On sort of but not really being a fannish activist
I already posted an almost identical locked version of this, but I've decided it would be useful to link to for context in broader conversation.
The archetypical "fandom activist", as far as I can tell from the assumptions I see around the place, is white, female, cisgendered, from the US, able-bodied, may or may not be lgbt, and middle class. She never really thought about social justice before joining fandom, but now pursues it with an almost religious fervour, with rigid ideas about acceptable behaviour, and attacks anyone who has been declared a Bad Person with angry comments on their journal and "signal boosting" posts. She also has no interest in activism outside this.
This does not describe me or the people I know who are involved in discussing social justice in fandom, at least not entirely. I used to think that maybe I wasn't the sort of person people were talking about when they made these posts, but my name has come up a few times so I guess I am.
So I've decided it would be helpful to get my experiences all laid out so that I can poke at them and maybe compare notes with other people.
I am, admittedly, white cisgendered and female. (And I have a sexuality :D) I'm also Australian, disabled (though that's new), from a working class background, and am probably the least social-justice obsessed adult member of my family.
This last one is I think the most significant.
My maternal grandparents were socialist environmentalists with a strong commitment to anti-racism. My mother shares their general principles, but not their dogmatic black and white viewpoint, especially their strong anti-religious stance (she's Christian). I was brought up to see the sexist, racist and classist(*) subtext in the media I consumed and the structure of the world around me, but I was also raised to be sceptical of activists (including my family) and to view the communist newspaper my parents bought with as much of a cynical critical eye as the regular one, and we had lots of long loud friendly disagreements.
So on the one hand, activism in a general sense has never felt like a big deal or even a choice to me: I've never not seen the world as inherently unjust and full of prejudiced subtext, discussing social justice feels as natural as discussing the weather, and fighting injustice has always felt like just a natural part of basic human decency.
On the other hand, I've got a strong idea of what a real commitment to traditional activism means, and while I have every respect for people who choose that path I have no illusions about how difficult it is or how much pointless counterproductive crap it engenders, and it is not a path I have been inclined to take for myself. Like most people I have mostly just tried to be a generally decent person, it's just that my standards with regards to social justice tend to be higher. I have also never had any illusions about activists being better people than regular people (I love my family but…yeah) Specifically, though I didn't learn the word until adulthood (in part because it didn't exist!), I have always been deeply irritated at the way they tend to ignore intersectionality and act like their pet injustice is the only injustice ever.
I was also raised to see myself as inherently biased, filled with invisible prejudices skewing my perceptions and warping my actions. So I've never found the idea of being confronted with own prejudice as this inherently scary or shocking thing, in my family we accuse each other of bias all the time (eg I and my grandma would needle my mum about her conservative attitudes about sex, and mum would needle grandma about her prejudices against muslims, and my dad accuses everyone of being complicit with the capitalist oligarchy etc) I always took the fact that I hardly ever got my biases pointed out as a bad thing, since it meant they went unchallenged. Sadly for a long time when people DID call out my racism and homophobia etc I tended to (fairly politely) disagree, since while I might think it was a good thing in principle I wasn't able to immediately overcome my biases in practice.
I never got involved in activism at uni. Mainly, I suppose, because of teenage rebellion against spending time with people who reminded me of my family and their annoying hypocrisy and dogmatism (rather like a teenager from a devoutly christian family avoiding church despite believing in God) At the same time, when I expressed my natural opinions about politics or popular culture amongst regular people there was a reasonable chance of people treating me like some oversensitive lefty extremist freak. Since I was very shy and nonconfrontational, I learned to keep those opinions to myself.
In my early twenties I decided to have a go at engaging with social justice and groups of likeminded people. So (to explore the one area my family didn't) I joined the Brights. And they were on the one hand a very supportive group who helped me figure out my beliefs and how to discuss fraught topics online and I made friends with some lovely people, and on the other hand a great many were smug privileged middle class white men who acted like atheists were the Most Oppressed People Ever, and when I disagreed with the party line or complained about the racism etc gave me crap for being Insufficiently Committed To The Cause and overall reminded me why I'd been avoiding activism or anything like it in the first place.
I joined local and online sf fandom in the late 90s (my late teens), but even when I got into livejournal was only peripherally aware of fanfic and fanfic fandom. The people reading my blog were just my real life friends and I tended not to discuss social justice for the same reasons as I didn't in real life. As I got older I slowly started gravitating towards local feminist fandom: despite my misgivings I was increasingly sick of the misogyny and obliviousness of mainstream sf fandom, plus I just kept making friends with women who turned out to be feminists and the stuff they said made sense.
