weeks is how hyperlocal it is for a lot of people, particularly—at least in the U.S. it has been, in terms of like, I have to assume that you are particularly invested in what the city of Chicago is doing and we are particularly invested in what our fuckhead mayor is doing—can I say that? We’re a clean podcast. Can I call him a fuckhead? [all laugh]
FK: I have been referring to him as an “invertebrate,” which I think is probably too cruel to invertebrates, so.
ELM: He’s too tall for that. What are people calling him, a Big-Bird-lookin’ motherfucker? [laughter] Anyway, fine. DiBlasio. It’s fine! People getting a lot of traction on a local level, I watch people in bigger cities—but even in smaller towns—be able to say, like, “Here are the things, here’s the city council meeting, if you can we’re gonna call in and do all this stuff,” or “sign this specific thing, talk to your specific legislator,” and I feel like—K-pop is not the, I mean, it’s this broad thing. But K-pop’s not the only fandom that’s not—most online fandoms are global in some way, but it seems like K-pop standom in particular is like, very very widely geographically distributed, and so it feels like there’s a bit of a gap between like…I don’t know, there’s a little bit of a disconnect if you have these kind of very broad surfacey actions versus like the kinds of things that people who are doing actual organizing around more localized actionable things are doing? My question isn’t terribly well articulated, but does that make sense?
KC: Yeah? I feel like it’s one of those—depends on what circles, even within K-pop fandom. I honestly don’t know if I am the best gauge of things, because I—as a Black fan and an older Black fan—tend to connect with and interact with and follow other older Black fans, women of color fans, queer fans, who are—
ELM: Sure, sure.
KC: —clued in to what’s happening on a lot of levels? And so are kind of using that platform to speak out, kind of more specifically and have more nuanced takes on what’s going on? But in general, yeah, you’re probably not gonna see quite as specific—anything that’s grounded in an activism or organizing—from fans who are new to this, who just want to participate and do something meaningful.
Like, there’s a particular change.org link that seems to be very popular among a lot of K-pop fans who wanna spread the word, and that’s great, you know? It’s a way to get people educated, it’s a form of political education and it’s helping folks get up to speed, but yeah, it’s not gonna be on the same level as somebody who’s a fan who’s also organizing within their communities and who use their timelines to talk about both of these things and flip back and forth from those two worlds with a little bit more…yeah.
But I think it’s hard, because it is for the most part, there’s a lot of young fans, there’s a lot of global fans, this is their first time really thinking about or talking about a lot of this stuff and so, like—and there’s a lot of just parroting of what other people say and do, like, you hear and say things, it sounds good, you’re like “OK, that makes sense!” So people just kinda repeat a lot of what they hear from other fans like themselves, which is sometimes good and sometimes harmful, depending on you know, what is being shared.
But I think in the case of BLM activism, I think where I tend to see a lot more thoughtfulness comes from the folks who were already gonna be doing organizing and activist work anyway and who just also happened to be fans, but it’s not necessarily coming from like the broader swath of K-pop fandom. And I think that’s where you get into: there is diversity, there’s great diversity, within K-pop fandom and people do come in bringing different parts of their identity to the fandom. And it gets played out in situations like this.
ELM: You know, I think that what you’re saying kind of underscores my own kind of ignorant assumptions about K-pop fandom in the sense of like—of course what you’re saying, “Oh, I have my friends within these spaces,” just like fandom—that’s what fandom is, right? You know, like—I think that to me why it often looks different from the outside—because I’ve never been in this kind of fandom, unlike Flourish, you’re in a global music fandom as well around Western artists—but like to me I could never imagine going into, like, hashtags where it’s potentially connecting me to thousands if not millions of people that I like, like, that’s not a part of my experience ever. The kind of fandom spaces that I’m in. But like, that is definitely a part of K-pop. So to me on the outside it looks like most people in K-pop are engaging in these huge, massive, like, thousands of people are on this hashtag doing this thing—whereas like, obviously what you’re saying makes total sense, that there are also people that like, have smaller circles and mostly just talk to other fans who also like it, and maybe have similar backgrounds, maybe don’t, but have a similar way of engaging, right? So I apologize for the framing of that—
KC: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: But I think it’s useful to talk about because I’m sure that other people in media fandom who aren’t in any music fandom may feel—may have the same assumptions that I have from the outside looking at this, you know?
KC: Yeah, I mean it’s really—I think with most fandoms you’ll find if you look a little closer that it’s not quite as monolithic as might be seen from the outside, in terms of like, different spheres of conversation, just different types of peripheral interests that bring folks together. And then more demographic similarities that bring different fans together. And I feel like K-pop fandom is actually like many fandoms, it’s not just about even the groups but it’s about some of those parts of identity that bring people together, whether it’s, you know, whether you’re a Western fan versus an Asian fan, and then specifically whether you are a Korean fan versus a Vietnamese fan or a Thai fan—and so like there’s geographical issues, there’s lots of different kind of subsets of communities and folks talking to each other and bringing some of those peripheral interests into the forefront.
