Episode 135B: Race and Fandom Revisited: Part 2
In the second half of “Race and Fandom Revisited,” fans of color continue to speak about their experiences—and Elizabeth and Flourish talk with another white fan (and fan scholar) about how whiteness operates in fandom spaces. Featuring interviews with Amanda-Rae Prescott and Dr. JSA Lowe, and clips from Stitch, Anisa Khalifa, Effy, Sam, and Phoebe Sinclair. Topics covered include deprogramming internalized racism, how the dynamics of Facebook shape fandom conversations there, and why characters of color always seem to end up as the secondary ship.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license. The cover images from the upper left are Choi Han-kyul from Coffee Prince, Miles Morales from Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse, Sanditon’s Miss Georgiana Lambe, and Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian from The Untamed.
[00:00:51] If you haven’t yet listened to the first part of this episode, go do it!
[00:02:02] Stitch can be found @stichomancery on Twitter or at stitchmediamix.com.
[00:05:27] Anisa is @anisakhalifa_ on Twitter. Her podcast is Dramas Over Flowers, and she recommends their two-part special on representation in K-drama, “Representation in Dramaland: Race and Identity” and “Representation in Dramaland: Bodies and Sexism.” Also relevant: her co-host wrote an article about racial and ethnic stereotypes in K-drama.
[00:10:36] Effy is @viciousmaukeries on Tumblr.
[00:13:50] Amanda-Rae is @amandarprescott on Twitter. Also, check out her Den of Geek reviews of Outlander, World on Fire, and more.
[00:24:40] Blacklanderz (the Outlander Women of Color Collective) has a blog and a Twitter account.
[00:25:17] For more on PineappleGate, read “The Battle Over Jane Austen’s Whiteness” in The Daily Beast.
[00:40:53] Our interstitial music is “Snakes” from Music for Podcasts 2 by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:42:00] Sam is @trust-is-for-fools on Tumblr.
[00:45:30] Phoebe Sinclair is @wholeheartlocal on Twitter.
[00:49:37] Dr. JSA Lowe can be found at her website or on Twitter, @jsalowe.
[01:08:18] JSA includes a correction here—“John Trudell: he was Santee Sioux, not Oglala Sioux.”
[01:17:32] Flourish was referring to this quote in Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist: “But before we can treat [the ill of racism], we must believe. Believe all is not lost for you and me and our society. Believe in the possibility that we can strive to be antiracist from this day forward. Believe in the possibility that we can transform our societies to be antiracist from this day forward.”
Transcript
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: OK. I’ve had practice, so I can do this one: this is Episode #135B, “Race and Fandom Revisited: Part 2.”
FK: And as you can tell from the fact that it is a Part 2, if you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, you should go and do that, because these really are just flowin’ right into each other. We are not going to tell you anything. We’re just gonna drop you into it.
ELM: Holy shit, really? We’re not gonna tell them anything? Let’s tell them one thing.
FK: What thing?
ELM: Like—just what this is! Like, let’s just—it’s fine. It’s fine. Just a quick refresher: in 2016 we did a double episode called “Race and Fandom,” 22A and B, Parts 1 and 2, and we heard from 10 different fans of color about their experiences being fans of color and about characters of color, about racism in fandom, all sorts of topics. And so we wanted to revisit that. So we invited all the original guests to send their reflections four years later and put out a call for new guests. You heard the first eight of them in Part 1 and if you didn’t you should go back to listen to it, and we’re gonna have the remaining seven in Part 2.
FK: Right now!
ELM: And, as you probably remember from the first one, but just to reiterate, we asked everyone to send in a bio to introduce them, and because we have so many guests—and because we’re trying to not take up as much space as we normally do on this podcast—we’re just gonna introduce them, play the clip or the interview, and then just kind of, you know, briefly say thanks and move on to the next one. But, at the end of this episode, we will talk for a little bit about our reflections, about the themes that we saw across all these 15 guests.
FK: Yep! Absolutely. OK. So, our first guest for this episode is Stitch, who came on the last “Race and Fandom” episodes and who is a major figure in talking about race and fandom on these here internets. Stitch’s bio is, “Writer, critic, a purposeful pain in your ass about anti-Blackness, Stitch is here to write what needs writing, slowly.” Let’s hear it!
ELM: A good, a good bio, I gotta say.
FK: [laughs] All right. Let’s go.
Stitch: So, it’s been a long four years. And one thing that I’ve definitely noticed and that y’all have probably noticed from following me is that racism in fandom really not just has gotten worse, but the pushback against it has gotten worse. When I spoke with y’all in 2016, the pushback I got was like, really annoying, but it wasn’t personal. Now I get personal pushback, lots of truly egregious bullshit, and the language that people use to push back—people went from not using social justice terminology and mocking fans of color who did, to using that language, kind of like twisting it to fit their needs. So kind of have a perverted social justice praxis. Like, if I was still in grad school, it would be kind of hilarious actually.
And people are really resistant, extra resistant, to the idea that—not only that fandom is racist, but that some of the best people that you can and should be listening to about what that racism looks like and how it can be stopped are Black people. Seeing people actively reject and tell others to reject listening to and learning about racism, even as like a starter point, because it comes from Stitch, is really wild, because at the end of the day, you should want to be better period. If your anti-racist practice stops because you can’t bring yourself to care about the words from a Black person who you dislike for some reason, that’s really a sign that you’re not going to get very far, and a lot of people in fandom maybe haven’t realized that they can put all the BLM in their profiles and in their display names and do charities, but at the end of the day, that is just social justice cosplay. It’s pretending at anti-racism. And you’re not gonna grow, if that’s even your goal.
And a lot of people don’t like any of the harder lessons. They want their anti-racism served up with a side of ally cookies, and in 2020, as we approach what is going to probably be a really horrifying and fraught future for people of color in the United States, in Europe, anywhere where we are essentially minorities, it’s important to realize that what happens in fandom happens for a reason, when it comes to racism. And it doesn’t stay in fandom. Just like it doesn’t stay in your offline life.
FK: I really appreciate Stitch’s uncompromising, “here it is.”
ELM: Absolutely. Thank you so much for sending this in, Stitch, we really appreciate it. OK, so our next guest is one of our new voices, Anisa Khalifa. Anisa is a writer, podcaster and culture critic who co-hosts and produces the Dramas Over Flowers podcast. She is a lifelong nomad, speaks five languages, and is fascinated by the intersections of race, culture, identity and media, the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. And I’m excited to hear her voicemail!
FK: Me, too!
Anisa Khalifa: Hi Flourish and Elizabeth! This is Anisa. Thank you for having me on. I wanted to start this out by talking about my first real fandom, which was Harry Potter. I got into it in high school, like, the fourth book was coming out at that time? I think I’m similar in age to both of you, so you understand. I know that I don’t have to explain what it was like to be a fan back then.
And I think I just began to slowly recognize that for a book series whose driving central conflict was fighting against this, you know, magical fascist, it was entirely centered around white characters. And I just began to realize the moral emptiness of that, and it didn’t help that, you know, over the years we’ve had the terrible takes on indigenous North American magic, and you know, the casting of an Asian woman to play Nagini’s former, you know, human self in the new movies, just—you know, like, JKR telling on herself and you know, now she’s told on herself in a lot of other ways, but for me that line was, was really her treatment of, you know, race and racism. And I think I just had to reach a certain point in my development as a person and kind of my deprogramming of the white supremacy that we all grow up with, even as a person of color, that’s programming that you have to disengage from and sort of remove from your brain.
And so I think because I had that experience and also because I grew up in a media landscape where there was basically no representation, and then after 9/11 there was only terrible representation—and to explain what I mean by that, I am a brown woman of South Asian descent and I wear hijab, so I’m instantly recognizable as a Muslim, and I came to adulthood in that post-9/11 era. And so for me, at a certain point, I just gave up on American entertainment I think, and just Western entertainment in general.
And then during undergrad I discovered Korean dramas, and they are delightful for many reasons, but what’s relevant here is that I was watching for the first time extremely entertaining television that was also starring 100% people of color. And I just couldn’t get enough of it. And in a lot of ways, it’s been a wonderful fandom that has felt very safe from a lot of the toxic fan culture that exists in, say, you know, the Marvel, DC fandoms, or like, comic book fandom, or other types of large, prominent fandoms that tend to attract a certain type of person. I don’t know why.
But I think it does have certain tendencies that are common across fandoms, which is that in general, I think, fans of color are often made to feel as though racism is one of the things that they should swallow in order to not ruin the experience of other fans. And how often that racism or that stereotyping basically is invisible to people who are not in the affected groups. And that often further marginalizes us, whether we decide to speak up and face backlash or if we just stay silent and swallow the insult and just, kind of ruins your experience.
