really wish that people made the effort to use specific terminology when talking about bias in tog fandom. this is a general tendency that can be explained by both the americano-centrism of online spaces like tumblr & the superficiality of liberal identity rhetoric, and it deserves a much wider conversation; but the use of broad categories like “POC” when discussing specific racialized characters obscures the root of the problem and weakens the argument on multiple levels.
“characters of color” makes sense when talking about the similarities in the way fandom treats nile, joe, quỳnh, and copley for example; but nile and copley face antiblackness in particular, nile with an added layer of misogynoir. nile is not just a “woman of color”, she is a black woman specifically, and rare are the instances where this nuance isn’t extremely relevant when talking about race.
the issue with how joe is viewed— and i will linger on this for a bit because the portrayal of joe and nicky’s relationship has been this month’s burning topic— cannot be boiled down simply to the fact he is a “man of color”: he is specifically read through the colonial lens of orientalism (even by other “people of color”!) as a north-african, arab-coded man. there is a specificity to the kind of racism joe is subjected to, just like there is a specificity to the kind of racism the other racialized characters face. there are of course many instance where it makes sense to generalize these experiences as shared by wider groups like “men of color”, “queer men of color”, etc, but there are equally just as many circumstances in which reducing that specificity to a broad, blurry concept of bigotry by characterizing joe as a POC and leaving it at that is a disservice to the argument being put forward. when talking about tropes like hypersexuality, for example, we cannot bypass the deeply entrenched orientalist myth of the lustful arab— which is related but not quite equivalent to the racist brutal hypersexualization of black maleness, and sits on the opposite end of the spectrum from the emasculation of east-asian maleness in the colonial imagination. this is just one example, but the same logic applies to other problematic characterizations of joe by fandom— from the insistent habit of hand-waving his ethnic origins as hailing from a nebulous country in the levant when other characters get a backstory as specific as a hometown to the obsessive focus on his physicality, joe gets this treatment because he is maghrebi (and depending on the context because he is an “arab” and because he is muslim), not just because he isn’t white.
this also serves to present the discourse as mostly divided along the lines of “people of color” versus “white people”, which is not exactly the case. some of the most vocal disagreement with criticism of these harmful tropes has come from people americans would characterize as “people of color”. i make the distinction here because there is a fundamental difference, as far as our perceptions of race are concerned, between non-white people who are the ethnic majority of the country they live in and racialized people in the west. this does not at all erase the larger imperialist global north/global south dynamics, and obviously this is a topic that demands much nuance, but for the sake of our very specific point of contention here: anyone who isn’t facing a specific type of racism in their daily life is obviously less sensitive to it, no matter their ethnic background. this is not a new controversy, not even on this website: the “but japanese people in japan don’t care if i wear a kimono for halloween” debate has been going on for years. of course they don’t! they do not experience the western anti-japanese racism that frames the cultural appropriation of east-asian traditions in the west! to bring it back to our bit of discourse: as a person of maghrebi descent who has lived both in the eastern mediterranean and in the west i am vastly unimpressed by muslims in muslim-majority countries dismissing our concerns about islamophobic and racist portrayals, instrumentalizing the fact they are perceived as equally invested in this by virtue of being “people of color" in the eyes of anglophone westerners. this goes doubly for people living in countries notorious for their mistreatment of african migrants. no amount of “but i’m brown too” can erase the specific dynamics of power that are being replicated when you weaponize your identity to speak over north-african people that are simply demanding some care and caution with how we are portrayed in media at a time where we are also being endlessly and viciously demonized in the western countries in which we have an important immigrant presence.
this does not even begin to encompass the larger problem with identity-as-a-shield tumblr politics, but this would demand a post of its own, and it is not my main point anyway.
the development of this “discourse” over the course of the past month has been absolutely absurd. it has arguably at this point shifted into outright conflict, which is baffling to me especially considering i follow the majority of people on one “side” of it and partook in the conversation quite extensively at the begining and as such can say with a certain amount of confidence that i do know what's being said over here. our repeated calls for introspection and awareness have been met with hostility and wilfully misinterpreted as policing, as if any of us hold any power to stop you from producing and consuming the content we criticize. this fabricated reality in which people are being “cancelled” and harassed over their “preferences” is a projection that repositions people who knowingly reproduce racist patterns as the victims. in practice it is literally impossible to step foot in the ao3 tag without being immediately confronted with disturbing content that exhibits all the characteristics that we have been pointing out as racially charged, and on tumblr artists that have been quite loudly dismissive of these concerns continue to enjoy large amounts of popularity. there is no witch hunt, and the only people who actually do run the risk of being driven out of fandom are the small handful of fans that have been screaming themselves raw over the insidious racism of this fandom.