So. Via one of these local sf feminists (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
emma_in_dream) I was introduced to ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
metafandom in 2006. And rather than the more common reaction of "Why is there racism meta in my fanfic discussion" mine was more "Yay racism discussion! …ew fanfic". (I was converted to vids and then fic very quickly :D)
So I got into conversations in the comments of various posts and for the first time in my life found myself the lone relatively racist white person surrounded by more informed and more actively anti-racist non-white people/POC (not that there aren't lots of well informed non-white/POC in local fandom! But it's too white for me to ever be surrounded by large numbers at once, and they're under the same don't-rock-the-boat pressure). And it was scary and I said some very stupid things but it was also awesome, I actually felt like I was learning something rather than flailing about well meaningly to white people who thought I was making too much of a fuss(**). I learned terms like "privilege" and "intersectionality"and they were incredibly helpful additions to the framework I'd been raised with.
After being called on my white privilege one too many times I had my doubts about certain aspects of the US-centred post-colonial anti-racist framework most fannish discussions seemed to draw on, but decided there was no easy way to untangle that from racist defensiveness, so I decided to learn some more about feminism which seemed to use similar terms about a prejudice I was on the other side of. (nb: after getting my head around these concepts better I decided that most of my issues were racist defensiveness, at least to some extent) And then my eyes were opened to the joy of feminism, and I started to think that maybe it was worth braving the inevitable hypocrisy and dogmatism to get involved in actual organised activism.
So I did. I joined some local anti-racist groups and meetings and went to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
gynaecon and femmeconne and helped organise links to Australian resources for debunkingwhite. I also started posting about social justice on my lj, because I had stuff I wanted to work through and because I was sick of keeping that part of myself hidden (also because I know that not everyone had my upbringing, and might not be familiar with the ideas). And there was drama and some people decided they didn't like me as much as they'd thought they did and not all the conversations were very pleasant for anyone. But I also had some really rewarding conversations with both my old friends and new people who came along via metafandom and debunkingwhite etc and I started to feel like I was really getting my head around all this stuff, including topics like homophobia, transphobia and abelism that I'd not really thought about much before (I tend to avoid discussing class online since discussions get skewed by the in some ways very different US class system). I became more comfortable talking about social justice in person (since if nothing else, I and a chunk of my real life friends had discussed some of the basic concepts and knew where we stood with respect to each other) and started to think about getting involved in social justice in a more major way.
And then I got very very very ill.
Well, I'd been ill since 2001, but not enough that I couldn't be in denial about it. It was in 2008 that my as then undiagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome got so bad that I stopped being able to function properly and eventually had to leave my job and become mostly housebound and give up on any plans to do much of anything, possibly ever again.
Which, as you can imagine, kind of distracted me a bit. In early 2009 when Racefail hit I was still figuring out how to engage with fraught topics online with my new less intelligent fuzzy brain and frequent periods of inability to answer my email, so I mostly just read and didn't post very much.
At the same time I was discovering the wonderful world of disability activism. I took to the disabled identity pretty quickly, since I'd already been reading up on the topic to try and be an ally and noticing how even in my "healthy" (actually, for much of this period, very unhealthy but in denial) state I had a lot of the same issues facing people with "real" disabilities. It was (and is) like a weird double vision, the ableist assumptions I'd happily lived with as an able-bodied person hitting the truth of what being disabled is actually like, and like a more sudden and intense version of my engagement with feminism I started noticing ableism everywhere but also making a bunch of friendships around shared experience with various disabled people I either already knew or met at the time. I'd gotten into the beta of dreamwidth and in the flurry of random friending met a bunch of very cool disabled people *waves*.
I decided to make my new dreamwidth journal a dedicated social justice discussion space since I wasn't up to moderating the comments that resulted from various people on my lj flist who hadn't thought about social justice much or disagreed with my take on it, or just couldn't always tell when I'd switched from light hearted rambles where I was open to random off topic digression to Serious Business.
But. Despite all this, I still didn't and don't consider myself an activist. My family still all take it all way more seriously than me, even my two siblings in their early twenties, who spent their childhoods and teens actively rejecting the family "weirdness" are now studying Women's Studies and Environmental Engineering respectively, and that's the sort of standard I compare myself to. I'm just expressing my opinions and trying to be a decent person. I might have the energy to do more than that one day but for now I don't.