I think in some spaces that’s getting better, but I think sometimes you just have to make your own space. That’s what we did with our podcast, Dramas Over Flowers. We just, we’re three brown Asian women and there were things that we wanted to discuss that were not being discussed in the mainstream English-language K-drama spaces, and so we just decided to start our own fan platform where we could freely speak about things like racial and ethnic stereotypes in the dramas that we were watching, or just have a space where we could talk about the media in a really critical way that wasn’t just shut down by people saying like “Oh, you’re just ruining the experience.”
Those are just some of my many thoughts about race and fandom; I can’t wait to hear the whole thing! Thank you, bye!
ELM: Thank you so much, Anisa, I really appreciate your perspective here and I’m so glad that you reached out to us. I mean, I’m really—I’m really grateful for all of the new guests that we had.
FK: Me too!
ELM: That sounds silly, I’m also grateful for the original guests. I’m grateful for everyone, whatever, moving on. [laughs]
FK: OK, great. Great. Moving on! OK. This next person is also a new guest, Effy. Effy is a Filipino woman who once wrote a whole thesis about Star Trek fanfiction for her final year, and likes to write crossovers and fusion AUs, because, quote, “Wouldn’t it be funny if this series took place in that canon?” She likes puto (sticky rice treats) and hates the Game of Thrones showrunners.
ELM: Also a good bio!
FK: All right, let’s hear it.
Effy: Hi! I’m Effy. I am a Filipino woman who has been in fandom since I was around 10 years old, if not earlier than that. My experiences with fandom and racism in fandom have not been as bad as some, because I tend to stay out of the discourse.
But in the more recent fandoms I’ve been in, I’ve noticed that some fans generally tend to overperform anti-racism. Like, there’s a small contingent in one of the fandoms that is quote-unquote “woke” to the point where they champion the mixed-race slash ship which is great—until you realize that the mixed-race slash ship always plays second-fiddle to the white slash juggernaut in the fandom. Most fics featuring the mixed-race ship will have it happen in the background while the big juggernaut is the main ship. Which is just rough when you don’t want to read about the juggernaut.
And that’s not the only thing that happened, but it’s the big one that I’ve really noticed. So you end up really wondering: do they really actually like this ship? I really hope they do! I really hope they’re sincere about championing this ship. But on the other hand, my thought is: are they trying to dodge accusations of racism from, like, other woke fans? Like, “Oh no! I’m not racist! I wrote the fic where the black guy and the white guy get together in the background of the ship with the two white guys!” No. No. That’s not—you are a little bit racist. We’re all a little bit racist, like Avenue Q says. The point is to try and do better, especially better than the source material, which was pretty bad on the racism front.
So that’s my experience in one fandom, in particular. But I’ve noticed it duplicated in a lot of fandoms, so I don’t know. Take from that as you will.
FK: Thank you so much, Effy. We really appreciate your perspective. And I think that the next one is an interview, right?
ELM: Yes! Our first interview of Part 2, Amanda-Rae Prescott. Amanda-Rae is a Doctor Who and period drama blogger, reviewer, live-tweeter and cosplayer with a decade of fandom experience. Having been in Doctor Who-adjacent fandom and having watched a lot of period dramas, I’m excited to talk to her!
FK: Me too. Let’s hear it! —OK. I think it’s time to welcome Amanda-Rae onto the podcast! Welcome, Amanda-Rae!
Amanda-Rae Prescott: Hi, everyone! First time here, so excited!
ELM: We are very excited to have you. So why don’t we start where we always start: can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and, like, your fannish background basically? Position yourself for us.
ARP: OK. I’ve been involved in fandom for about 12 years now? I am Black and multi-racial, I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. My main fandoms are Doctor Who and broadly speaking period drama/U.K. TV fandoms. I said “broadly speaking” because there’s a whole, there’s a lot of stuff that comes out of the U.K. right now, so I’ve focused a lot on anything that PBS has imported or the things that end up on Amazon and the various streaming services. I like also some of the mystery and modern drama shows, but a lot of the fandom controversy tends to center around the historical dramas, so that’s sort of where I’ve focused a lot of my work.
I am a freelance blogger, I’ve gotten paid for some of my reviews of historical TV, I also have a lot of unpaid, just stuff I’m thinking about and meta-ing about on my Twitter account, and I also have been very active on the Facebook side of things, trying to get mods of fandom groups to be a little less racist, a little less sexist, a little less homophobic, et cetera, and that part of the work is very very difficult, because you are dealing with people who are very much—have no idea about fandom as the way we see it, have no idea of transformative fandom, they don’t know about a lot. [ELM laughs] Yeah, it’s one of, this area of fandom is one of those fandoms where it is not just dominated entirely by women, it’s also dominated by women who are—broadly speaking—45 and up.
FK: Right. So that’s amazing, having you come on, because we—I feel like we usually talk about lots of fandoms that are very Tumblr, very Twitter, very—you know, we rarely talk about Facebook fandom, and that must bring with it a whole host of, like, its own issues, just as a platform—just as Tumblr does, just as Twitter does.
ARP: Yeah, it definitely does. I mean, there are fans who are active on Twitter, but again, you get—you’ll see a very, there are a lot of generational divides. There’s also a lot of ideological divides. Facebook tends to be dominated by older white women who are probably either—identify as Republicans in the U.S. system or even, interestingly enough, you get a lot of Brits who are probably Tories and pro-Brexit, and then you have a whole host of people who are from Europe and international, and yeah. A lot of them are politically on the right or even culturally on the right for various reasons. There’s a lot of religious folks on there, different—there’s a lot of different, it’s a completely different fandom landscape. And there are also people who are like, “Wait, what I do is fandom? Really? [laughter] There’s a lot of that.
ELM: That’s really interesting.
ARP: It is interesting. I think it’s something that—I’ve seen a lot of fan metas, but so much of it is focused on Twitter—so much of it’s focused on Twitter and Tumblr and AO3, but we never talk about Facebook and in my fandom at least, it’s a huge problem.
ELM: So I think it’s interesting because—and you can tell me your perspective on this and if I’m reading this right—but like, you know, in a lot of media fandom, critical media fandom, there, when it comes to racism and talking about racism, there’s like a broad assumption in these spaces that like—on like Tumblr or wherever—that “Oh yeah, fan means you can be critical too!” But then you bring up racism and they’re like, “I don’t wanna talk about that,” right? So there’s that disconnect where you’re like, can critique the thing, but then white people don’t want to be self-critical.
But I’m wondering if, with these fans or enthusiasts, if they don’t even identify as fans—they’re not used to critiquing anything at all, right? So this is like a double whammy, because then you’re also talking about race too?
ARP: It’s weird! Because they can—they critique things, but it’s never, it’s—they don’t understand transformative fandom, I think that’s what it is. They can critique things like the costumes are—“This is an 1860s show and the costumes are from the 1930s.” They can critique “This is not what the writers said because…” some theory that’s probably disproven by experts in the field. They can cite things that are whitewashed history.
But when it comes to dealing with framing things as “this is racist,” or “this is sexist” or “this is homophobic,” they really do not have any concept about that. And if you start to question a story about how it’s offensive because it’s an -ism being brought up in the story, and not an -ism that’s necessarily reflective of history but more so of modern bias, they get especially weird about that. And if you try to critique trends in a fandom—cause I’ve noticed, in certain fandoms, there’s certain discussions that have gone a certain way, and I can predict where people are going with this, and then I question it or I confront it in some way, shape, or form—it turns into “Oh, Amanda’s a bully, she’s really rude about this, who does she think she is, she doesn’t know anything, I know more than her because I’m an older white woman,” and I sit here like—people don’t realize I have a master’s degree in journalism, so it’s probably the other way around.
Plus I’ve done research in Black British history because every time—for example, Les Miserables from—not the musical, but in 2018, PBS and BBC had that miniseries. Every other comment at one point was “Why is Javier Black?” And I’m like “Well, there was already a Black Javier on Broadway; Victor Hugo in the books said that he was quote-unquote ‘Gypsy,’” which obviously it’s a slur now—
FK: Yeah.
ARP: But it indicates an “other.” Also, again, the production was trying to highlight stuff related to Black Lives Matter, so it was all perfectly reasonable for people who are open-minded already. But again, we get a lot of these fandoms, they’ll—something as simple as “Oh my God, why is there a Black actor here, it should be somebody white,” they lose their minds.
Hamilton was the same thing. Of course, in mainstream theater fandom, you don’t get that kind of response, but in period drama circles, you bring up Hamilton and every—all of a sudden it’s, “Well, why doesn’t some white actor play Genghis Khan.”