And especially as an older fan who’s liked it for a bit longer—like you’ve had newer fans who’ve come in over the past two or three years, and you have fans who have been into K-pop for the past 10, 15 years or so. And they operate and communicate and—it’s usually talked about in “generations.” There’s generations that like—it’s argued whether this is now technically the third or fourth generation of K-pop, but for example I’m a second-generation K-pop fan, I tend to like the ’90s, early-2000 and mid-2000-ish groups that come out, and then you have other groups that have come later than that and they have their own kind of generation of fans. And so there’s like different—other different ways that fans communicate, talk to each other, how they interact and congregate.
And then a lot of the conversation happens offline in group chats and Discords and like, and so that conversation weaves in and out, it’s like, off-the-grid conversation that then comes out in Twitter. So like, there’s so many different, it’s so diverse and not just thinking about race and ethnicity, or the things that you normally think about. There’s just so much variation in terms of how people do engage with K-pop. It’s not that dissimilar than other music fandoms.
I mean, as a metal fan I think it’s very similar, where you have like, the different like, you know, like—hardcore versus metalcore versus grindcore versus death metal versus black metal versus Norwegian black metal, and then intersections of that where we have Black Norwegian black metal fans versus Black metalcore fans and like—we don’t even agree about what music we like, you know what I mean? So like, it’s not that dissimilar to other music fandoms, but I think because of the stereotypes about K-pop as an industry, the fans, you know, a lot of these existing stereotypes about who—the very gendered and racialized stereotypes about who likes this music and why, the consideration that it would be similar to other music fandoms isn’t even like, thought of, because it’s just kind of dismissed.
FK: Totally. And I feel like that brings us around to the like—coverage of this in the media, which was, you know—even from the outside it was interesting to look at and see the simultaneous like, the people going like “What? K-pop fans know what Black Lives Matter means?” And then “Oh! K-pop fans are radicalizing and they’re gonna save us all!” You know, because all of these young, presumed-white-suburban K-pop fans have learned all of a sudden and for the first time that race exists and also they’re coming to save us—and then also seeing people within fandom sort of…different fandoms, not just K-pop, I mean fandom broadly, jumping on and being excited. Going “Yeah! K-pop fandom is gonna save us! Fandom is gonna save us!” Right? [KC groans] Yeah, I don’t know about that. [laughs] I feel like it’s sort of a stew, right, because it’s like, at the same time, “This is bad! But it’s also saying nice things about fandom?” and people coming out of it being like “What do we do with that?” and it’s like, eeh! Guys!
KC: Yeah…they were kind of like backhanded compliments. [all laugh] Very much like “Oh, look at these bubbleheaded fans who actually are like, learning about something other than fawning over these dancing robots! Oh wow, it’s amazing!” Like, it—a lot of it felt like a backhanded compliment to me and it was hard. Even outside the lack of conversation about anti-Blackness and just Black fans in general, it all felt very…it was a little insulting, it was a little condescending, just in terms of how mainstream media portrayed it.
But it’s also a cute story! It’s one of those things that I feel like, you know, somebody would make a movie about it. “Oh! The little 13-year-old squealing fangirl, and look, she changed the world with a hashtag and a fancam!” [all laugh] Like, it’s, it’s—it’s cute. Like, it’s a narrative that I could see why your average reporter like, white male, probably, older, gen-Xer, baby boomer—
ELM: This got so correct and specific.
KC: —would be like “Oh, wow! That’s amazing!” You know. “My daughter, my granddaughter’s a BTS fan and she told me about this!” I’m, you know. I’m sure that was what happened in some of these newsrooms somewhere.
FK: And they kinda play into traditional stereotypes about fans, too, like, broadly the idea of the screaming horde of fangirls for a music fandom, right? Like—it’s totally a comfortable space to think about “Oh, we’ve found the kind of activism that everyone can understand: a screaming horde just came and did that,” you know? And it’s like “OK, well, you know, that’s great.”
KC: Yeah.
ELM: Let’s dig into, since we brought it up—and also, going back a few clicks to when we were talking about how it’s actually like, super diverse in a lot of different ways and a lot of different ways of engaging, but also different backgrounds and all over the world and et cetera, I think we should talk about the anti-Blackness part. And one thing that I left out of my bullet points in the beginning is the K-pop artists themselves, which I feel like an inextricable part of this too, because it’s my understanding that some of this is Black fans and their allies critiquing the silences or the poor responses or the historical anti-Blackness from these artists and then people getting angry that their faves are being critiqued. Is that the heart of it or is it much more complicated than that?
KC: It’s a longer history than that, and I feel like that’s—it’s all kind of come to a head with what’s happening in this moment, because there are Black fans including myself who want to hear from these artists, knowing that so many of them, you know, knowing that K-pop is built on the, you know, it’s inspired by and appropriating the music of African-American, of Black cultures. It’s lifted directly from hip-hop and R&B and so, you know, for many Black fans it’s like—knowing that K-pop is drawn from this, at the very least just let us know that you give a shit on some level, that you have, you know, some level of solidarity with Black people considering that the music and culture and aesthetic is, you know, so important to your careers.