And I still have a knee-jerk distrust of anything that feels too activist-y to me (I don't have a problem with activists as individuals, I think they're awesome, if everyone was like me nothing would get done. I just usually prefer not to get involved when they do their thing as a group). I was for example very cynical about the OTW when it started (although I tried not to be too crushingly negative since I have friends who are very involved, and have on the whole been pleasantly surprised) But one of the things I really like about the people I discuss social justice with online is it's not this organised activist group with a single agenda but a hugely diverse and fuzzy group of people who all have different points of view and agendas and experiences and levels of commitment.
I also don't see people who talk about social justice online as this neat well defined group who are all that different from everyone else. Afaict pretty much everyone apart from, like, neo-nazis is against racism and sexism etc in principle, and will even act against what they see as really egregious examples of it. And in the other direction even the most committed and clue-y activist is still made of Fail some of the time. I mean look at Racefail: the whole thing started with a post Elizabeth Bear made about racism which made some really good points. Before 2006 I was someone who "didn't post about social justice in their journal" but still had comparatively strong and…extreme (for lack of a better word) views. None of us divide neatly into sides except maybe on very specific issues and, alas, pretty much everyone sucks at intersectionality and understanding other people's POVs.
Which is not to say there aren't broad pressures and expectations and dynamics. For the most part, though, I see these as part of general online and fannish dynamics: if people are going to get into flamewars and angrily link to People Being Wrong On the Internet and hold grudges for years about shipping preferences I don't think it should be surprising that they do it about social justice too.
I do have some qualms sometimes about the way social justice language and ideas are discussed online and in fandom, but since online fandom is, on the whole, a bazillion times better than every other discussion about social justice I've been involved in I see it as "How can we fix this awesome but flawed thing" not "This thing is broken, and everyone involved in it sucks". And on the whole it is still, and always has been, the people who think I'm too oversensitive and extreme who make my life difficult more than the people who think I'm being racist or have internalised sexism etc. Sure, well meaning able-bodied people may be a bit dogmatic about "obvious" ableism in a way that excludes some disabled people, but able bodied people who make no attempt to care about ableism are on the whole much much more exclusionary. Sure, some feminists may accuse me of being Tool of the Patriarchy for all manner of reasonable choices, but anti-feminists still say things that upset me more. And since I never had a romanticised view of activists in the first place, none of these things shock me. I think they need addressing, but to me are just part of the general fight against ableism/sexism etc.
Since I have an allergy to dogma I try to be open minded towards people with different views and criticisms of POVs I subscribe to. Of course, given that my own opinions are pretty left of centre, that means that my cutoffs for "Too extreme to be open minded about" go pretty far into radicalism on one side and not that far into complicity with the status quo on the other. Still, I think there are multiple different ways of approaching social justice (and as I said, I think most people do try to pursue it to some extent as they see fit), and since I was myself brought up into one that is moderately different to those commonly used by online fandom definitely don't see any given approach as the only way.
*looks at the description I started with to see if I missed anything*
I usually see no point in "punishing" people who do what I consider to be the wrong thing. I think they should be told (because otherwise how will they know?), and I think it can sometimes be instructive to criticise this behaviour publicly so that other people see the criticism and realise that (a)If they do it they may also be told off and (b)See the explanations for why this behaviour is unacceptable. If someone has done the wrong thing and has already been called out publicly by many other people then I generally see no point in getting involved. I might link to the discussion as an illustrative example, but not to encourage any more negativity towards the person who did the wrong thing, and sometimes I hold back from linking to people who would make for a good example but I don't feel comfortable directing negativity towards. The two exceptions that come to mind are (a)People it's important to be warned about and (b)Very powerful people hurting less powerful people, like when Amanda Palmer made fun of FWD on national tv.
And since I have written like 5 versions of this post, and they all seem doomed to overlong incoherence I shall post and be done with it.
(*)My parents are not, on the whole, in favour of homophobia and ableism, but they don't concentrate on those biases so much, and can be pretty heteronormative.