FK: Whoa, that’s wild. I mean I guess I knew that some people had that reaction, but…
ARP: Yeah, and they still have these reactions! And they popped up again when Disney+ aired Hamilton. It was kinda crazy. Yeah. They question every time there is a diverse casting, they question it. Every time there is a plot that handles racism, they question it. It’s very, very frustrating. Every time there is a crime drama that addresses anything about racism and immigration it just gets—“Well, they’re just making this too political for today!” And I’m like, this is based—ripped from the headlines in 1970! Yeah, there’s a show on PBS called Endeavour. Every season, without fail, something is ripped from the headlines from that era? Turns into “something’s too political.”
FK: Wow.
ARP: The past season had something about, there was like a murder at a women’s college. And it just turned into “all this bra-burning,” whatever, I was just like “This is what happened back then!” [laughter] Yeah. There was another—the season before had a reference to the Grenfell disaster, and they thought they were making it up, but there was an earlier disaster [inaudible] called [inaudible] where that happened. Something similar happened, and they’re referencing that earlier incident, but of course they have their own biases about today, so they’re reading into things.
And a lot of this is on Facebook, and the problem with Facebook is that anyone can say whatever they want, and also the studios and the production companies don’t have moderation control on Facebook, especially if people create their own groups—let alone, you know, you can say whatever you want on the official page and nothing’s gonna get moderated. But it’s really frustrating, because you have these groups of fans creating discussion groups, and they’re completely racially or otherwise unaware of why you can’t have people talking, saying this kind of stuff. Or they’ll all throw out words like “political correctness” or “talking about race is political.” It happens a lot.
FK: Right. That sounds so incredibly frustrating. It sounds like it’s a hard space to exist in, to come back to. I guess I’m curious, like, what keeps you coming back into those spaces that are so—I mean, when you know that this is just gonna be the thing that faces you all the time, like—I mean obviously you’re a fan of the thing, maybe I answered my own question. You want to be able to talk about it. But how does that play out for you? Because it sounds just so frustrating.
ARP: So, what happens—the reason why I still keep going is that I found, I’ve had to create my own spaces to talk about these issues in the way I want them to be framed. So I started my own Facebook group for period drama fans, and recently I collabed with another bunch of white allies to create a group where we can talk about general discussion things, but make it less openly inclusive and political but more like, “Hey, we can talk about these shows, we don’t have to talk about politics, we don’t have to talk about social issues in this group,” but I have my own group where I’m talking about analyzing things from, you know, left-wing perspective all the time—so I have my own spaces.
But what, oddly enough, has helped, is when the admins of these groups flip out and then ban me, so I don’t have to deal with these people any more. [all laugh] I’ve been banned from, I’ve been banned from eight groups about period drama or specific fandom spaces, because I’ve confronted people on their biases on race and feminism and other things. Yeah, I have a lot of stories and—yeah. There’s three particular fandoms where my confronting their biases have turned pretty public and nasty.
FK: Wow.
ARP: The first was Poldark, oddly enough. Yes, that show on PBS about a Cornish miner in the 1780s and ’90s. You would think there wouldn’t be any drama there. There is a lot of drama there.
FK: [laughs] We’ve been in fandom long enough to know that even—at all times there’s always drama there!
ARP: Yeah! I mean, it doesn’t help when the book—there was a scene that is in the book that it’s based on, and on the show, that can be interpreted as rape, and the problem is half the fandom—even I, myself, at one point didn’t think it was. But once the #MeToo movement happened…I already realized the framing of that whole scene’s a problem. And of course the cast and crew have to stick to what’s in the book, because they can’t piss off the estate of the author.
But, A., if you criticize the way people defend the scene—they kicked you out of the group. If you criticize anything about how the lead actress, these people are kind of constantly body-shaming her and slut-shaming her character and all this—they kick you out of the group. If you support a different ship than the canon ship, they—yeah. So yeah, that fandom was incredibly frustrating.
There was a lot of issues. It was a lot of not just racism issues but a lot of ageism issues, too. A lot of women thinking that because they’re of a certain age they can then bully younger fans.
And there’s probably a fair bit of other things too, because I am neurodivergent, and I know a lot of people don’t understand that still. There’s a lot of bias about being on the ASD spectrum. So I’m sure—there’s so much intersecting drama going on with my interactions in Poldark fandom.
The second fandom with issues is Outlander, but the difference with Outlander fandom is that there’s a spread of that fandom—it’s so large, there’s stuff on Tumblr, there’s stuff on Twitter, there’s stuff on Facebook. But also there is a group that was set up to sort of counter—a group of feminist and Black fans who have set themselves up as alternatives to these white-focused spaces.
On Twitter we have a collective called Blacklanderz, which I’m a part of, and it’s been great to be in a space where we can talk about how the show handles slavery and race issues without folks saying “Well, that was what was in the book, they shouldn’t change it because of the TV show!” And I’m like, yeah, the TV show’s being watched by people who didn’t read the books, and also the books were written 20 years ago. We know more about Black history now, thanks to the 1619 Project, than they did back then. So they probably have to correct things, so.
FK: Yeah, totally.
ARP: And then the third fandom, which has been the most outrageous in terms of racial everything, is Sanditon fandom.
ELM: Mm. This has trickled into my feed and I am not in this sphere at all. So.
ARP: Yeah, I was the person that was interviewed by the Daily Beast about why their emoji, the pineapple emoji was racist? I’m the person who started that.
ELM: Oh wow.
ARP: So…yeah. It was a very tough couple months on Twitter earlier this year. Cause I’ve noticed that fandom was being problematic even before PBS aired the show in America on Twitter, because they were using—because the show got canceled by the U.K. network ITV before it aired in America, they were using Twitter to push a renewal campaign, which then trickled onto the Masterpiece hashtag before Masterpiece aired the show. So there were people reading on the feed, people seeing spoilers for the show on the feed before it even started.
And they were harassing American fans in the groups when we would tell them things like “Oh, that’s totally not true about PBS,” because many of us have been watching PBS for years and we know how they work—they wouldn’t believe us about that, they banned several people I know from those groups and then when I saw the European fans trying to push this pineapple emoji on Twitter when, previous to the airing of the episodes, I was fed up. I wrote a rant one day, I was like, “I’ve had it with you guys disrespecting me and other Black fans, cause this scene is racist. It has been proven by historians to be racist.” What do they do? They make it a symbol of the fandom.
ELM: Can you possibly give a little bit of context? Because I’m not sure that all of our listeners will know—
ARP: OK, sure. So Sanditon is a show based on an unfinished Jane Austen novel. It stars Rose Williams, who is white, and Crystal Clarke, who is Black. Her character, Crystal Clarke’s character Georgiana, is from the West Indies and she is—in the novel she’s presented as half-white, half-black. Crystal Clarke’s casting, definitely purely Black in terms of today’s racial standards.
So there’s a scene where Georgiana goes to the house of the rich person in the town, and her name is Lady Denham. She’s an old crusty white lady, she’s very angry and she’s crazy, whatever. So Lady Denham thinks that being polite is showing Georgiana “Oh, I have a pineapple.” But it’s clearly fetishizing her station in life as a Black heiress.
FK: Right.
ARP: Cause it’s clearly—and of course there’s a whole bunch of microaggressive stuff there. So when they finally cut open the pineapple, it’s a bunch of rotten maggots inside. Because pineapples back then, there was no refrigeration, it probably spent a couple months on a ship, people were trying to grow them in their own backyards, like hydroponics. Back then, the Regency era, a pineapple cost about $8000.
FK: Right.
ELM: Yeah.
ARP: A status symbol. But of course the whole theme is about racism and microaggression. The fans, some of the fans were like “Oh, Georgiana’s being rude to her host!” I’m like, “Why?” Me, on the other hand, someone who’s experienced microaggressions, I’m like, “Yay! She stood up for herself!
ELM: yeah.
ARP: And people being like “That’s a good symbol for our show”? Like, no, it’s not a good symbol for your show. Of course, the people who aren’t—I mean, other fandoms have used emojis as jokes before, but it was never—Black people never thought it was an issue. They, these fans, who—none of these people who promoted this are African-American or Black British, or in my case, I’m West Indian-American. None of us ever had issues with other fandoms. Clearly it was this fandom that made it an issue.
And of course, like most things on social media, when you try to tell people that they’re being racist, it turns into “you’re bullying, you’re ruining the fandom spirit, and you’re trying to take control of the narrative from us,” and I’m like, “you’re pushing a narrative that me and others never asked for. We said it’s offensive. People who represent Jane Austen fandom in America have said it offensive.” The article I got interviewed for, by the Daily Beast, they interviewed experts around it and not just cast—they interviewed experts. And it was very obvious that it was deemed a racist symbol. But they refused to accept it. And when I would try to negotiate with people, it turned into them expecting me to forgive them or something. And it turned into months of harassment and drama. I can’t even mention the show on social media now, cause I’m scared that people are gonna try to find me, harass me now, months later.
