After four years working on my AO3 Ship Stats project, and having
previously addressed issues of misogyny in this data set, I feel like
it’s past time to talk about the elephant in the room:
Fandom is kinda racist.
(Hold on folks, this is going to be a long one… If you don’t want to read all the details, skip to ‘Conclusions’ at the end.)
“…While “shippability” is something I have yet to quantify, the dismal 12.5% minority races in Western media fandom is less than half of the proportion of non-white characters in media overall, and the discrepancy is even greater towards Black characters.
“Fandom has gradually been edging towards greater inclusion of POC, but the pace of change is slow, and there are still huge barriers to overcome. The fact that mainstream culture is saturated with racism and colourism explains these trends, but it does not excuse them; for fandom to make good on its promises of diversity, we must all contemplate the part we play in supporting or erasing characters of colour in our fics and other fanworks.”
An interesting discussion. It would probably take an anonymous survey to find out how many authors hesitate to write characters of a different color or ethnicity than their own for fear of the Scylla and Charybdis of stereotyping and magical minority.
Okay I’m going to start this off by acknowledging that some people do perceive this as a problem, and it does affect their writing choices within transformative works fandom and elsewhere.
HOWEVER. There’s an slightly-inaccurate-but-very-true quote by Kwame Dawes that’s floating around which I think is valuable here: racist writing is a craft failure.
What this means is that racist tropes – the “scylla and charybdis” you mention above are two examples of racial tropes, but aren’t the only ones by any means – are just that: lazy tropes and cliches that expose a lack of imagination on behalf of the author to see or even imagine characters of color beyond the “single story” (see: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s talk on same) that those of us raised in a white supremacist culture are trained from childhood (look up ‘the doll test’ and ‘implicit bias’) to consider “true” or “believable” or “complete” or even narratively compelling…
Yes, it’s a cultural issue; it’s a fault of our media (not enough representation / not enough varied or good representation), but it’s also a failure of personal imagination and a lack of willingness to put the same amount of research and world-building effort into stories about characters of color as we do for white men.
I could list a thousand and one examples of minor white male characters, some of them heroic but some of them downright evil, who’ve been elevated by fandom, whose cannibalistic, genocidal, abusive traits have been excused or even valorized, while characters of color are crammed into the nearest stereotype pigeonhole and given no second thought, when they are remembered at all.
And you know what? That first part is fine. You’re allowed to like ‘bad’ characters. That isn’t the issue here. The point is that white ‘bad’ characters are fandom faves that get woobified and defended, and ‘good’ characters of color are hypothesized to be evil – and then their ‘badness’ becomes a reason to discard the characters of color instead of celebrating them along with the white villainous faves.
Writers fret about stereotypes, yes. Writers should be conscious of lazy cliches and offensive tropes and the whole lot. It’s one of the things that makes for better stories and especially one of the incredible strengths of transformative works fandoms: finding the stories that aren’t being told, the stories lurking within the murky subtext beyond the two-dimensional surface, and telling better stories for ourselves (see also: how fandom adds queerness when there is none in canon).
But when confronted with a cliche of a white man and a nuanced character of color, fandom has proven time and time again that they’re willing to stick their creative neck out and do every bit of work that it takes to add nuance to the white guy, while ignoring it in (or taking it away from) the character of color.
(Incidentally, there are SO MANY resources nowadays for writing characters of color effectively and non-offensively, especially because this is a conversation that’s been happening both in fandom and in mainstream publishing for YEARS.)
What’s worse is that people will defend not writing characters of color at all because they honestly cannot perceive or imagine that a character of color is worth their time and effort. They honestly cannot perceive or imagine that there’s any way they could come up with a story for that character that won’t be a cliche or stereotype.
And that’s not fear.
It’s a lack of imagination. It’s a craft failure.
And it’s not at all ‘transformative.’
This, for real.
Look, I get the fear. I get that tumblr can be a mob mentality, and even slight misunderstandings can spiral out of control because of the way this site functions. I get that we’ve stigmatized bigotry and racism over the last decade or so to the point that a lot of people genuinely believe that being called a racist is as painful as experiencing racism.
I get that not everyone has the ability to do graduate level coursework on the history of civil rights and intersectionality and microagressions, but did you know you don’t have to? The internet is a wonderful place, with many resources that have been lovingly collected for you.
Seriously, though, here’s the real thing – research is helpful, and depending on the story you want to tell it may absolutely be necessary, but if you start with the assumption that your black/trans/Native American/disabled/etc character is a real person just like you, with aspirations and goals and faults and emotions and a life shaped by their experiences, you’re already like 85% there.
That’s the low bar you’ve got to hurdle: create believable, well rounded human beings. If you’re any good as a writer, you don’t need to do any graduate level work to accomplish this. You’ve spent lots of time figuring out the inner workings of people who aren’t you, who didn’t grow up living your life, people who don’t exist. Empathy isn’t something that should require research; Black people aren’t some mystical alien beings whose ways are unknown to us white folks.
When fans talk about racism in fandom (or ableism, or transphobia, or sexism, etc), it’s not always something that can be described as, “I see a lot of fans standing on my tumblr lawn, wearing hoods and burning crosses.” A lot of times it’s something a lot simpler. “Many fans can’t imagine people like me are human.”
Tumblr Exodus 