So my friends and I have been re-watching through all of TOS. Near the end of the series, in the episode ‘The Savage Curtain,’ a facsimile of Abraham Lincoln appears; a creation by an alien race that believes he actually is Abraham Lincoln. During a tour of the ship led by Kirk, he meets Uhura on the bridge.
The exchange that follows is one that we found especially empowering and profound. Lincoln addresses Uhura as a ‘charming negress,’ realizes that using that word could be taken as an offense, and apologizes. Uhura answers;
“But why should I object to that term, sir? You see in our century, we’ve learned not to fear words.”
Lincoln replies, with the realization that he’s apologized where no offense was given, and Kirk follows up;
“We’ve each learned to be delighted with what we are.”
This is an exchange that was penned in 1969 as a very astute and clear social commentary, as was not unusual for the show. (After all, Star Trek is the show that gave us America’s first televised interracial kiss.) The ideas in this exchange, the message of self-acceptance, of reclaiming one’s own sense of self, even of reclaiming words that might have been twisted into insults through foolish prejudices, are ideas that are still relevant today, in 2015. They are ideas that will continue to be relevant for years to come, for centuries to come. We just need to learn to live by these ideas, and to spread them to everyone we can reach.
Today, a friend of mine expressed that she has become too paralysed with fear to continue writing. She’s working through it and it’s compounded by her mental illness which magnifies this sort of self-destructive rumination. However, as for the trigger, she named it specifically as Tumblr’s vicious hostility towards any piece of work which does not pass their arbitrary, ever-shifting and vastly varying criteria. Criteria for being “inclusive”, as well as portraying “diverse” characters in a way which doesn’t raise red flags for some subset of users and thus gets stamped “problematic”, or if you’re feeling saucy, “garbage shit trash”.
To summarize: Tumblr “critical consumption” has effectively silenced a queer, female, mentally ill creative voice.
I am a minority creator myself (biracial, mentally ill) and I’ll be the first to admit that hanging around tumblr has been helpful in learning how to examine my programming and how it shows up in my work. However, I possess a confidence— and arrogance— in my work that others do not, which allows me to press forward even when my inbox accuses my queer characters being “lip service” because they don’t have romantic arcs.
Is deep-sj tumblr happy with this model? Are we content to batter aspiring socially-conscious creators into abandoning the idea of creating altogether, while scores of white boys skim past your open condemnation of Urbance with a scoff, if they even read it at all?
Let’s talk about Urbance. Before I get right into it I have a related anecdote.
Some time ago, I recommended The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin to a user seeking books with gender-nonbinary characters (the work in question contains characters who are, quite explicitly and viscerally, genderfluid). They immediately discarded the idea after reading its summary on goodreads. They didn’t want to read a book about “some white guys from Earth having to ~learn to accept~ gender noncomforming aliens and that being the entire arc of the story”.
Anyone who’s actually read Left Hand knows this is ludicrous, but for your benefit, the main character is black, and he is the only Earthborn human in the story; the Gethenians are described as ‘Inuit brown’ and are humanoid in every respect besides their unique sexual physiology. The core themes of the book are actually about exploring a society which doesn’t have a masculinity construct. Where everyone is both male and female. No time is spent by the (BLACK) protag being disgusted or crudely fascinated by the Gethenians; only with examining how his two-gendered social programming has led him to frequently prejudge and misunderstand them.
No, that wasn’t good enough. These barriers need to not exist, because we want diverse stories where LGBT and people of color don’t face prejudice, right?
Urbance. Urbance was almost utterly destroyed by Tumblr; its creators sought to portray a society where everyone was mixed race (their characters were unmistakably black and asian-coded) and the construct of ‘race’ was absent, a relic of a bygone era. Tumblr users decided that this, in itself, was racist. They proceeded to pick apart every line of a translated-from-French Q&A page and decided that Urbance was acephobic, nb-phobic, transphobic, queer-erasing, whatever; until, embarrassingly enough, Urbance received a funding surge at the eleventh hour from fucking GamerGate.
GamerGate had to pick up a promising, racially and sexually diverse project because Tumblr users were so utterly batshit hateful towards it that it almost didn’t get funded. Simply to spite us.
So that’s at least one high profile ‘progressive’ piece of media that Tumblr has waved its dick and balls at and nearly destroyed— has there been an analogous example of a diverse project that Tumblr has rallied behind?
Oh right— The Arkh Project.