And then when George Floyd happened, the cast were reflecting on their lives and stuff, and it re-started the debate. I had a new wave of harassment on Instagram because these people who claim they’re big-name fans of the show, they attacked me all over again for what happened in January and February.
And the reason why I stick around with this? Is basically because I feel like if I don’t do it, nobody else is going to, and I also feel like there is a need in these fandoms to have somebody who is going to call out these problems, because there is a reason why—some people have told me, “I watch Father Brown, but I keep it to myself, because I don’t wanna deal with people.” Or “I love Downton Abbey, but I went and I saw all these white people, I didn’t think that’d be a space for me.” I’m like, yeah. We have to create the space to be safe, and there’s very few people doing that work in our fandom.
So that’s sort of why I—there’s a couple other bloggers here and there who have been doing things, but my work has been sort of half getting freelance work, articles and reviews of Outlander and the like, but I also feel like there’s a need for—because there’s so many U.K. TV shows out there, there needs to be somebody who can analyze these things with a critical eye to race. I mean, I’ve been kind of teaching myself meta on how to do these things. It wasn’t until the Sanditon saga that I actually interacted with folks like Zina and others who’ve been doing this work in other fandoms for ages now, and I’m just kind of through Twitter doing what I can to change the conversation in these spaces.
FK: Wow. That’s awesome.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I find that really inspiring that you’re willing to do that and just go, day to day.
ELM: So I guess one question I might have—so you have a little context about me, I studied colonial literature and post-colonial literature about the British empire. So a lot of that was reading things like Mansfield Park for specifically, for the colonial and racial elements in the story, right? And that one is pretty obvious. But in a lot of other, Victorian literature, it’s a lot more coded, and you have to understand the context, right. So I think of all of those books as racialized whether they are taught that way or not. But I guess my question for you is, when I think about British period dramas, until recently I generally find them to be pretty whitewashed and not willing to dig into those themes, and I don’t know—would you agree with that?
ARP: I would agree with that, and it really wasn’t until—I think it’s very very recent they even started to question those themes or at least find ways of addressing what hadn’t been talked about before. I think that’s probably why even small little steps, like casting a Black actor in a traditionally white setting, even something as simple as that has become so controversial. It’s happened in Doctor Who as well, but I think it’s a little bit—Doctor Who fandom is, in some respects…at least people are aware of racial politics.
In period drama, they’re kind of, a lot of these folks are watching these shows because they’re mostly white. Because it’s not “sexual.” Because, for whatever their definition of “sexual” is. I mean. It is very much, it’s been whitewashed. I think Downton Abbey was the fandom that was the first British period drama fandom I think that had full social media exposure, I mean like, for Facebook and Twitter, that stuff. Because obviously there were shows that happened on LiveJournal, and earlier, before social media. But that was the first that had international social media attention.
From Downton Abbey on is where you really start. And Poldark had, just the last season, there was a plot that was introducing Kitty and Ned Despard, and their interracial marriage, which actually existed, but fans resisted that whole plot because it wasn’t in the books. It was of course an attempt to bridge gaps in time in those stories, but people were very angry: “Oh my gosh, now my romance drama has a whole bunch about colonialism, race, why is this happening?” And I was like, “You don’t understand, for somebody who’s watching shows where you don’t see characters who look like you on the screen, and to have a real life character on the screen, it’s like, oh my God.”
In terms of films, it started with Belle, in 2013.
FK: I remember that, yeah.
ARP: Here’s the thing: for awhile, Belle is still—even though it happened like seven years ago, Belle is still like, the gold standard of representation in our genre, but I’m like, there is a lot more underneath that surface that’s waiting to be picked up, and—yeah, people are definitely starting to listen.
Oddly enough, through all my Twitter posts, I’ve actually picked up quite a few folks in the industry who follow me now because of what I have to say about race. I did not ask for that.
ELM: That’s great!
ARP: One of the production companies follows me…
ELM: Is that all right? [laughs]
ARP: A couple of the showrunners follow me on Twitter, and I’m like, I have some actors here and there, some screenwriters, the Spanish Princess team follows me on Twitter as well, so that’s another huge milestone moment. They actually, that show has Black people in the Tudor era, which is another era that’s infamous for whitewashing. I’m like, no, we were there! John Blanke and others, there were Black people in England at the time. Of course, that actually starts another whole conversation about “Why are Black people here?” Did you guys not hear about the Moors? Did you not know what they looked like? [all laugh]
FK: Did they not make you—
ELM: That is a mystery!
FK: Did you never think about how could Othello be written if Black people weren’t there? Like, I mean—
ARP: I know!
ELM: Shakespeare just used his great imagination.
FK: At least one Black person, because otherwise you could not write that play, right?
ELM: Just the one.
ARP: Exactly. So yeah, it’s weird how people have—they use inaccurate history to defend themselves when a show actually does the research and consults Black historians. It’s truly crazy. So yeah, it is definitely a whitewashed place.
But I think that is changing, and I can see it changing in ways—what is getting greenlighted, for sure. I mean, there’s still a long way to go, but I’m starting to see—the U.K. networks are kind of moving away from these traditional, these staid period dramas and ones that are a little more questioning. For example, there’s a show that is not even out in America yet, but everybody watched it, started to watch it, called The Singapore Grip, which is a satire of colonialism in Singapore around the time of the Japanese invasion in World War II. I’m not sure how Americans will react to it, but that’s not something that would have been greenlighted even five years ago, let alone 20.
ELM: It seems to me, it’s interesting cause it seems like everything you’re describing it’s like, the production studios are pushing ahead despite like—
ARP: They are.
ELM: —old-school fans being like…actual historians are like “Yes, this is the truth,” and there’s a maybe an older subset of this fandom that’s like, used to a false version of history…it just seems to mirror the real-life reactions to people trying to actually talk about history and people being like, “I don’t think those things happened!” And it’s like, “No no, it did!” Like, I don’t know, maybe you didn’t learn about it in school, or maybe you did and you refused to accept it, but it seems like it’s directly mirroring that kind of tension, and you’re on the front lines of it.
ARP: It is. So true.
ELM: OK, so I think we’re almost out of time, but it sounds like things are changing. Maybe not super fast.
ARP: Not super fast.
ELM: But like, I’m wondering—what are your hopes? What do you wish? What could move the needle for you in terms of making, like, you love this stuff and you don’t want to have to spend your time battling racists while you’re just like, trying to watch Aidan Turner take his shirt off? I don’t know, that’s my only knowledge of Poldark. I don’t know if that’s what even draws you to it, but like, that’s all I know.
ARP: I’m an Eleanor Tomlinson fan, but, um. [all laugh]
ELM: All right, I don’t know who that is, but I support you! [crosstalk] All right, I’m gonna look this up afterwards.
ARP: Totally.
ELM: I’m sure I will definitely support you then. Not to objectify her. But continue, sorry. [laughs]
ARP: Basically what I would want is threefold. I believe people who are involved in anti-racism work on social media need to focus back on Facebook. There is a lot of stuff that’s not being—especially my area of expertise—it’s being ignored because it’s on Facebook and we don’t look at it or we don’t have an account for it or people have other, I don’t wanna diss Facebook but there’s so much racism in these spaces and there’s not a lot of us combating it.
Secondly, I wish—this is starting to happen—I think the studios and the networks really need to start policing their Facebook pages, and creating a presence on social media that is beyond just “Here is the trailer to our new thing!” Getting in the weeds and seeing what people are talking about, especially in these groups that are not official groups, and seeing that these fans of yours—you want their viewership, but then they’re talking about stuff that’s against what you’re trying to promote. Like, you shouldn’t have a group where it’s technically run by the studio, but half the comments are bashing the gay character on the show. That’s not a racism example, but that’s the kind of thing that you see on Facebook, because you aren’t looking for it.
And what I hope is the admins of these groups take their Black members seriously and stop coddling racists who make a mistake and acts of violence, even if they don’t see it that way. People like me shouldn’t feel like we have to walk away or be silenced or banned just to bring attention to how their discussions hurt people, and they shouldn’t be tolerating hate speech and racism. And even something as innocuous as “political correctness,” that kind of terminology should be banned from your group. There are people doing it, but there’s not enough. There’s actually a Jane Austen group, formerly known as “Drunk Austen” but now “The World of Jane Austen,” they’re actively trying to stop people from being racist and sexist and whatever, and homophobic, in those spaces, and it’s awesome, but we need more of that work.
I mean, I’ve been dealing it for the past five years—the past five years heavily on this topic of anti-racism, but that’s my main hopes. If people can just pay attention to it and don’t be afraid to confront comments when you see it. A lot of times people get away with these things because nobody confronts them.