(**)If this make it sound like 2006 me was inclined to see non-white/POC fans attempts to fight racism in terms of how it helped me grow as a white person, well, she kinda did to some extent. Well meaning but with a lot of unexamined crap in her head, that was 2006 me. (I still fit that description but hopefully not as much)
The archetypical "fandom activist", as far as I can tell from the assumptions I see around the place, is white, female, cisgendered, from the US, able-bodied, may or may not be lgbt, and middle class. She never really thought about social justice before joining fandom, but now pursues it with an almost religious fervour, with rigid ideas about acceptable behaviour, and attacks anyone who has been declared a Bad Person with angry comments on their journal and "signal boosting" posts. She also has no interest in activism outside this.
This does not describe me or the people I know who are involved in discussing social justice in fandom, at least not entirely. I used to think that maybe I wasn't the sort of person people were talking about when they made these posts, but my name has come up a few times so I guess I am.
So I've decided it would be helpful to get my experiences all laid out so that I can poke at them and maybe compare notes with other people.
I am, admittedly, white cisgendered and female. (And I have a sexuality :D) I'm also Australian, disabled (though that's new), from a working class background, and am probably the least social-justice obsessed adult member of my family.
This last one is I think the most significant.
My maternal grandparents were socialist environmentalists with a strong commitment to anti-racism. My mother shares their general principles, but not their dogmatic black and white viewpoint, especially their strong anti-religious stance (she's Christian). I was brought up to see the sexist, racist and classist(*) subtext in the media I consumed and the structure of the world around me, but I was also raised to be sceptical of activists (including my family) and to view the communist newspaper my parents bought with as much of a cynical critical eye as the regular one, and we had lots of long loud friendly disagreements.
So on the one hand, activism in a general sense has never felt like a big deal or even a choice to me: I've never not seen the world as inherently unjust and full of prejudiced subtext, discussing social justice feels as natural as discussing the weather, and fighting injustice has always felt like just a natural part of basic human decency.
On the other hand, I've got a strong idea of what a real commitment to traditional activism means, and while I have every respect for people who choose that path I have no illusions about how difficult it is or how much pointless counterproductive crap it engenders, and it is not a path I have been inclined to take for myself. Like most people I have mostly just tried to be a generally decent person, it's just that my standards with regards to social justice tend to be higher. I have also never had any illusions about activists being better people than regular people (I love my family but…yeah) Specifically, though I didn't learn the word until adulthood (in part because it didn't exist!), I have always been deeply irritated at the way they tend to ignore intersectionality and act like their pet injustice is the only injustice ever.
I was also raised to see myself as inherently biased, filled with invisible prejudices skewing my perceptions and warping my actions. So I've never found the idea of being confronted with own prejudice as this inherently scary or shocking thing, in my family we accuse each other of bias all the time (eg I and my grandma would needle my mum about her conservative attitudes about sex, and mum would needle grandma about her prejudices against muslims, and my dad accuses everyone of being complicit with the capitalist oligarchy etc) I always took the fact that I hardly ever got my biases pointed out as a bad thing, since it meant they went unchallenged. Sadly for a long time when people DID call out my racism and homophobia etc I tended to (fairly politely) disagree, since while I might think it was a good thing in principle I wasn't able to immediately overcome my biases in practice.
I never got involved in activism at uni. Mainly, I suppose, because of teenage rebellion against spending time with people who reminded me of my family and their annoying hypocrisy and dogmatism (rather like a teenager from a devoutly christian family avoiding church despite believing in God) At the same time, when I expressed my natural opinions about politics or popular culture amongst regular people there was a reasonable chance of people treating me like some oversensitive lefty extremist freak. Since I was very shy and nonconfrontational, I learned to keep those opinions to myself.
In my early twenties I decided to have a go at engaging with social justice and groups of likeminded people. So (to explore the one area my family didn't) I joined the Brights. And they were on the one hand a very supportive group who helped me figure out my beliefs and how to discuss fraught topics online and I made friends with some lovely people, and on the other hand a great many were smug privileged middle class white men who acted like atheists were the Most Oppressed People Ever, and when I disagreed with the party line or complained about the racism etc gave me crap for being Insufficiently Committed To The Cause and overall reminded me why I'd been avoiding activism or anything like it in the first place.
I joined local and online sf fandom in the late 90s (my late teens), but even when I got into livejournal was only peripherally aware of fanfic and fanfic fandom. The people reading my blog were just my real life friends and I tended not to discuss social justice for the same reasons as I didn't in real life. As I got older I slowly started gravitating towards local feminist fandom: despite my misgivings I was increasingly sick of the misogyny and obliviousness of mainstream sf fandom, plus I just kept making friends with women who turned out to be feminists and the stuff they said made sense.