And so it all kinda came to a head with that, but like, for decades now Black fans and other allies—Black fans leadin’ the way in this—if there’s an artist who will have culturally appropriated hair, Black hairstyles or do something in blackface, and it happens way more often than people wanna talk about—or, you know, use the N-word in a song—you have Black fans who will call out and say “This is not, this is unacceptable. This is offensive. This is wrong.” And then you have non-Black fans saying “shut up,” basically. “We don’t wanna hear it, this isn’t the place for that,” or “You should be grateful, you should be proud,” or “It wasn’t offensive to me,” and it’s like, “It’s not about you! You’re not Black!”
And this has been ongoing for, since the start of K-pop’s rise here in the U.S. and the West for decades now, or at least many many years, where Black fans bring this up, struggle with it, struggle with whether we want to continue to support this, either the artists or the music in general—but at the very least bringing it up and pointing it out and calling out artists and calling out fans for letting it slide—and that is often not responded to with support. It’s often responded to with harassment, with—there are fans who’ve been doxxed, there have been fans who’ve had pictures of lynchings sent to them, just really horrible harassment. And this has happened for many many years, and this, you know, across the board. This isn’t pointing any finger at one artist, because you could probably, like—there are very few K-pop artists that have not had some kind of cultural appropriation scandal in the past few years. You can just go down the list. Almost nobody is completely free from it.
And just having those broader conversations about ways, about cultural appropriation, about just like what it means, especially when you have a diverse fanbase and you have music, you know—just the role and the influence of Black music and culture on music in general, and kind of the devaluation of actual Black creatives while Black music and culture is celebrated within different genres. And having those tough conversations, even trying to have an entry point to them, is met with violence and met with antagonism and anger by white K-pop fans or just non-Black K-pop fans. And this is not new at all.
But I think this is kind of a boiling point, because it’s such a crucial moment, and I think a lot of fans are just fed up and want to see even—even if the response is like a bare minimum, just some acknowledgement that there’s some solidarity there. And so I mean the fight is gonna continue. Black fans are gonna keep bringing this up long after this moment is over that I think just seeing—seeing it not really acknowledged because of the aforementioned, like, dismissals of the legitimateness of the music overall, whether it’s Black music and culture or music from Asian artists. All of it, it’s not, there’s not enough actual critical discussion about these genres on a broader level anyway, and so like, the entry point is very surface-level, so we can’t even have those 201 or 301-level conversations, because we’re still stuck on like, screaming girls and dancing models.
FK: Right right—that’s what the mainstream, that’s what mainstream reporting knows about it, they haven’t bothered to think about “Where does the music come from? Might there have been conversations about this in the past?” Cause hearing you talk about this and this history—like, you’ve told us a little bit about before, but this history of these debates happening within K-pop fandom, like—how can you see that and then say “Oh, isn’t it shocking that K-pop just learned about race and suddenly got on board with Black Lives Matter!” I mean, like, no, that’s not—! That’s not what happened! I don’t know what did happen but it wasn’t that!
KC: I mean it is good in that I feel like there are, you know, especially in the past couple days more articles that have gotten into that a little bit more, but it’s—as with a lot of discussions right now—you have like decades’ worth of discourse being stuffed into like, one 800-word article. [laughs] And it’s never gonna be enough, because this should—these are articles and conversations and whatnot that should have been a part of, you know, especially music writing for sure! This should not be the first time we should be having these conversations about anti-Blackness in K-pop and all of this, it’s 2020, this shoulda been like a bunch of books, a bunch of articles, a whole bunch of stuff in Rolling Stone, this shoulda been happening. So the fact that it’s, now we’re here, it’s never gonna really give it what it deserves because we should be at the 201, 301, 401 level of this conversation within, you know, music writing, culture, pop culture anyway. And that goes for a lot of issues with race and fandom, I feel like.
ELM: Yeah, even just fandom in general. Like, as a fandom journalist, the number of times where I’ve had to like, go over the 101 stuff—genuinely like, I don’t have enough space to go in! And then you wanna talk about critical fandom stuff, regardless of the topic, and you have a paragraph. And so then it feels like weirdly shoehorned in, and it’s like, there’s a reason why I don’t really write for mainstream publications anymore.
And I see those parallels happening in the music—like there are people who are on the K-pop beat now at major publications, but it really often feels like they turn into kind of trade reporters, and they’re not speaking across, like, they’re talking about what’s happening just in K-pop and they’re not speaking across these barriers, and so then you get what would happen in the last two weeks, where people are like “K-pop! Have ya heard of it? Well, they’re wacky! These wacky guys!” No, not guys. “Girls!”