FK: Totally.
ARP: And take screencaps, please. Screencaps make the world go round. [all laugh]
FK: Awesome. I mean I guess I shouldn’t say “awesome,” because “awesome” is not how I would describe all the things that are going on, but it’s awesome to talk with you—
ELM: It is awesome to talk with you.
FK: And it’s very, um, rejuvenating? You make me feel like every time that you, you know, confront something that’s an aggression or something like that that you see that you’re making the world a better place. Which obviously is true, but it’s good to sort of talk about that and remember that it’s actually like—it’s everyone’s job to be part of that.
ARP: Exactly.
FK: So thank you so much for coming on, this has been really enlightening and it’s been great.
ARP: Thank you so much, I’m glad! Because eventually I hope to get my meta somewhere that’s less like, reading tweets? Like getting a formal meta blog started. Cause I go like eight directions anyway all the time. I’ll be watching something and then a minute later I’m watching something else. So yeah. [all laugh]
ELM: OK, well when you launch that let us know and we will share it.
ARP: Definitely. Thank you guys so much!
FK: Thank you for coming on.
ELM: Thank you!
ARP: This was great!
ELM: That was a fantastic conversation. I’m so glad that we had Amanda-Rae on and I’m really looking forward to, like, digging into more of her work.
FK: Me too.
ELM: So thank you very much, Amanda-Rae.
FK: Yeah, thank you. At this point should we go for a break?
ELM: Yeah, let’s do a break!
FK: All right.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back from the break and before we get into our next person, we just wanna take a moment to talk about how we make Fansplaining. Fansplaining is funded by listeners and readers like you, and we’re funded through Patreon. Patreon.com/fansplaining. We have a ton of different rewards for different levels of contribution, from physical things like little pins—which are very cute—to digital rewards like a ton of special episodes. We have 22 of them so far, and in fact just this month, we did three on three of the shows that won biggest at the Emmys: Succession, Watchmen and Schitt’s Creek. So if you have been enjoying this episode and our other episodes, please support us on Patreon.
ELM: And if you don’t have any cash, no worries at all. We love everyone’s thoughts, feelings, opinions. You can send them to us at fansplaining at gmail dot com. You can message us on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, all at fansplaining. Some of those places are not that great for messages, but you know. You know what I mean. And you can also leave us a voicemail yourself! And it’s something that we love getting cause we love actually hearing people’s voices. It’s 1-401-526-FANS. You can tell us whether or not you, if you wanna remain anonymous or whatever. You can do that with all messages, by the way. And we’ll play it on the air, and maybe use it in a future episode. So please send us your thoughts, we’d love to hear them!
FK: All right. So with that said, our next guest is Sam! And Sam’s bio, which they sent is: “My name’s Sam. I’m a Chinese-American adoptee who was raised in the U.S.A.”
ELM: All right!
FK: Let’s hear it!
Sam: Hello! So, as an Asian-American who was raised by white parents in a very white neighborhood, my relationship with race and by extension fandoms can be a bit complicated. Now, I have a lot of internal biases. I’ll be the first one to admit this. Trying to fit in was important to me as a kid, and I may have accidentally internalized a lot of racism. So now that I’m older, I’m trying to educate myself, but it is a work in progress.
So since getting older, I have gotten more involved in things like fandoms. And getting involved in fandoms, I’ve had more opportunities to spot and confront some of the biases I’ve internalized. Tumblr: if you ever want to question your worldviews, Tumblr’s the place to be! But for reals, despite any faults with the website, there are interesting conversations on topics such as portrayals of race in both media and fandoms.
The particular fandom I’m in, really active in right now, The Old Guard, has a lot of racial discourse. So I’ve been on both sides of the argument. I’ve definitely been the ignorant one more times than I’d like to admit. Not that I don’t notice problematic things in media, it’s just I’ve kinda learned to tune them out for the sake of fitting in and not being told I’m too sensitive. There are also just issues I’ve never really considered before, and even if I do have to make an effort to not feel defensive when people bring up these topics, I am glad, ultimately, that I’m getting a chance to learn more.
I’ve also been on the—I don’t wanna call it the “educated” side, but maybe more mindful of the situation side? This is actually, this one I have more complicated feelings about, solely just cause—I don’t know if I, even if I do know more on the topic, I don’t know if I have the right to play educator when it comes to race. Even, again, if this is something that I’m aware is problematic, I understand the issue, or even if it’s some issue that I’ve actually personally experienced, I’m kind of only a person of color in name, only. Like, in a technical sense. The world sees me as Asian, but if you get to know me, it’s pretty obvious I know nothing about Chinese culture or Asian culture. Any—if I try and offer my two cents on race, it just feels like taking away the opportunity for like, a “real” quote-unquote Chinese person or person of color to explain their side, and I don’t want to do that. Even if we’re both technically, you know, people of color, I just wasn’t raised that way. So, you know, I should offer up the floor, I should just stay not involved.
So yeah! As a somewhat-Asian, somewhat-white-person, race and fandom, the feelings surrounding that can be very complicated. Yeah.
FK: Thank you so much, Sam. That was a really interesting perspective.
ELM: Absolutely. OK, our final voicemail before our final interview is from Phoebe Sinclair. Phoebe is a Boston-based writer and wanderer who loves herself a library and all things hyperlocal.
FK: Excellent. Let’s hear it!
Phoebe Sinclair: Hi! My name is Phoebe Sinclair, and I am a cisgendered Black woman born and raised in New Jersey. I came to fandom via my love of animals and my obsession with animal books as a little kid, which lead to me mistakenly reading Beowulf hoping it would be about wolves—which it is not. I grew up in a household that was into pop culture; I watched Star Wars and Star Trek, I read my brother’s Robotech books, I got into Lord of the Rings around age 10, and from there I discovered Elfquest which just blew my mind because the central characters in that book are an interracial couple and their two adorable brown children.
I didn’t really know about fanfiction until I—or, fanfiction writing more specifically—until I read Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, and that just blew my mind because I did not know that all of these folks were out here writing all of this great transformative fiction. And from there somehow I fell into the Avengers fandom where I’ve been for the past five years.
Fanfiction has helped me sell my own novel. I had about eight straight years of writing instruction, which drummed into me the idea that the only legitimate writing is original fiction, and can you believe how excited I was when I discovered that folks were building works on top of works on top of works on top of works in the fanfiction sphere. And I just am so excited that this exists.
There’s one dynamic, however, in the Avengers fandom that strikes me as…not the greatest? And that is what I refer to as the “rehabilitate Bucky Barnes drive.” Where fic after fic after fic is being produced about rehabilitating this white male murderer while at the same time, in actual life and in the actual world, Black men and women and children are being killed at the hands of police and at the hands of their own fellow community members. I find this really curious that no one is talking about this dynamic. I haven’t read any essays on it. I guess I’ll have to be the one to write the essay. What’s with that?
And then another thing that struck me as odd was post-Into the Spiderverse, which is just the most amazing movie, I was hoping for this big influx of fics and when I went to my AO3 space, I saw very few works being produced about Miles and many—well, I shouldn’t say many because there aren’t that many fics. But the ones that were being produced seemed to be about Peter B. Parker and Spider-Noir and Spider-Ham, but not about Miles.
Another thing that I want to sort of shine a light on, however, despite those disappointments, is there’s a fic out there that features an Asian-American Kate Bishop, who is of course Hawkeye, and I think that is brilliant, because why not an Asian-American Hawkeye? Why not more books and more works and more, you know, art about Miles and about Ororo and about Sam Wilson and about all of these characters who have all of these storylines and all of this work already produced about them in the world of conventional publishing? And yet so little time and attention paid to them comparatively in the world of fanfiction.
So I’m hoping for more of that, I’m hoping for more conversations like this that focus on race and racism, and focus on the ways that we don’t understand each other but have these opportunities to. And I look forward to more from y’all at Fansplaining. Thanks so much for keeping this conversation going. Here we go! Let’s have more.
ELM: All right, thank you so much Phoebe. I think that was a perfect voicemail to end on before our final conversation. I really appreciate your thoughts.
FK: Yes! And now for that final conversation, we are gonna be hearing from JSA Lowe, who is a lecturer in English at the University of Houston, where she received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature. She lives on Galveston Island.
ELM: So if anyone missed our—we should just clarify for this one. In our first “Race and Fandom” episodes, we did not include any white guests, because we are two white people, who obviously can’t speak to the full spectrum of whiteness in the world, but we have lived our lives as white people and can talk about that.
