Since you have finally said that you are going to stop your programming and step away to educate yourselves instead of giving vague statements of "doing better" or remaining silent, I'm taking this opportunity to hope you are finally willing to listen to what I, many other BIPoC, and some white allies have been trying to tell you for years.
I have tried to educate you in private. I have tried to educate you in public. I have tried to educate your fanbase. But apparently it took yet more murders and riots across the country for you to finally acknowledge how woefully inadequate you have been as white allies, and how your white-led company has catered to liberal white supremacy.
It is good that you are pausing programming to keep focus on B/L/M. It is good that your entire staff is educating yourselves. Forgive me if I don't trust you to have all your shit together even still, because as I have said, you have been direct participants in racism, despite me and many other people repeatedly telling you how you could not do that. You have laughed at and dismissed our concerns. You have dismissed those of us who are angry at your racism as "hostile." You have asked us to look into your "heart" as if your moral fiber is what we give a shit about. I don't care if you go to liberal heaven. I care that your actions do not reflect the subtle ideals of white supremacy. I care that you do not create a safe space for racists. And your actions have reflected the subtle ideals of white supremacy, and you have created a space that is unsafe for BIPoC who have issues with where you fall short, and a place where nazi-sympathesizers feel supported.
Activism, standing for what's right, politics - these aren't about Moral Points. Doing good somewhere does not cancel out the ways to enforce white supremacy in your work. Throwing money at charities doesn't buy you 'forgiveness' for being a tool of racism elsewhere. There is no replacement for active study, active work, actively pushing against oppressive forces, actively unlearning the racism embedded into our culture, actively pushing against your own privilege. And those among you in your company who are worse than others do not get a pass because there are a few individuals who do good work as advocates. Those of you who are good advocates do not get a pass for what racism you allow around you or that you engage in.
"Don't forget to love each other," has become a cry for tone-policing and practically a white-supremacist dogwhistle in a new package. Neo-Nazis rely on this concept of "love" as meaning politeness and civility, that to meet their calls for genocide with defensive anger is to be "unloving." Your love is meaningless without action, it's a concept used to "love" people into silence, calling for justly frustrated people to repackage their anger into something to make your white sensibilities more comfortable. It has been used to victim-blame marginalized people for their own oppression, suggesting if only they were kind to their oppressors, then they would not have been oppressed. Your culture of toxic positivity has created a fanatic viewerbase that paints anyone critiquing you as dangerous, and they respond to some of your fair critics with racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and ableism. You have created a culture that values civility over justice or social responsibility. You have created a culture that believes you can do no wrong and that anything you do is right because you did it.
Your words of "I ignore anyone who says Hot Take," your words of "people on both sides go too far" have contributed to this culture of shaming BIPoC who are angry at the injustices they face, at the things you contribute to in your white ignorance.
Your show of "just a bunch of (white) friends who are also voice actors playing D&D" has perpetuated racist and white supremacist narratives and tropes. You have had fun pretending to be slave owners and slave traders and slaves, like that's just some fun outlandish thing, and not a present reality, not a bloody legacy white people's privilege is built on, and Neo-Confederates love. Your quirky, stylish slaveowner gags and characters betray the joy white people find in putting themselves above others, in dehumanizing others, in treating people like property. This humor appeals to Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates and makes them feel normal. When fans express anger and discomfort with this gag, you minimized their feelings and wrote them off. You laughed at art portraying your brown player character as fucking furniture. You have portrayed human trafficking as a forgivable offense, so long as the person who does it is someone you like. You have minimized the horrors of slavery into something funny to laugh at.
You are white people who play characters of color like "wearing another skin" and joking about turning those characters of color into animals and furniture. You have had characters treat characters of color like test subjects or scientific curiosities. You have worn us like costumes for shallow 'diversity' and meaningless representation. You have fed into the white supremacist ideal that white people are better at portraying BIPoC than we are of portraying ourselves. You have portrayed and profited off of our cultures, our skin, without supporting or consulting with any of us in any meaningful, respectful way. You have received praise for your white-lens on our appearance and cultures. You have accepted praise of your meaningless diversity while ignoring BIPoC and allies asking you to do the bare fucking minimum of not supporting racist art that depicts your characters of color in caricatures and in whitewashed ways. You have featured and supported racist artists, and artists affiliated with you have blocked people who called out those racist artists. You have been informed repeatedly through multiple means of communication that whitewashing and colorism is an insidious vehicle of white supremacy, and you have ignored it when it was polite and private, and you ignored it when it was loud.
You continue to support racist caricatures of fantasy humanoids who have been coded in racist ways that BIPoC in the fantasy genre have talked about for decades, such as the anti-Semitic caricatures of goblins. You continue to perpetuate coded racism through jokes that reflect the actions of real-life liberal microaggressions such as the fetishistic "Tusk Love" book and the "Tusktooth" caricature tattoo. I once tried to give you the benefit of the doubt in believing that were your half-orc player character actually a man of color and not a half-orc, you would know better than to treat him the way you do, but seeing later how you treat real BIPoC and Beau, I have no faith left to give you. If you ever joke that one of your friends of color is like the love interest in a book titled "(racial feature) Love" or make a googly-eyed cartoon face with a racial feature they're insecure about: Fuck you.