KC: Yeah, and that’s a real shame, and I talk about that a lot, I’ve tweeted about it a lot how it’s a real shame that there’s not a whole lot of space for critical writing about K-pop. I mean it’s kind of a hard time for critical music writing anyway in general, but it’s a real shame that K-pop has become bigger than ever here and like, we do not have a history, a library, a backlog of like, mainstream critical writing that puts a lot of this into any kind of context, and there’s, you know, there’s a lot of musicality and just really interesting things to talk about and say about this music, but it’s not there. Like, and there are plenty of fantastic writers who could go in! I know or know of most of them! They are out there! And ready to write about this stuff! But like, it’s just not [inaudible] space for publications to leap on it. That’s a real shame, because that’s why so much is lost in the reporting on this, because it’s—like you said, it’s the whole “Look at this wacky, the wacky girls and the wacky dancing models!” Like, it never gets any deeper than that even though the story itself is a completely different one than the narrative that has been spread.
FK: But I mean I think there is a general knowledge gap for a lot of people considering how important K-pop is to so many people. I mean I was astonished coming into this to discover that—I was talking with a person who’s a very well-respected person who studies Anonymous and hackers on the internet, and I had to explain to her that yes, K-pop makes Twitter hashtags trend a lot. I mean, I was like, “In the top 10—” and she was like “Do they normally go above a million?” And I was like “Well, yes! I don’t know what to say, yes, if you look at the top hashtags, out of the top 10 like four of them are BTS!”
ELM: Hold on, in her defense—well, not really, because she probably had Twitter more than a year ago—Twitter has changed algorithms so it’s not only K-pop hashtags, but still, it was hard to miss that period where it was only K-pop hashtags.
FK: Not to mention it’s still—the top 10 most liked tweets ever, like, three of them are BTS related. And that’s just BTS! You know what I mean? So it was just this moment where I was like, “We have been living on different internets, and yet you are supposed to be—you are a person who’s very knowledgeable about the internet,” I don’t mean to say “supposed to be.” But it’s just sort of amazing, that sort of awareness gap, you know? And I think it goes—obviously it’s deep in music but I think it’s everywhere.
KC: I agree. I mean, it’s so funny because I feel like—it’s not just that but I think about, and this is going way way back, but there were so many instances where I talked about Scandal and when Scandal was really poppin’ off and Black TV fans talking about Scandal, and I would go into places for like my job, which is digital strategy, and talk about Scandal, conversations about Scandal, and people were like “What?! I don’t understand! So they’re talking about Scandal on Twitter?!” [all laugh] And these are folks who are in digital strategy and social media, and they go—so I think a lot of it is just, I don’t know. Woeful ignorance, just not seeing what’s in plain sight?
But I don’t know how you can’t see K-pop, even when you’re trying not to look for it. It’ll just trend at the drop of a hat daily if not hourly, it’s always there. You know? There are so many subcultures online who are basically hiding in plain sight and having these conversations, and they kind of spill in and out of the general public’s conversation and discourse, but it’s maybe not always seen or acknowledged as important unless something game-changing happens, even though it’s like always there. It’s like “OK, we’re not gonna notice it until it’s huge,” but it’s always there, those subcultures are there, those communities are there, those conversations are there but there’s just people who won’t see it unless they’re forced to, because I’m always thinking about it from this level.
I always feel like in there’s getting to the other spheres of marginalization and stratification—who gets listened to and whose voices are seen as powerful and important and at what time and for what reasons, you know. So it’s easy to like, not see something that’s there if you don’t think that the people who are talking have anything important to say.
ELM: That’s so well-put. I hate to keep asking questions but I gotta ask you at least one more—OK. So one thing I was thinking about today, there were some conversations on my feed with fan studies scholars of color talking about transformative fandom and racism and some of it was just trying to get people even on that 101 page, you know, which like, people have been talking about it for years also, I don’t know why this is breaking news for anyone.
But one thing I was thinking about a lot today, we’ve had this scholar Rukmini Pande on the show multiple times to talk about racism in fandom. And I feel like at least once, possibly multiple times, she’s talked about how… she’s talking about media fandom but I know that there are parallels with other kinds of fandom too, that fans of color really only get to have these conversations about racism or anti-Blackness or any particular subset of racialized bigotry when there’s a crisis point. Like, she was talking about Racefail, we initially talked to her during a Star Wars shipping and race, like, meltdown—a massive conversation.
And this is a crisis point, but it’s like—of everything. This isn’t just about any fandom thing or K-pop or anything, but like, it’s across, across the whole sphere. And it just feels like it’s a little bit of the flip side, this is an opportunity for like, white people in particular to like, start apologizing. The door is wide open right now to be like “Here are all the ways I fucked up,” right. And I’m just wondering if you feel like you’re seeing any reckoning with that, like, cognitive dissonance between K-pop fans saying “Black Lives Matter” but still persisting in being violently anti-Black in fandom spaces, right? Or like, people acknowledging. Do you know what I mean? I, I feel like this is a little bit rambling, but it’s sort of like…
FK: No, it makes sense to me. Like, is—
ELM: No time like the present to be like…
FK: Is there any actual, is there any actual personal responsibility-taking or reckoning with their own actions or the way that the culture is or is it all pointed to the outside: “these bad people outside of our culture, we’re gonna go after that.”