You know, one of the things that Rukmini in particular has really helped me think a lot about as we’ve made this podcast over the years is how often we just default to—when talking about race—just turning to people of color and having them do the talking, and not actually thinking of whiteness as a race, just thinking of “Oh, race is a problem, and I gotta listen to people for whom it is a problem,” rather than actually acknowledging my own whiteness and how that is as much of a race as any other race, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so, I—I suggested that we have a white guest on who actually works on whiteness as a structuring force as a part of their fan studies and also, like, fan practices, and I knew that JSA Lowe had, and so I was really grateful that she was willing to come out and talk about this. But I just feel like we need to clarify, why is there a conversation with a white person in here? Because you know, we don’t wanna have white people just taking up space that could be given to people of color to talk about race, but like, tl;dr: that’s why three white people are gonna talk about whiteness now.
FK: OK, great. I think that we should just do it.
ELM: Yeah, let’s just do it!
FK: All right, I think it’s time to welcome JSA Lowe to the podcast! Hello!
JSA Lowe: Hello!
ELM: Thank you very much for coming on!
JSA: No problem. My pleasure!
ELM: All right, well this is a bit of an experiment, because you’re our first white guest on our… [laughing]
FK: The first white guest ever—
ELM: —on our “Race and Fandom,” I mean, yeah, that would be something. On our “Race and Fandom” episodes. So I am excited to talk about whiteness with you. Can we get through this whole thing without making it incredibly awkward whenever I say this? This is my goal.
JSA: You know, I like to tell my students I’m the whitest person they will ever, ever know, and it’s become a thing now where it’s a joke, wherever I say “whiteness studies,” I like to say “whiteness studies.” Just putting that out there. [laughter] It’s whiteness! Just kind of italicize it and not try to be coy about it. So. Feel free to follow me in that.
ELM: That’s great, just lean into that. OK. OK, so can we start though with—so you are a professor. Can you situate yourself a little bit as a fan and also as a professor of fan studies?
JSA: Sure. Well, I’m a lecturer in English at the University of Houston, so I don’t teach fan studies per se, as many of us don’t. And I have a PhD from there as well in literature and creative writing. I came to fan studies maybe five or six years ago, after a hospital stint, during which I was recovering, and I thought, well, I better see what this Sherlock thing is that everybody’s watching. [laughter] So that was my, what Mel Stanfill calls my “fandom origin story.” I became a villain at that moment. And yeah, I’ve been doing fan studies stuff ever since, presenting at conferences, writing papers, and I’m now working on a book.
ELM: I wanna know what your book’s about, but also, so you were not doing fandom things prior to—you came to fandom and fan studies at the same time?
JSA: I did.
ELM: Interesting!
JSA: No, my background is all English literature and creative writing. I’m actually a poet.
ELM: You weren’t, like, reading fic on the side when you were 15 or whatever.
JSA: I was writing Kirk/Spock in my little spiral notebook, absolutely, but I didn’t know what it was or why I did it. I just knew that I better not show it to anyone. And then when I was in my, I guess, late 20s early 30s, it was X-Files Usenet time.
FK: Yeah!!
JSA: So—I did some—
ELM: So you have, yeah, you have been in fandom for a long time. All right.
JSA: I did some lurking! But I didn’t write fic until probably 2015, 2016, something like that.
ELM: Gotcha.
FK: So how does whiteness studies tie in with your fan studies work?
ELM: Can you tell us a little bit about what it is? Because it’s—embarrassingly, for someone who did a lot of postcolonial studies…to be fair, I graduated from college now some time ago. I didn’t have whiteness studies, which feels like a mistake.
JSA: No that’s fine! And I mean, I think it’s a field that’s, like many others, kind of aggregated, become itself through iterations of lumpy questioning and people just sort of being like, “Hang on a second, there’s something here!” Definitely comes out of post-colonialism and Black American critical race theory.
But I don’t know, I don’t know who we would want to say started it? It doesn’t really have a figure the way that, say, post-colonialism has Edward Said or critical race theory has bell hooks. There were all along, especially again, Black Americans, saying “white people need to look at whiteness.” [laughs] “This is not all our work to be done here.”
ELM: Well, so when you’re teaching things that are related to fandom, how does this work? When it comes to, like, combining these things. When you’re thinking about race in fandom—maybe not necessarily when you’re teaching it, but when you’re thinking about it in these big structural ways. Specifically thinking about that with a lens of what whiteness is and how white people engage or don’t engage with their own race.
JSA: Right. I think in all of my academic work, whatever I’m teaching or thinking about, I have learned to center whiteness and in particular my own whiteness as being important and relevant. I first started out teaching at a tribal college, a multi-tribal college that had over 100 different North American tribes represented, and First Nations from Canada. And that was kind of where I got a little bit radicalized, or I had some faculty members there who mentored me and sort of—I think—took pity on me [laughs] and took the time to start, start my education.
And so centering whiteness and bringing it into view became very important to me as an academic early on. It’s no different in fandom than it would be in literature or any other field. Just considering human history, I mean, I think there’s so much work that’s been done in critical race theory that white people have—here’s the thing: White people enjoy… [laughs] Stuff white people like: we like rock climbing, we like sea salt, right? We like Olive Garden. [laughs] We like recycling. And one of the things that white people love is to try to talk our way, or think our way, out of our own racism. So we will read books, we will read the Ta-Nehisi Coates, we will read whatever, like, the new thing is to read.
FK: Ibram X. Kendi, right now.
JSA: Exactly.
FK: Let’s all learn how to be an anti-racist.
JSA: Right, and there is this distinction being drawn between non-racist and anti-racist, which I think is important: anti-racism is more about what academics call “praxis,” right? Actually doing something, as opposed to theory, just sitting around and having noble thoughts. But centering whiteness becomes something more active than simply listening, thinking, feeling feelings, and maybe reading a book. There’s something much more active that needs to happen.
And this became important for me as a fan as I started to think about writing non-white characters, that that was gonna be more labor-intensive than just saying “Oh yeah, I wish I could’ve—if I could’ve voted for Obama a third time I would have.” [laughter] Or you know, “one of my friends is a person of color,” whatever.
But yeah, we like to think that we can talk our way out of racism, and it’s really just another kind of being non-racist, it’s a kind of performance. And it’s white fragility. It’s us thinking that we can’t handle having these difficult, painful, emotional—highly emotional thoughts and feelings, so we better just kind of have them briefly and then set them to one side. And that fragility is of course a form of aggression, because it’s our privilege that allows us to do that.
FK: So when you say “doing something more active,” what does that look like? Because I think that I’m—I think I’m beginning to get what you’re saying, which is that quote “people of color” are not just like, the—that’s not like an “other category” that is against the norm that is whiteness. I get that. And I get that just talking about things and thinking noble thoughts is not enough. Definitely get that. But what does that actually look like then, particularly within fandom? You were talking about writing characters of color—I don’t know, it feels like, what makes that more active? What makes centering whiteness more active, and what is the praxis that you’re talking about here?
JSA: Well, ultimately, I’m gonna channel Cornel West and say something like “dismantling structural racism at its structural roots,” which means legal, political, wealth-related, property-related changes. [laughs] White people own property and have for so long that we don’t even see that. It becomes, again, part of the default position, part of the assumption.
I’m trying to think who said this—it’s gotta be Cheryl Harris again—that whiteness becomes, like, a consolation prize, even if you don’t—even if you “lose everything,” quote-unquote, you’re never gonna go down as far as, for instance in the U.S., a Black person with the same social status or class status will, because you’ve got the consolation prize. So I think what I mean by praxis ultimately is really ugly. It’s kind of dirty work, on the street and in the houses of government, and in our political moment that’s difficult to conceive. [laughs] It’s difficult to imagine that being effective, because so much of the structure has been carefully aligned to maintain white power. That’s me being radical, and I apologize to listeners who are offended, but I’m not sorry actually at all, so. [laughs]
ELM: Sure, but I would say—if we’re talking about fandom…
JSA: If we’re talking about fandom we have to kind of consider…
ELM: Well, I think that people—some fans would say in response to that, like, “Oh, I absolutely agree with you, what you’re saying right now, because that’s like, the real world. That’s like, housing and jobs and like, the economy, and all these huge things, and this is fandom, this is just where I write silly stories about characters that I like, and how does that make any structural change.”
JSA: So maybe in this case activity is something that begins with reading, listening, and thinking thoughts. But ultimately, what are the things that we do as fans? We create content. And I’m not even gonna say we transform it. We just create it. [laughs] Somebody who’s toiling over their gifset at three a.m., they’re not, you know, remixing, they’re actually making—making shit. So what do we choose to make? Where do we choose to focus our attention?