So. Via one of these local sf feminists (
emma_in_dream) I was introduced to metafandom in 2006. And rather than the more common reaction of "Why is there racism meta in my fanfic discussion" mine was more "Yay racism discussion! …ew fanfic". (I was converted to vids and then fic very quickly :D)So I got into conversations in the comments of various posts and for the first time in my life found myself the lone relatively racist white person surrounded by more informed and more actively anti-racist non-white people/POC (not that there aren't lots of well informed non-white/POC in local fandom! But it's too white for me to ever be surrounded by large numbers at once, and they're under the same don't-rock-the-boat pressure). And it was scary and I said some very stupid things but it was also awesome, I actually felt like I was learning something rather than flailing about well meaningly to white people who thought I was making too much of a fuss(**). I learned terms like "privilege" and "intersectionality"and they were incredibly helpful additions to the framework I'd been raised with.
After being called on my white privilege one too many times I had my doubts about certain aspects of the US-centred post-colonial anti-racist framework most fannish discussions seemed to draw on, but decided there was no easy way to untangle that from racist defensiveness, so I decided to learn some more about feminism which seemed to use similar terms about a prejudice I was on the other side of. (nb: after getting my head around these concepts better I decided that most of my issues were racist defensiveness, at least to some extent) And then my eyes were opened to the joy of feminism, and I started to think that maybe it was worth braving the inevitable hypocrisy and dogmatism to get involved in actual organised activism.
So I did. I joined some local anti-racist groups and meetings and went to
gynaecon and femmeconne and helped organise links to Australian resources for debunkingwhite. I also started posting about social justice on my lj, because I had stuff I wanted to work through and because I was sick of keeping that part of myself hidden (also because I know that not everyone had my upbringing, and might not be familiar with the ideas). And there was drama and some people decided they didn't like me as much as they'd thought they did and not all the conversations were very pleasant for anyone. But I also had some really rewarding conversations with both my old friends and new people who came along via metafandom and debunkingwhite etc and I started to feel like I was really getting my head around all this stuff, including topics like homophobia, transphobia and abelism that I'd not really thought about much before (I tend to avoid discussing class online since discussions get skewed by the in some ways very different US class system). I became more comfortable talking about social justice in person (since if nothing else, I and a chunk of my real life friends had discussed some of the basic concepts and knew where we stood with respect to each other) and started to think about getting involved in social justice in a more major way.And then I got very very very ill.
Well, I'd been ill since 2001, but not enough that I couldn't be in denial about it. It was in 2008 that my as then undiagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome got so bad that I stopped being able to function properly and eventually had to leave my job and become mostly housebound and give up on any plans to do much of anything, possibly ever again.
Which, as you can imagine, kind of distracted me a bit. In early 2009 when Racefail hit I was still figuring out how to engage with fraught topics online with my new less intelligent fuzzy brain and frequent periods of inability to answer my email, so I mostly just read and didn't post very much.
At the same time I was discovering the wonderful world of disability activism. I took to the disabled identity pretty quickly, since I'd already been reading up on the topic to try and be an ally and noticing how even in my "healthy" (actually, for much of this period, very unhealthy but in denial) state I had a lot of the same issues facing people with "real" disabilities. It was (and is) like a weird double vision, the ableist assumptions I'd happily lived with as an able-bodied person hitting the truth of what being disabled is actually like, and like a more sudden and intense version of my engagement with feminism I started noticing ableism everywhere but also making a bunch of friendships around shared experience with various disabled people I either already knew or met at the time. I'd gotten into the beta of dreamwidth and in the flurry of random friending met a bunch of very cool disabled people *waves*.
I decided to make my new dreamwidth journal a dedicated social justice discussion space since I wasn't up to moderating the comments that resulted from various people on my lj flist who hadn't thought about social justice much or disagreed with my take on it, or just couldn't always tell when I'd switched from light hearted rambles where I was open to random off topic digression to Serious Business.
But. Despite all this, I still didn't and don't consider myself an activist. My family still all take it all way more seriously than me, even my two siblings in their early twenties, who spent their childhoods and teens actively rejecting the family "weirdness" are now studying Women's Studies and Environmental Engineering respectively, and that's the sort of standard I compare myself to. I'm just expressing my opinions and trying to be a decent person. I might have the energy to do more than that one day but for now I don't.