ELM: Yeah, I think that’s a good summarizing of this very stumbling question that I’m trying to articulate [FK laughs] with all of the ideas at once. But does that make sense?
KC: I think so?
ELM: You can just take whatever you want out of that and go with it. Just ignore me. Skip me.
KC: Yeah.
FK: [laughing] That’s a good question. Answer the question you wish you’d been asked, not the question you were actually asked. That’s the solution.
KC: [laughing] I’m gonna answer in the best way I can.
ELM: Don’t worry about it. I’m spitballin’ here. Don’t worry about it.
KC: No, I think I get it—I guess unfortunately I don’t really have a very positive answer to that.
ELM: That’s fine.
KC: Like, I don’t think anything is gonna change. There’s so much denial around that anything is even wrong, and I’m talking specifically about K-pop fandom. There are people who in one tweet will be like “Black lives matter!” and then in the next tweet violently attack a Black fan. So there’s not any, there is that cognitive dissonance and there’s not a connecting…
FK: You can’t have cognitive dissonance without cognition? About the dissonance? [all laugh] Sorry, that was a little mean. I couldn’t help myself. Please don’t kill me, K-pop fans.
ELM: It’s fine, it’s fine.
KC: But yeah, I, at least internally I don’t think there’s gonna be that much change. I—maybe we will see more voices, more diverse voices writing and doing critical writing about K-pop. Maybe. But I don’t know if that’s gonna even exist, you know, outside of the end of this month. Like, I think it’s—it is like, it’s a crisis moment, it’s something where you can get those voices. Whether those voices will be invited to write about music or K-pop or anything after this moment? I honestly don’t know but I honestly don’t think so. Like, I think as with anything structural, the change is slow, the change is painful, the change is incremental, and whatever changes we see within fandom racism—it’s not gonna be a sea change, it’s not gonna be an immediate pivot to something better. It’s gonna be slow and incremental and I think, you know, a lot of the folks who really are doing the work may not even be in the fandom to benefit from the changes that happen. Because I do, I think there will be a lot of—at least in K-pop—a lot of Black fans who this will be it for them. They’ll be like “Screw you guys, we’re out.” And you know, there will be fans that stay in the end and do the work, but I—
And they are doing work! I do want to quickly shout out that there’s a hashtag right now called #SMBlackOut, one of the companies, SM Entertainment, they do employ a lot of Black songwriters and producers and so a lot of fans are using this hashtag to say “We would like to see a show of solidarity, considering how many Black creators you have who write your hits.” We just wanna hear from the company, knowing that you are [inaudible]. You know, that’s really heartening to see because it is like, it’s industry based, it’s fandom based, it’s specifically Black fans and allies saying “This is what we want, this is it.” And that is, I would love to see more of that.
I think if there’s a happy or at least a positive result of this, it’s that that kind of critical activism within fandom and calling out fandom and the industry might be a result of this. Because that’s needed on a lot of levels. K-pop fandom is notoriously bad about that kind of critical fandom. There’s a lot of company stans where it’s like “The company is great! They’re a big family and we’re their children!” And it’s like…
ELM: [sighs] That’s so interesting.
KC: And so it would be really great to see that kind of critique of the industry itself and critique of, yeah. That, just seeing that is hopeful. But I honestly don’t know about like structural racism in fandom, all fandoms basically. Like—that’s like trying to, you know, just, there’s so much happening right now and honestly with the companies that are firing folks and like, making brown Band-Aids, like… [sighs] All of this stuff where you had decades, centuries, whatever, to do it, and then today, this week you decided that this thing that people have been talking about for years and years, “Oh, I guess we shouldn’t do this any more.” It’s suddenly, like, good business to at least outwardly say that you care about Black people. But like, this moment will be over, and will you still care? Will Black people still mean something to you once this isn’t a trending topic?
And I think that’s my big thing, that’s what I hope we’ll see more of, is within fandom, fans saying “OK, this is structural. How do we,” it’s not just about loving your faves, but what’s going on with the industry and how can we speak to that and maybe some critical mass around that would be fantastic. That’s what I hope to see, but I don’t know. Come back to me in a year and I’ll tell you! [laughing]
ELM: You put a pretty hopeful spin on things, like…
KC: Yeah, I wanna believe! I wanna believe, just because I think there are so many people trying to really do some good stuff.
ELM: Yeah.
KC: But.
ELM: Yeah, OK. Well…
KC: Sorry!
FK: I mean, we’ll see, right? What’s there to do but…see…right? Time does march forward! [laughs]
ELM: Also, cynical me is like, “Just get corporations to give as much as they can right now even if this is like a temporary thing. Just, like, milk it.”
KC: That’s what I feel like. You know what? Write a check. Honestly I am totally down with just like, write a damn check. I would be like—bare minimum, whatever, write a check. I’m down with that.
ELM: It’s just like, if you’re gonna make a black jpeg with white letters, it should include “We are donating a significant amount of money right now.”
KC: Yes.
ELM: Just donating it. So. If you’re a large corporation.
