#gonna make this one not rebloggable since its a bit specific

[bellysoupset]

today I spent a full hour on the phone w/ my guy going over food lists that make him sick or not, bc he's coming over for a long stay at holidays and hm. the urge.

[mzminola]

Most of the time on here when I talk about racism it’s about the kind done by the creators of a given piece of media (author, writing team, marketing department, etc) but today I’m gonna talk about racism done by fans.

Specifically erasure and sidelining/downgrading characters of color in ensembles. The three examples I have are from the sort of tumblr-specific multi-fan reblog works. Gonna put this all behind a cut, with links & descriptions.

Example 1 [https://mzminola.tumblr.com/post/161130456813/sperari-foundloveinbudapest-obsessiforge]

The OP made a four-panel comic of Sam Wilson, Natasha Romanoff, Bucky Barnes, and Steve Rogers sitting at a table to play D&D, with a caption stating they headcanon Guardians of the Galaxy as the Avenger’s D&D campaign that Bucky DM’s. Sam & Natasha are only visible in the final panel, but they are very clearly there, and no other Avengers are.

Other people reblogged this with their own match-ups of which Avenger is playing which Guardian, and this particular reblog someone has done Natasha=Gamora, Tony=Quill, Thor=Drax, Bruce=Groot. 

Completely ignoring that the comic to kick this off features Sam Wilson, not those three other guys. When I first reblogged this, I tried to find commentators that included Sam, but it was a needle-in-a-haystack situation and I gave up.

Example 2 [https://mzminola.tumblr.com/post/186125797093/if-were-gonna-keep-rebooting-things-in-2019-then]

The OP suggest a Leverage reboot for 2019, lists a few ideas, and ends with “Sophie becomes president”. The first commentator points out that Sophie can’t, because she’s not an American citizen, and suggests Hardison instead, including the idea that with the voting machines un-hacked, Hardison wins in a truly fair election.

The third commentator says we can’t do that because of Hardison’s age, referencing a single episode where a character who is not Hardison himself says he’s 24. A fourth commentator suggests Parker or Maggie instead.

My objection here might seem a little nitpicky; if we rule out Sophie because of her nationality, why not Hardison due to his age? If we tweak canon to make Hardison old enough (since this is a reboot suggestion), or change what year the election is, why not tweak it to make Sophie American?

Well, that’s the thing: a lot of fandom racism of this type (erasure, sidelining) is easy to ‘justify’ or downplay in the particular instance, but is still part of an overall pattern. Much like how slash fandom still has a massive problem with sidelining women characters; sure a single fic might have decent reasons, but when it happens over and over and over again?

This Leverage thread had someone suggest the only black main character in the show become President of the United States in a fair election, and the response by some other fan was to immediately say that couldn’t happen because of one contestable trivia point.

Example 3 [https://mzminola.tumblr.com/post/189671198448/kaylapocalypse-lonepower-thrawn-thrawn]

OP suggests a Star Wars AU in which Rey is a hockey player and Finn is a figure skater. A+ concept, love it.

Then we get someone copying another reblogger’s tag of “Poe drives the zamboni” and someone else adds “poe “i just work here””.

And okay. Maintenance staff is fucking vital to everything, everywhere, but it’s still questionable to take a post about “what would these space action adventure characters do in an ice athletics AU” and assign the hotshot pilot a role that isn’t also athletics, you know? Its’s not like hockey and figure skating are the only ice athletics in the world, if you’re trying to give everyone a different niche.

~

So those are the examples I have on hand; first two are someone includes a character of color, other people ignore them or downgrade their role in favor of white characters. Third is someone playing with an AU (that gives a fun, positive role to a character of color, heck yeah figure skater Finn) and someone else brings up a character of color just to give them a less glamorous role than the originally mentioned characters.

So, what do we do with this?

Couple suggestions:

If you’re creating content with an ensemble, double check who you’re giving attention to, and if you notice yourself ignoring characters of color...include them! If you’re only including them with a bare nod, go back and include them more! If you’re giving them less interesting, glamorous, important, etc roles than the other characters, examine your own reasoning for a bit, to shake your assumptions up...and then go give them equally cool (or even cooler) stuff to do!

If you’re in a group participation setting like tumblr, don’t knock down what other people set up. Someone says “let’s have Character do Cool Thing!” and you know some canon factoids that get in the way of that...leave it be. Don’t jump in to say why it doesn’t work. I totally get the urge to correct people about canon, I really truly do, but this is not the moment to do it.

“What if I’m using the canon facts to suggest an alternative cool thing for the character to do?” Awesome, make a new post! So you know that “XYZ Canon Facts means Character cannot be Empress”? Maybe that’s worth including in your post, maybe it’s not, but either way making a new post of “Character could be Democratically Elected Prime Minister and Secret Princess!” is awesome! Now you’re contributing fun content without raining on anyone else’s parade, yay!

If you see someone else doing the “ignore or sideline” thing don’t reblog it with no comment. The examples I used in this post are all instances where I reblogged it and added my own commentary. Did I flat out go “hey you’re being racist”? No, I didn’t. I could have! I might in the future! What I did do:

I questioned where the hell Sam was and pointed out he was in the original comic, dismissed the age issue and re-asserted that Hardison should be president, and suggested an ice athletics role for Poe.

You know what I do even more often? I go back up the reblog chain. That’s one of the reasons why I have so few examples. It’s not always possible to go up the reblog chain; url changes, deletions, or the racism being embedded in the middle of a long reblog chain with unracist and cool stuff further down all mean that sometimes, I’m going to reblog a post that has these problems.

So I comment. I refuse to let the erasure and sidelining slide by.

Do you, hypothetical reader, have to do that?

I don’t know. I’m not you. But now you know about this pattern (if you didn’t before), and you know some responses to it, to make informed decisions.