You have called Beau, a brown character of color angry, dumb, ugly, aggressive. Some of you have primarily praised her for her strength and martial arts. If you don't know what's wrong with that, you have so goddamn much to learn. You have exaggerated her anger to the point that your characters do not seem to know her at all, or recognize how many times she's apologized (hint: more than the rest of you). This is all complicated by the fact that while Beau is brown, she is played by a white person, and the bizarre meta racism you have put this fictional brown character you pretend to be is not met with appropriate pushback. You might say "well human racism doesn't exist on Exandria" (and good, it shouldn't, because you white people have fucked up allegories of racism and playing BIPoC, and it would be egregiously inappropriate for white people to play tourist in Real Racism), but BIPoC still have to watch you subject this supposed representation of us to tropes and stereotypes.
Your dismissal of the repeated concerns of BIPoC and our allies and silence on these topics has contributed to the white supremacist narrative of BIPoC's concerns being minor, unimportant, and inherently aggressive. You have made us feel like we were bothersome for asking you to stop supporting racists and to stop being racist. You have prioritized your white comfort and convenience over doing the bare minimum to be responsible in the portrayal of characters of color that you profit from.
I have given you resources for combating whitewashing before. I have offered you easy methods for how you could combat the problem you are a willing machine for. You said you'd take it under consideration, and then did nothing. Why should I have believed you were ever willing to work on your numerous other issues when you did nothing for this simple one? The only thing that ever worked with you in regards to whitewashing was public callouts for whitewashed merch, which you sometimes did, sometimes did not, fix. But still, you kept uplifting racist art in your art reel and your gallery.
It is good that you are taking this time with your regular programming down to educate yourselves. It is all I have ever wanted you to do. You will study and you will learn about how deeply ingrained white supremacy is in this rotten nation. You will learn how anti-Blackness and Indigenous genocide are the foundations upon which this evil country is built. You are going to stop looking away from reality because it makes you uncomfortable to think of what your dreams and accomplishments are built on. When your company which is built around the dreams and creativity of 8 white people passively moves through this industry and gathers success, you are just another beacon of white supremacy, the idea that the stories you tell are the most important. You do not get to tell the stories of BIPoC if you cannot meet the bare minimum fucking standard of not further perpetuating white supremacist ideals against us. If you are going to tell allegories about racism, you should fucking understand what it is and how it works beyond the basic, "it's mean to call people slurs."
I don't trust that you know where to look for your research because you have proved again and again to be painfully ignorant, so here is some advice:
systemic, emphasis on SYSTEMIC, racism and the anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous forces that built this evil fucking country
the anti-Blackness of white abolitionists who only wanted to abolish slavery because they thought it made white people look bad
the deliberate sabotage of Reconstruction, and the subsequent Jim Crow era
slavery through the prison-industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline, slave patrols
bias against Black patients in the medical field, and Black folx being used as test subjects for medical experimentation
the true activist strategies, tactics, lives, and histories of MLK, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers, not the white supremacist propaganda garbage you learned in high school and college
the fetishization of BIPoC, and especially mixed folx
the harm of "positive" racism like praising Black women for being "strong"
respectability politics and how it has been used to blame Black folx for what white people do to them
whitewashing in Hollywood and black/red/yellow/brownface
cultural appropriation such as non-Black people using AAVE to sound 'funny'
how to create spaces that are actually safe for BIPoC creatives and fans, and that exclude people who mean to harm us
white supremacist propaganda baked into Dungeons & Dragons, especially Gygax
eugenics theory and how that false, disgusting misunderstanding of race still permeates mainstream culture and the fantasy race lore of D&D and other fantasy works. Pay a-fucking-ttention to how they levy mixed-race people as "superior" to Black folx, but "inferior" to whites, and therein create a racial hierarchy they use to enforce white supremacy and anti-Blackness, with other PoC as tools in the middle.
how to be anti-racism, not just a "well-meaning" white person
Do not read white authors. You've got enough whitewashed ideas in your heads.
When you get back to your regular programming and your ongoing campaign, you need to consider what to do about the harm you've already done. What should you do about all of the racism baked into your backlogs of content? What will happen to the people who watch your content in the future? Are they going to track down a twitter post or fireside chat where you apologize? What does that apology do other than represent you recognizing a moral failing? What about the viewers who are run through your content, passively consuming racism? Are you going to be transparent about how you are going to do better, in specifics, instead of offering vagueness that could mean anything or nothing, and forces BIPoC to have to "wait and see" if you're ever going to get your act together, and meanwhile your fanbase will call anyone critiquing you "hateful" and scold anyone for not believing you're one of "the good ones."
Some of your fanatic viewership has bombarded and harassed critics of your racism with further racism, misogynoir, and other forms of bigotry. Fans who even mildly criticize or comment in not-perfectly flattering ways on your business decisions or other issues with your portrayals of identities and sensitive subjects have also been harassed by bigots, all in the name of defending you as "one of the good ones." You have never stepped in to defend anyone experiencing harassment from your fandom, but you have repeatedly talked about how "caring" your fandom is. And you have gone out of your way to uplift and support racist and sexist artists. And you have gone out of your way to tell fans their harmless headcanons are wrong.
To combat your backlog of racist content, you could consider adding addendums to said backlogs where you explain clearly what is wrong with what you did and where others could educate themselves on the issues, rather than vague promises to just "do better in the future." To combat your other serious issues, you have been told multiple times by multiple people to hire sensitivity and cultural consultants.
Now, I would say I hope you learn something and do better, but I am done wasting my hope on your company.