FK: So on that note, I think the takeaway of this, this episode, was “write a check.”
ELM: Great!
KC: [laughs] Yes.
FK: But seriously, it’s always a pleasure to have you on, Keidra, and you’re great and this was a great conversation, is the summary.
KC: Thank you! You’re great. Thank you so much. It’s always a blast being here.
ELM: Wonderful. We’ll have you on at least a year from now if not sooner.
FK: All right. Bye!
KC: Bye!
[Interstitial music]
FK: It is truly always a delight to hear from Keidra.
ELM: Yes. 100%. And like, one of these days it should be about metal fandom, cause she’s just—
FK: I really wanna know!
ELM: —slippin’, slippin’ in these references and I’m like “Wait, what? Tell me more about Norwegian black death metal versus,” like, the subcategories—I wanna know!
FK: Yeah, it’s all a world of mystery to me, so… [both laugh] OK, but we really should talk about the Trump Tulsa rally, which is the sort of continuation of this story since we spoke to Keidra. And I don’t think that anything that Keidra said has been made outdated or anything like that, I think that this is just a continuation of all the things that we were talking about really.
ELM: Yeah, I do think—well, I slightly disagree with you. I think there’s a little bit of a new facet to this story. So basically what happened is Trump held this rally and they really hyped it and the organizers, his like, campaign manager were constantly talking about how it was astronomical reservations, 800,000—
FK: Like a million.
ELM: Yeah. Reservations. And just huge hype. And obviously that’s, there’s a reason why they would do that regardless of whether it was true or not. And to the point where the people who were going—this rally was also notable because it was originally scheduled for June 19th, which is Juneteenth, and they chose that deliberately. People said they did that on purpose and then they said they did do it on purpose, so they changed it to June 20th because they were expecting some backlash but not that much, which is just an incredible—the times where you’re like “Did you do this on purpose?” “You” being the Trump administration. “Or are you just incompetent?” And the answer sometimes is both. [laughter] You did it on purpose to be awful, but also you didn’t do it very well, and et cetera… Anyway, so this was on June 20th, and people had been camping out like for days to get seats, right?
FK: Supposedly, yeah.
ELM: And then it turns out that [laughs] huge portions of—I’m sorry, it is funny. Huge portions of those tickets were reserved by various organized groups of people on the internet including K-pop stans as well as quote “TikTok teens,” which I’m not exactly sure what—
FK: TikTok teens?!
ELM: —what organized group of TikTok teens we’re talking about. But! And you know, classic, I mean, people were trying to say this wasn’t a prank, but like, classic prank stuff goin’ on here. People were saying, like, they were using the names that you’d order a fake pizza with.
FK: “Mike Hunt,” you know. [ELM laughs] The most classic.
ELM: I’m sorry, I’m juvenile. And so thus launched a very large fresh round of “Will the K-pop stans save us?”
FK: Right, and lots of debate also about the functionality of this and what they actually did, right. People saying “Oh, they suppressed turn-out,” “Well no they didn’t actually, what they did was inflate visions of who would show up,” and then people go “No, what it actually was was an operation so that Trump couldn’t use any of those sign-ups for mailing lists,” which is actually true, right. Now they’ve basically poured sugar in the gas can, as it were.
ELM: It’s impossible to sort out who the actual supporters are. Yeah, I should clarify, because I didn’t say: there was no cap on sign-ups. So that’s why people were showing up early, the people who did wanna go. But the actual attendees were numbered in the few thousands, is my understanding, even though it was a venue that could hold like 100,000 people. So like, no one was shut out because they had reserved a finite number of tickets, at all. So just to keep the facts on the table here.
But you know, it got like—we got like liberal politicians, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez being like “Hey K-pop stans! Thanks!” You know? The stupidest take was that this was a coordinated—you saw the one that was like something coordinated with North and South Korea?
FK: Yeah, I saw that and I was like—
ELM: North and South Korea.
FK: “Whoa.” [ELM laughs] Gettin’ spicy in here! Those are some spicy takes.
ELM: Oh God. So it’s just like the whole thing…it is really frustrating too because there’s an element of, this part of it—and I feel the same way about the stuff that we were discussing with Keidra—there’s certainly a Columbusing element to it. You know the expression “Columbusing” being when people act like they’ve discovered something that a group has been doing for years or has been studying for years.
FK: Yes. “Behold! The continent of North America!”
ELM: You know, and like, there’s a—for all the correct critiques that like, the stuff that we were discussing with Keidra, like, K-pop stans aren’t this monolithic—white teen girls in the suburbs who just learned about politics like three days ago or like three weeks ago…that aside, one thing that I’ve seen a lot of in the last 12 hours or so since this happened, cause we’re recording it the day after the Trump rally, is a lot of people acting like no groups of enthusiasts around anything have ever done these tactics or organized in this way, and like—you know, in particular I saw a good commentary about how this diminishes the, the political online organizing work of like Black Millennials in particular, and the things that they did over the last decade on social media were seen as disruption—unwanted disruption—whereas this is “Oh, they’re our saviors, these K-pop stans.” You know?
