The Phantom of the Opera fandom is going through it this week. There is a Google doc created and circulated by a white trans man which accuses dozens of artists and fic writers of being terfs, racists, and orientalists. One issue, aside from the inherently unethical nature of blacklists, is that the list includes trans fans, fans of color, many of whom are Asian. So there's this strange dynamic of a list that was supposedly written to protect fans who are from these communities that is actively them instead. And this racist dynamic of a white person calling POC racist, and Asian fans specifically orientalist.
I'd love your take on any angle of this. What are your thoughts on these kinds of block lists? Do they happen in other fandoms? Thoughts on the racial dynamic of this situation? Thanks!
Oof. Yes, I was thinking of saying something about this, but I hadn't gotten around to vetting posts for reblogging yet. When I first saw your post, it passed my sniff test, but I'm not very familiar with PotO fandom (Phandom? Hah! I thought that was a reference to Dan/Phil stans or Danny Phantom or something!), and I like to have a better grasp on what's going on before I reblog. I see more people have weighed in by now though.
My take is that this often happens with blacklists. I can't think of another exact parallel to this one off the top of my head (mostly because there are so many fandom wanks that the details get fuzzy), but every time I hear of a fandom blacklist something of this general type is wrong with it.
The sad reality is that the most vulnerable community members generally won't have time/confidence/assurance of their safety in a way that would make them likely to make a public one and spread it around. People with a lot of experience and perspective who have a good handle on what their group overall thinks is beyond the pale and who could reasonably speak for the whole group don't have time for petty shit like this either and are more aware of the downsides of a public list.
The sorts of people who spend their time on public blacklists are the opposite of the people you'd want to be making them. They're either chasing clout or they've gone off the deep end with "my ship/character is literally me, and when you write them wrong, you are literally committing crimes against me" lunacy.
It makes perfect, if horrible, sense that it would be a white person calling Asian fans orientalist. What we've seen time and time again is that outrage mobs come from a dominant culture. (So in English, in fanworks fandom, that's usually a US cultural context, even if many individual members aren't from the US themselves.) That's who has the numbers and the smug self-assurance of their holy righteousness.
It's very easy for a faker or a manipulator with bad intentions to imitate a Good Minority for this kind of mob. A Good Minority is scenically exotic and primitive and tells quaint stories about granny living in a hut or whatever other bullshit the listeners have internalized. A Good Minority doesn't like Bad Representation™, whether that's characters who were orientalist in their original form or badwrong kink or the wrong dude on top.
Unfortunately, actual members of whatever ethnicity or culture are rarely convenient stereotypes. It's a lot harder to get an outrage mob to care about them--or even to believe them about their identity--because they don't fit into some unconscious white savior or noble savage narrative.
It's like when "fujoshi"-hating fuckfaces whine about how m/m fanfic is bad rep but ignore that lots of cis gay men love stuff ten times more problematic and couldn't care less about AFABs' art and its supposed appropriativeness.
Masturbatory obsession with "authenticity" represses actual authenticity in favor of respectability politics and stereotypes
Among other reasons this is so is that minority members who disagree with the clout-chaser's version of things are a threat to their power. They're always first on the chopping block. We saw it in TOG. It's no surprise it's there in PotO.
Fake anti-racist activism doesn't incidentally harass POC: that's intentionally one of its main applications.
Public blacklists are grudgewank, this time and every time. The creep who made it sucks, but as with the situation in TOG fandom, it seems to me that a lot of the harm is coming from useful idiots.
If more fans would remain skeptical and make up their own damn minds about each person they block, these bullies wouldn't have such power.
Trying to be a better person is great. It's not an excuse for outsourcing your critical thinking. If we would stop reaching for easy answers to be Guaranteed Not Orientalist or whateverthefuck, we wouldn't fall for these transparent power grabs.