I think fandomantiracism is taking a good approach to the situation, and one thing I particularly appreciate already is their awareness that it's impossible to take a universal, one-size-fits-all approach to race/ethnicity and racism — you need to look at the regional, social and cultural context of specific instances, and contextualise them for people outside that specific context. Anything else is doomed to failure. Case in point: I'm an Australian who lives and works in the UK. Recently at work I was helping a researcher who is doing a PhD on the experiences of underrepresented groups when they're accessing healthcare/medical treatment. We found very quickly that most of the existing research was carried out in the United States — and not only did it use different terminology, it focuses on completely different underrepresented groups, which makes sense given the UK and the US have different demographics, and people of different ethnicities who are underrepresented in healthcare settings. And if I were to look into this in Australia, it would be different again.
I totally agree with everything you're saying here. One of my least favourite things about the contemporary internet is a tendency of some people to view signal boosting and being loudly outraged about a topic as the be all and end all when it comes to activism. It tends to go together with a spoken or unspoken implication that if someone is not engaging with a particular topic or posting about it publicly, they're part of the problem — whereas I feel that this leads to a superficial understanding of a lot of disparate issues, and that a deep engagement plus concrete actions on a smaller, more manageable number of issues is more productive. I also don't believe that anyone is obligated to post about or engage with anything. So what I was saying above in the post was meant to make that clear, but it had the opposite effect in some cases and made people feel like I was implying they were ignorant for not knowing what had been going on.
In any case, I'm glad you found that Tumblr helpful, and I can only apologise that I myself am guilty of failing to do the thing for which I praised them: clearly explaining the context of what I was talking about!
no subject
I totally agree with everything you're saying here. One of my least favourite things about the contemporary internet is a tendency of some people to view signal boosting and being loudly outraged about a topic as the be all and end all when it comes to activism. It tends to go together with a spoken or unspoken implication that if someone is not engaging with a particular topic or posting about it publicly, they're part of the problem — whereas I feel that this leads to a superficial understanding of a lot of disparate issues, and that a deep engagement plus concrete actions on a smaller, more manageable number of issues is more productive. I also don't believe that anyone is obligated to post about or engage with anything. So what I was saying above in the post was meant to make that clear, but it had the opposite effect in some cases and made people feel like I was implying they were ignorant for not knowing what had been going on.
In any case, I'm glad you found that Tumblr helpful, and I can only apologise that I myself am guilty of failing to do the thing for which I praised them: clearly explaining the context of what I was talking about!