FK: And one of the things I thought was funny about that—we may even be talking about the same thread—is that in that thread, I think, the one I’m thinking about anyhow, the point was “Oh, well, now that it’s white TikTok teens and white K-pop stans, now you pay attention, but what Black millennials were doing wasn’t paid attention to,” which I thought, well yeah, you’re right about the generational point but—that’s also pretending that most K-pop fans are white, which I understand is like the narrative, but I’m not sure that it’s actually true if you’re talking globally? And as we talked about with Keidra, it’s a very, the diversity of K-pop stans—and frankly the diversity of people on Tiktok, right? This is a false narrative in itself that it’s white people doing this.
ELM: Right. You know, I think Keidra had a great point—she was dragging the people who were writing about this being like, “My daughter is a BTS fan and I just learned about this!” You know? But I think it’s a real reflection, it just shows the way this has sort of trickled down into who even gets to write about it and who is asked to comment about it, and if you think this is a story worth covering…it makes me think a lot about all the arguments I’ve had over the years…not necessarily… “Arguments” may be overstating it. But you know, discussions I’ve had with editors about what fan stories are worth even bothering with, or “Oh, this is just a niche thing,” like, “The general public isn’t gonna care about this.”
Which has always been really frustrating, because then it has to reach some sort of international crisis point like Gamergate for it to matter, right? And for it to wind up as like a segment on NPR. And I’ve always just thought it’s such a reflection of the people doing the assigning, not so much the people who could write about it. Because you’re deciding what’s a valid story.
And there is a big thread throughout the last month of the K-pop narratives, to me, which is: why did you just think this was something to talk about now? And then when you think, where you think the story is and who you choose to talk to, to quote, or who you choose to assign it to, you know like—even that first story that Teen Vogue ran about anti-Blackness, to kind of correct the narrative of like “Look! K-pop loves Black Lives Matter,” was to be like “Also, but—” They assigned it to a white person, you know?
And it’s just like, this is something we’ve been struggling with over the last two weeks about how, as two white people, how much should we be talking, right? The balance between using a platform versus just whitesplaining all around the internet. But a publication doesn’t have—like, commission a Black writer to write this, this is not that hard.
FK: [laughing] If you have more than two people at your publication, then perhaps you should consider…
ELM: If your method of publishing is that you commission writers to write stories, and it could be any old writer, anyone at all, then why are you hiring a white writer to do this? There are—you know, like, and similarly, if you are a white writer, because I’m sure there are journalists who listen to this podcast or academics, this is a very good time to suggest someone else, you know? Like, I don’t know. It’s not that complicated to me.
FK: Yeah, agreed.
ELM: But it’s just frustrating to see this being perpetuated after there was really good, substantive critique of the way that the media handled this like two weeks ago, to just see this immediately—I don’t know. I made a joke about it this morning, it was like, “Oh, I would say we were in the second wave of this, but I think we never left the first wave.”
FK: Oh no. [laughs]
ELM: Like, you know, it’s like the coronavirus joke—you get it. But like—
FK: Yeah, no, I got it, it made me sad, but I got it.
ELM: It’s sad but it feels that way to me! It’s like, “Oh, you didn’t learn any lessons two weeks ago.”
FK: Yeah, it’s true. It’s really true.
ELM: So I don’t know.
FK: Yeah, and it’s actually—if anything it’s only getting worse. I think that the other, the other piece of this is that if all of your fancy people that you would normally have as a go-to for crisis moments are white people, and older white people and men and people who don’t know anything about youth culture and all of this stuff, right, whatever particular constellation of those? And then you don’t cover this stuff until it gets to a crisis point, right? Of course they’re gonna be looking like they’re Columbusing it!
ELM: Yeah, and you don’t even know where to start, right, exactly.
FK: Exactly. Right, like, how do you—you know, I mean, and understanding that when things get to a crisis point, maybe it’s suddenly a really big story and you want to give it to someone who is really big—OK! Fine! But like, you’re in this position because of the way that, who those people are too. You know?
ELM: Right. Right, yeah. Cool.
FK: Well, now I’m depressed.
ELM: That’s great.
FK: Seems like this might be a good time to wind this down! [laughs]
ELM: I think that we are nearly out of time. One thing that I wanna say about—the one thing I wanna say before we wrap up and go to like, you know, outro business, is I wanna very briefly mention the OTW stuff.
FK: Absolutely. Yeah. So as many of you guys may know, the Organization for Transformative Works did not do a great job of communicating about Black Lives Matter and by that I mean they didn’t put out a statement for a really long time—
ELM: As of this recording, Sunday, June 21, they did not put out a statement at all; yesterday they committed to putting out a statement.
FK: Yes. And instead of doing this they posted a news roundup that quoted among other people—or cited, I should say—among other people Rukmini Pande and Stitch, people who have been on this podcast before, as people who have worked on racism and fandom and written about this, and yet didn’t seem to take on board any of their criticisms or seem to have any awareness that they should be taking those on board. I know that individuals at the OTW know this and have thought about this, but as an institution they did not communicate that, did not seem to be interested in engaging with it at all. And this went down like a lead balloon! As you might well imagine, and as it absolutely should’ve.