And I still have a knee-jerk distrust of anything that feels too activist-y to me (I don't have a problem with activists as individuals, I think they're awesome, if everyone was like me nothing would get done. I just usually prefer not to get involved when they do their thing as a group). I was for example very cynical about the OTW when it started (although I tried not to be too crushingly negative since I have friends who are very involved, and have on the whole been pleasantly surprised) But one of the things I really like about the people I discuss social justice with online is it's not this organised activist group with a single agenda but a hugely diverse and fuzzy group of people who all have different points of view and agendas and experiences and levels of commitment.
I also don't see people who talk about social justice online as this neat well defined group who are all that different from everyone else. Afaict pretty much everyone apart from, like, neo-nazis is against racism and sexism etc in principle, and will even act against what they see as really egregious examples of it. And in the other direction even the most committed and clue-y activist is still made of Fail some of the time. I mean look at Racefail: the whole thing started with a post Elizabeth Bear made about racism which made some really good points. Before 2006 I was someone who "didn't post about social justice in their journal" but still had comparatively strong and…extreme (for lack of a better word) views. None of us divide neatly into sides except maybe on very specific issues and, alas, pretty much everyone sucks at intersectionality and understanding other people's POVs.
Which is not to say there aren't broad pressures and expectations and dynamics. For the most part, though, I see these as part of general online and fannish dynamics: if people are going to get into flamewars and angrily link to People Being Wrong On the Internet and hold grudges for years about shipping preferences I don't think it should be surprising that they do it about social justice too.
I do have some qualms sometimes about the way social justice language and ideas are discussed online and in fandom, but since online fandom is, on the whole, a bazillion times better than every other discussion about social justice I've been involved in I see it as "How can we fix this awesome but flawed thing" not "This thing is broken, and everyone involved in it sucks". And on the whole it is still, and always has been, the people who think I'm too oversensitive and extreme who make my life difficult more than the people who think I'm being racist or have internalised sexism etc. Sure, well meaning able-bodied people may be a bit dogmatic about "obvious" ableism in a way that excludes some disabled people, but able bodied people who make no attempt to care about ableism are on the whole much much more exclusionary. Sure, some feminists may accuse me of being Tool of the Patriarchy for all manner of reasonable choices, but anti-feminists still say things that upset me more. And since I never had a romanticised view of activists in the first place, none of these things shock me. I think they need addressing, but to me are just part of the general fight against ableism/sexism etc.
Since I have an allergy to dogma I try to be open minded towards people with different views and criticisms of POVs I subscribe to. Of course, given that my own opinions are pretty left of centre, that means that my cutoffs for "Too extreme to be open minded about" go pretty far into radicalism on one side and not that far into complicity with the status quo on the other. Still, I think there are multiple different ways of approaching social justice (and as I said, I think most people do try to pursue it to some extent as they see fit), and since I was myself brought up into one that is moderately different to those commonly used by online fandom definitely don't see any given approach as the only way.
*looks at the description I started with to see if I missed anything*
I usually see no point in "punishing" people who do what I consider to be the wrong thing. I think they should be told (because otherwise how will they know?), and I think it can sometimes be instructive to criticise this behaviour publicly so that other people see the criticism and realise that (a)If they do it they may also be told off and (b)See the explanations for why this behaviour is unacceptable. If someone has done the wrong thing and has already been called out publicly by many other people then I generally see no point in getting involved. I might link to the discussion as an illustrative example, but not to encourage any more negativity towards the person who did the wrong thing, and sometimes I hold back from linking to people who would make for a good example but I don't feel comfortable directing negativity towards. The two exceptions that come to mind are (a)People it's important to be warned about and (b)Very powerful people hurting less powerful people, like when Amanda Palmer made fun of FWD on national tv.
And since I have written like 5 versions of this post, and they all seem doomed to overlong incoherence I shall post and be done with it.
(*)My parents are not, on the whole, in favour of homophobia and ableism, but they don't concentrate on those biases so much, and can be pretty heteronormative.
(**)If this make it sound like 2006 me was inclined to see non-white/POC fans attempts to fight racism in terms of how it helped me grow as a white person, well, she kinda did to some extent. Well meaning but with a lot of unexamined crap in her head, that was 2006 me. (I still fit that description but hopefully not as much)