And it’s too easy to say—I’m not gonna cite certain essayists or people who are high-profile in fandom, because we all know who they are—but it’s too easy to say “Well, my id is just not, kind of, tugging me in that direction, so you can’t legislate my pleasure,” et cetera. We can’t legislate our own personal pleasure, but we can sure as hell question it and interrogate it and haul it out into the light of day and put it in front of ourselves, where it’s very uncomfortable.
And maybe that’s the masochist in me, that I sort of like doing that. I like to know what’s driving me. I like to know what’s pushing me to think certain things and prefer certain things. “Well, why do I like that character?” I need to know. That’s a fannish behavior, questioning and interrogating and being puzzled by things and curious about things.
I mean, most of the time, what we think we’re doing that we call “thinking” is not really thinking. It’s just sort of like blurry television static or something. But to really get clear about something and sort of drag it out in front of us and say “OK, I’m looking at it now. I’m white! That character that I really like is also white. OK.” I’m just gonna sit with that, but I’ve noticed it at least. And not just sort of, I don’t know, deluded myself about what I’m actually doing. I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m using a lot of uptalk. “Is that?” [questioning noises] [all laugh]
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s hard. What you just said was really well-formulated in terms of—neither saying you’re not allowed to love things, but also not saying you’re allowed to love things and just never think about it again, because, you know, pleasures are above being addressed. Right?
JSA: Yeah, it’s so much more complicated.
FK: I think that’s something that is really—that a lot of people, myself included at times—I really credit a lot of the people who have come on this podcast with helping me sort of interrogate that and complexify that. But I think that for a lot of folks in fandom, it really feels like this black or white, right? Like, either I am allowed to love absolutely anything I feel like and we never have to question—because this is just about my id—or everything must be examined and then I have to stop loving things and then I have to, you know, somehow discipline myself—and I don’t know that that’s what anyone’s calling for either, particularly.
JSA: And that’s white fragility. What you just described. Cause then I can just throw up my hands and sit down and say “Well, you know, I just don’t know what they want from me.” [laughter]
FK: Right. Totally.
ELM: Right, right.
JSA: “I’m gonna ship Spike and Buffy!” [laughter] Which is fine! Nobody’s saying you can’t. But can we be, can we be conscious of our choices as choices. There are choices being made. And I don’t wanna do that! I wanna just roll over and pass out cause it’s three a.m. and I just finished a 90k fic, either writing it or reading it! [laughter] But either way, I have to wake up and live with myself the next day and go to work and have colleagues and have family members and have friends and, how am I comporting myself in the world?
ELM: Do you think, if enough white people did this—I think that, I think that one of the things that…I like how I didn’t finish that sentence. [laughs] But let me just clarify where I’m coming from here. Everything that you are describing is stuff that I have—I would say I have done. Like, just like Flourish is saying, I think we’ve had a similar experience of like, going on a journey over the course of the last five years of this podcast. Having decent ideas when we started, but not super well-formed.
And now having listened to a lot of people who really know what they’re talking about when it comes to race in fandom, I definitely interrogate the things that I like, and I interrogate the patterns that I have. And I certainly think about that, and I think about that when I’m writing my characters as much as I think about their gender and sexuality and class, like, I think—probably more than I would have a decade ago, certainly more than I would have.
But like, what—a question for me is always: what do I do after that, you know? Like, because I’m, I—my question, I guess, making it broader, is if enough white people sit with these things and are honest with them, does that start to make structural changes by sheer force? Or are we gonna just keep replicating these patterns without actively trying to choose different things to like?
JSA: I don’t know that we get to know, and that’s an unsatisfying answer, but it’s my best one.
ELM: I think that’s a, like, that’s not a bad answer, right? You know? [laughs] Like… I don’t know.
JSA: We don’t get to know what the consequence is gonna be. We get to make choices in our moment. I’m thinking again about Richard Dyer, this film theorist, who says “whiteness needs to be made strange, to extract it from the default position and to move it from the assumed reality that it holds.” You know? He talks about it in film, how characters will be raced, or just in a simple anecdote, you know: “I saw a Black guy on the bus,” but the whiteness is not labeled.
And I see this more in fic now. I see people more saying, you know, “A white guy came into the coffee shop.” [laughs]
ELM: Yeah yeah, I’ve noticed this too. Over the last—in the last five years I would say. A noticeable increase.
JSA: Or even maybe the last two. I mean, definitely—definitely this is recent.
ELM: Yeah, sure.
JSA: And I think these things are filtering through the, the consciousness, the zeitgeist if you will. But what the consequence of that is gonna be? I mean, how long a view of human history do we wanna take? And it also could be that structural changes that need to happen to make fan spaces more inviting—I don’t even want to say “inviting.” More, more hospitable of a climate to people of color, those structural changes have been made as suggestions now, and it’s really a matter of voting in the people who will take action on them.
ELM: Do you have hope on that front? Because I have to admit that I don’t. Have a lot of hope. To speak frankly. I thought that the, the conversation around the OTW in the beginning of the summer was pretty clear, and I absolutely understand that anyone who suggests there is one single desire or set of desires from fans of color is incorrect, because people have competing interests and desires—you know, not competing, but mutually exclusive.
FK: Yeah, genuinely mutually exclusive, yeah.
ELM: And different experiences and different positions in the world. But I thought that the critiques that were being leveled at the OTW were pretty straightforward, and while I thought their initial statement was a good start, I’m not wholly convinced that it’s going to go much past that. And we’re just gonna have another round of yelling at them. To put it bluntly. You know? Firmly talking to them. It feels like a lot of things are being collapsed and conflated and there surely has to be a way to talk about trying to make the space more—I think hospitable or tolerable, you know, a place people can actually spend time in without feeling like they’re under attack, you know? Without altering the fundamental values of the site, but maybe that’s not true. Maybe those things are not compatible.
JSA: I have like three responses bottlenecking. Um… [all laugh] One is, Francesca Coppa saying a few years ago: Maybe we just need to have this conversation over and over again. Maybe that’s part of the process. And maybe we just need to develop some tolerance for repeated rounds of, you know, “Oh, we’re talking about this again. OK. It’s still not working. Great, good, now we know.”
Another response is, again: how long a view of this do we want to take? Institutional change, as we know in our national moment as well, in our international one, is grindingly slow. People sometimes don’t get voted out. People sometimes have to die out of office, or out of a generation, for social progress to be made. That’s just part of our lifespan and our life cycle.
The third thing is, I did an interview a really long time ago with John Trudell, when he was still alive, John Trudell, the Oglala Sioux activist. And I asked him if he had hope for his younger Native American friends and colleagues. And his answer was very interesting: he said “I hate hope.” [laughs] “Hope is a way of deactivating your intelligence.” He used to say that when Pandora opened her box, hope was the last thing to come out, and it’s Pandora’s box of evil, it’s her ills, right? That she opens and releases onto the world. So hope is one of the evils.
He used to say, it’s better to pray, because then at least you’re activating your intelligence. And that answer has stayed with me, now, for however—20 years, to think about whenever I feel depressed or I think “Oh, there’s no hope.” I think, well, is hope really to the point? I mean, it’s better to think and be uncomfortable and drag things that I don’t wanna look at out into the light. So that’s just my, again, my kind of brand I guess. [laughs] Is, um, making the uncomfortable visible and staring at it for a really long time, past our comfort level and past kind of knowing why we’re doing it, because only then are true ideas gonna come to us that aren’t sort of specious easy solutions. Right?
ELM: Those are extremely powerful answers. I’m glad that you [laughs] gave all of them!
JSA: I’m sorry!
FK: No, I’m incredibly—it is true that sometimes—I don’t find that to be a depressing answer at all. You know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Because it’s not actually saying “the world is gonna be shitty,” it’s just saying that hope is a different—hope is a—it’s about the, it’s not about what the future is gonna hold, it’s about the category of how we address that, right? And I think that that’s super valuable and I really appreciate you saying it.
JSA: The only other thing that I kind of wanted to bring up—I think that when I talk about praxis, it might help to look at a practical example of something on the ground right now, and I’m specifically thinking about my current topic, which is danmei and the Chén Qíng Lìng fandom, or as it’s known in English, The Untamed. And watching fic writers struggle with this process right now of how to be white, write characters of color, not give offense, not be offensive [laughs] you know, hell with performing offensiveness, try to actually not be offensive! Be respectful of a cultural moment, and at the same time, service their own pleasure.
And just watching people go through this process and going through it as a fan as well is so fascinating and uncomfortable for everybody involved. The, Twitter is kind of like—frothy and lathered up with this right now [laughs] on my fan account. And this is an exact situation in which, if you’re a fan writer, you’re stuck between what you feel like at first are poles of on the one hand whitewashing—so I’m gonna take these characters and make them Chinese-American, or I’m just gonna completely make them ATG and forget that they even have a cultural identity at all [laughs] because I can’t be bothered, like, it’s too complicated and I don’t know anything about it, and I will research, you know, the button style that was popular in the Regency era, but I don’t wanna have to go and research, you know, Chinese provinces and their linguistic differences or whatever. Which I get! Again, we all prefer an easier pleasure. That’s why we eat HoHos, you know. It’s not that complicated.