ELM: So over the last week, we’ve been talking about it on our social media feeds but just wanted to mention it here in case you hadn’t seen it, we signed an open letter which you also may have seen—I guess this hypothetical person who doesn’t have social media wouldn’t have seen it either—asking for some fairly basic things. They are specific and substantive, but they’re not prescriptive. They’re not saying “The AO3 should change this in X way,” or “Transformative Works and Cultures,” which is the academic journal that the OTW runs, “should do Y specific thing.”
I think those kind of recommendations are not ones that should be made without really careful, substantive thought, and listening, and input from a lot of different fans, because one thing that I had a really hard time with the last week—and I’ve been really stressing this—is I’ve seen some kind of knee-jerk defensiveness to ever making any kind of changes to anything at all.
And often when you dig into it a little bit, the person who’s being defensive has like, one specific idea about what this would mean and they don’t like it, and, you know, sometimes the idea is something that I don’t think is a great idea—I’d be like “yeah you’re right, I don’t think that they should do that either, I don’t think that’s feasible, I could list seven reasons why I also don’t think that’s a good idea,” but like, then that leads to like “So, nothing can change and we can’t discuss this.”
And it’s like, we first had these writers and scholars in question on in our big early “Race and Fandom” episode, which was four years ago. And one thing that we did say on social media is we’ve committed to doing a follow-up to that, because while we’ve had guests of color talk about racism in fandom, we haven’t had anything like that with a lot of voices at once. But you know, one thing that always struck me about that from the very beginning is that there was disagreement and differences of perspective from all those guests, because of course there were! They were eight different individuals with different backgrounds and different relationships to fandom.
There’s no monolith, and no one is demanding that the AO3 must change and do X certain thing. And the defensiveness just, [sighs] just really gets in the way of good-faith conversations about racism and fandom which is like—does this hurt you to talk about this? I don’t know. It’s been pretty disappointing, an unsurprising but disappointing reaction to me. You knwo what I mean?
FK: Absolutely. Anyway, we will include a link to an open letter in our show notes, but just so people understand where that comes from, a group of mostly academics drafted it—a variety of people from a variety of different races. It was signed by a lot of academics. We were part of the group who were sort of commenting on it as it was sort of going forward. It’s by no means something saying “X or Y, you have to do this, you have to do that,” it’s more saying “we call on you to actually think about this and that’s incredibly important.” And so I think that we would urge you to sign it as well and basically to keep telling the OTW that this needs to be a major topic of conversation, this needs to be something that is explored as we move forward, because otherwise nothing’s gonna change and that’s actually not good.
ELM: Anyway, by the time this comes out the OTW may have already released a statement, and maybe we’ll have feelings about it, so this might be moot, but like, definitely it’s a conversation that we like, encourage all listeners and readers to engage in.
FK: Absolutely. I think that that makes it about time for us to wrap up, so I’m just gonna quickly mention a couple of things that you can do to support our podcast also, because as we’ve said, we’re planning on doing a lot more around a lot of these topics in the coming months.
As always we are completely listener-supported and the way that you can support us is by going to patreon.com/fansplaining—that’s how for instance we were able to have Keidra write for us. So we have rewards for different levels of Patreon backing, and we’ve been really really grateful to see how many people have supported us. Since COVID-19 started we know things have been tough economic times for a lot of people and we’re just so thankful that folks are backin’ us up.
If you don’t have money or don’t feel like doing that or any reason whatever, but still want to support us, you can help by sharing our podcast to people and also by writing in and sending us comments and questions and thoughts. We are fansplaining on Twitter, Tumblr, we’re on Facebook, we’re on Instagram, and you can also leave us a message at fansplaining at gmail dot com, or call in at 1-401-526-FANS and leave us a voice message.
ELM: Oh, I think you just all said—I didn’t even have to say anything.
FK: Yeah, I just took care of it for you right there.
ELM: You didn’t even ask if I wanted to contribute to the round-up.
FK: No, I just did it. I just took, I took the wheel.
ELM: All right, whatever.
FK: [laughs] All right. Any parting words, Elizabeth?
ELM: [sighs] Yes. Here are my parting words: please stop tweeting things like “K-pop stans are going to save us.”
FK: All right. And with that, I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: No no. Anyone who’s never tweeted that, I’m not critiquing you. I’m only critiquing those people.
FK: Great.
ELM: I just wanted to clarify. I’m not suggesting that everyone who listens to this podcast has tweeted those words, or put it on Facebook—
FK: Elizabeth—
ELM: I just saw it on Facebook from someone I went to college with—
FK: You’ve—
ELM: Don’t like it! Don’t like it!
FK: You’ve spent too many hours on the internet recently. Go, go, I don’t know, take a walk or something. I’ll talk to you later.
ELM: I am gonna go take a walk. OK, goodbye! [FK laughs]
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