I really have nothing else to add that hasn’t been said a hundred times over by people more versed in this stuff than I am— everything is problematic, progress in small steps, glass half full, etc.
The fact of the matter is Tumblr needs to sort its fucking attitude out, and quick, or we’re looking at a lot of the same shit for the next ten years while the same straight white guys make everything, and laugh at “SJWs” constantly, impotently, pointlessly, complaining. While queer, female, mentally ill writers languish in corners, silent, hiding like battered wives from the people who are supposed to be their advocates, their protectors, and their fans.
Also the problem that I have with the whole “activists are allowed to take whatever tone they want” online is that… In my experience with offline activism, there isn’t one tone. There are toneS.
There’s the nice friendly explainer who sits down with people who are unfamiliar with the concepts and carefully explains and answers questions as patiently as he can. There’s the firebrand who stands in front of the government building screaming FREEDOM NOW and doesn’t explain how she is unfree because that’s not the point. There’s the erudite columnist or presenter who backs claims of injustice up with facts and figures. There’s the rollicking motivator who gets his people fired the fuck up. There’s the passionate but polite person who writes letters to the editor to a hundred different publications that can’t stop getting it wrong and never loses her urgency or her patience.
All of these people are real activists. All of them are needed.
Saying to someone “you’re using the wrong tone” can be about dismissing him. Of course.
But it can also mean “Call in the Erudite Presenter. On the bat-phone. You need her.”
Focusing too much on what activists are ‘allowed’ to do sort of distorts the fact that activism isn’t meant to be self expression, it’s meant to accomplish things — and when your main way of accomplishing things is persuasion, you need to be able to adapt tone and tactics to the situation.
this is rly smart and for the most part (as a neophyte activist myself) i agree.
however — if i may assume that this post is, at least in part, talking about interactions that occur on tumblr? that creates a new wrinkle here.
most people on tumblr aren’t activists, though they may occasionally dabble in an internet-activist sphere. even if they are activists, they aren’t always “on” on their own blogs. tumblr is mostly a collection of personal blogs, on which people sometimes adopt an activist stance.
so this thing can happen: a person makes a post where they are just venting about their personal life, in a way that ties into larger social issues; the post gets widely reblogged; somebody else assumes that OP was in fact making a didactic activist post, and responds accordingly. (e.g., by saying ‘call in the Erudite Presenter,’ or by pointing out a logical inconsistency, or ways in which the social issue at hand can present differently.)
and then OP gets rightfully mad, because how dare you question or attack their tone when they were just talking about their life.
this is primarily a problem with the format of tumblr, and i don’t have easy solutions to it, but i do think we need to be aware and careful about it. we’re interacting with people, not professional activists, and the lines between different kinds of social interactions can blur easily.
Yeah, I think that’s fair. I definitely know what it’s like to make a post like GOD DAMMIT ALL I HATE THE THING and then have a quintillion people reblog it assuming that you’ve cursed them all to fiery doom when all you were actually saying was “fuck im frustrated rn guys” and your intended audience was mostly sympathetic e-friends.
But I also think there is sometimes a thing where people take the stance that reblogging is activism (which, in some cases, it is, but in others, it’s not) and then they say something SJ-ey in a really nasty and seemingly challenging tone but when told “whoa, that was kinda rude” go “…I was just venting.”
I’ve seen that phenomenon enough times that I feel skeptical of “I was just venting” in some instances.
Like, yeah, sometimes it’s true, but — have you seen that feminist joke about Schrodinger’s Douchebag? “Makes gross creepy remarks about women and decides whether or not he was joking based on women’s reaction”?
I think there are SJ Schrodinger’s Douchebags too, and their characteristic call, rather than “I was joking! Lighten up,” is “i was just venting oh my god”
Bolded the last part, because I’m pretty sure that is exactly what happens.
Also when any extreme examples of abusiveness or just plain faulty logic get publicized people go “but those are obviously just trolls,” or otherwise say they’re not real social justice bloggers.
Sometimes they are obvious trolls, like those people who always seem to think slapping on “Dorito otherkin, god/godself pronouns” makes them “look like an SJer har har,” but the rest? You can’t just magic away the parts that make what you’re doing look bad.
If you do want a socially aware community, this is how you foster abusers in it. :l By hiding or excusing them- or pretending they’re just not there- just so that people won’t think there’s anything wrong with the community itself.
Tumblr backup 