But then on the other hand, we’ve got the—the, you know, if whitewashing is at one end of the spectrum, we’ve got Orientalism where we can exoticize and be like “Oh my God, it’s so romantic, hairpieces and fans and,” you know, exotic silks and delicacies and tea varieties and whatever. And so you feel as a fan writer, or a reader, “Oh, how do I navigate this terrible situation, I’m just gonna say fuck it and put a coffee shop AU, and that will just be fine.” [laughs] “OK. Great. I’m done.”
Yeah, and just watching people struggle with this and have opinions about it back and forth, and kind of like—you know, jostle each other. It makes me think of what my Zen teacher used to call “hairy potatoes.” Like, how do you clean off the potatoes? You dump them all in a bucket and put the water and then just shake it, you know? And let the potatoes knock against each other and maybe they’ll get clean that way. [all laugh]
So I’m watching this kind of happen and it’s just so interesting to me. I don’t have a conclusion. I don’t have a prescription for fans that are in this process. But watching it is very, I think, edifying and enlightening when it comes to thinking about ways of looking, and are we gonna highlight difference, do we believe in the sort of universal subjectivity? We’re all just people? And hopefully if we say that to ourselves often enough as white people, that will just make racism go away, because being quote-unquote “colorblind” is truly an answer?
Yeah, so that was just my kind of one practical example of something that’s very much alive right now, and I think is to be determined.
ELM: This has been a great conversation. I would like to talk to you for longer, but we got jam-packed episodes, so.
JSA: You guys have like 16 other people! [all laugh]
FK: Thank you so much for coming on and speaking with us. We really appreciate it.
JSA: You’re welcome!
ELM: Yeah, these have been really great thoughts and they’re definitely—it’s helpful! We need help. I’m gonna keep thinking.
JSA: Help us! Help us!
FK: All right, it was wonderful having you. We’ll talk to you later.
JSA: Thank you! Goodbye.
FK: I have to say that conversation, with JSA Lowe—one of the things that people often talk about is like, don’t rely on people of color to tell you what you have to do, you know? Don’t rely on people of color to educate you and to do things, you know, in those regards. And I think it was really helpful to me to hear from JSA about her perspectives on whiteness and her perspectives on what we as white people need to do in order to sort of address and understand all of the things that all of these wonderful guests of color have, have been sharing with us about their lives and experiences, you know? And how to, how to be better citizens of the fannish world, basically.
ELM: Yeah. So all right, let’s take a few minutes, because we didn’t do a lot of editorializing to get through everyone without making these episodes three hours long each. But I think that we should talk for a few minutes about the conversation we ended with and also the kind of scope of the whole thing.
We talked to JSA Lowe before Rukmini sent in her audio, and I was really pleased when I listened to Rukmini’s about how much they bookended each other, particularly the like, sitting with discomfort. And here’s the paradox that I see, and I feel this as I listen to almost everyone here, is like—white people need to learn to sit with their discomfort. That doesn’t mean like, loudly trying to talk over people by being anti-racist. Like, sometimes you need to just sit, sit with it, you know? Not just be like “Hey! Hey. I got it, I got it. I’m white and I got it.” Which is like, I think a very hard thing for a lot of white people to learn.
So like, while that’s happening, simultaneously, you have fans of color who are like, just trying to stay in these spaces without being—feeling like they just can’t anymore, right? And I think that having Clio’s perspective in here, I think, was a really powerful one, because it’s like, in the space of the four years since we last talked to her, she’s like “I can’t do this anymore.”
And meanwhile we have other guests who are just trying to figure out how they can keep staying in the spaces that are gathered around things that they love, and like, in spite of the behaviors and commentary they see, you know? They’re trying to make it work, and they’re having to make these compromises to their own personal comfort and safety.
And so it’s like, well yeah, it’s a process, and yeah, we have to continue, like, fucking up and having cycles of commentary, but like—you know, it just, it makes me feel bad, because it’s like, how many people are like Clio and they’re like “I can’t wait. I can’t continue doing this while you fuck up over and over again.” Not to put Clio on the spot, but I think she just said it so succinctly and so powerfully.
FK: Yeah. There’s, there’s—I mean she’s not the only person who’s being hurt, you know what I mean, on a daily basis.
ELM: Yeah. I just—yeah, absolutely. And so like, that to me is very paradoxical. It’s like, how many fandom casualties—not to put too fine a point on it—but like, how many people need to be driven out of fandom while we continue to have this conversation? That sucks!
And it’s not like, it’s also like, well, you know, maybe if fandom like, over the course of a decade, has really critical conversations where it like, works through some of its issues—and like, “fandom,” talking about that in such a big broad way is kind of silly. But like, these various fan cultures and these various fan communities, trying to make things better—how is anyone gonna give their trust again that it’s not just gonna…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know what I mean? So that’s something that I’m, another discomfort I’m sitting with. It’s kind of like, there’s no solution.
FK: Well, not to be a—not to be a Pollyanna or something like that…
ELM: Go ahead. Be a Pollyanna. Hit me.
FK: But I—so, you know, I have been rereading a book that I was slightly making fun of people for everyone reading it at once, How To Be An Anti-Racist, right.
ELM: OK. All right. Tell me.
FK: So I acknowledge that this is a very of-the-moment quotation that I am slightly mocking myself for picking out, it’s just the thing.
ELM: Great. Great white conversation. Hit me. Tell me.
FK: But I do think that there’s something—so almost the last chapter in that book, he talks about how in order for anything to change, we have to have faith that things can change. We have to actually be committed to seeing it as a possibility, even if it seems really difficult, if on, you know, even if it’s hard to see how our individual actions can make anything better. About, you know, how—fundamentally, we have to sort of take that leap of faith and try.
And I do think that there’s a real danger sometimes, when we get into this sense of “things are really shitty,” and like, it’s going too slow, and all of that—I mean, all those things are true. But I think we also have to hold on to the fact that by our, like, small actions, that’s the only way that things change. By taking our own, you know, doing—everybody doing their best and everybody working the best that they can.
That’s not an answer, but I do think that it’s important to come back to and to say, like, actually like—particularly as white people, we can do different things. And we need to do that!
ELM: I think it’s extremely interesting that you brought up faith and JSA Lowe brought up hope and its badness. [FK laughs] And prayer. Which, you know, I think prayer has different connotations for different people, obviously. But I think I understood it in the way she was contextualizing it. And it’s interesting, because hope and faith are not the same things at all.
FK: No.
ELM: And faith is hard, because it often requires something kind of intrinsic and it’s not—it’s not evidence-based, right? That’s why it’s faith.
FK: [laughing] It is not evidence-based!
ELM: That’s literally the point of it, right?
FK: Yep, yeah.
ELM: And so I think it’s really, I think that’s hard. I mean, you’re not saying it’s not. I just think it’s interesting that these three kind of concepts sort of jammed up together at the end here. And just thinking about all of those kind of structures, looking back across all of our guests and their commentary, even if they weren’t using those specific terms, like how those things factor in.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s interesting. It’s complicated. I don’t know. I got nothin’. I’m just gonna keep thinkin’. Just thinking about stuff.
FK: Maybe this is part of the discomfort that it’s necessary to sit with.
ELM: Yeah, no, don’t worry! I’m not comfortable and I’m sittin’ right now, literally. I’m physically comfortable cause I’m on my couch, but.
FK: All right. Well, I am really grateful to all of our guests who came on, everyone who agreed to be interviewed. I thought this was a super successful pair of episodes and I’m really really glad we were able to come back and do this again.
ELM: If you do say so yourself. “Super successful, Flourish!”
FK: I do! I think it was super successful, and it wasn’t because of us, it was because of all the wonderful things that people came and said, you know?
ELM: Yeah. I am—I said it 100 times already in the course of these little interstitials, but I’m extremely grateful that everyone gave us their time and their thoughts and their honesty. I think that these are hard things to say, and these are the things that people—these are the things that people get driven out of fandom spaces for, because people don’t want to hear them, and I’m just extremely grateful everyone was willing to share them with us.
FK: Me too. All right, Elizabeth, I will talk to you next time.
ELM: Yes! It’ll just be one episode next time.
FK: It will just be one episode next time.
ELM: I will not pain you with the naming conventions.
FK: Thank you.
ELM: Until the next double episode we do.
FK: All right. I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: OK bye.
FK: Bye!
[Outro music, thank yous and credits]