Got some responses to thread about false nostalgia and racism in fandom arguing that "Fandom spaces WERE unsafe and that's why we evolved tools (tags, blocks, filters) that let ppl curate their experience but ppl choose to ignore/misuse them."
Guys, you can't filter out racism.
Guys, you can't filter out racism.
Firstly ofc, no one is going to tag their fanwork as racist and there are very few mechanisms on fanwork archives for ppl to request a tag or warning to be applied. You can maybe block a creator with an add-on, but you've already been confronted by something upsetting.
The problem is that racism is seen as something bad people do. And since fandom is seen as INHERENTLY good, there is very little willingness to accept the idea that stanning Sam Wilson or Nyota Uhura might be a very different experience from stanning Steve Rogers.
The truth is that navigating the tag of a character of color is...fraught. You spend most of your time trying and FAILING to curate your experience as you either find very little content, or the character is tagged as one of a million bg mentions, or it's microaggression central.
There are obviously exceptions. But in general, stanning a char of color, particularly if they're in white-dominated text, teaches you the limits of tagging very quickly.
See: me and the MCU fandom...which is possibly my supervillain origin story.
See: me and the MCU fandom...which is possibly my supervillain origin story.
I'm not arguing against the usage or efficacy of tags. I'm saying that they are not a magical fixit for every problem. By continually bringing them up as gotcha "solutions" when ppl discuss stuff like systemic racism demonstrates that you're not listening. /end
(To be clear I'm talking about the "opt-in" tags where the creator tags their work, not tags applied by hosting platforms in line with moderation guidelines)
