a true revolution

I once wrote, discussing whitewashing in fandom and the public spectacle it produces: 

but the fact of the matter is that despite all this–i do feel [pain], and i feel compelled to evoke it. maybe it’s some sort of petulant resistance to theory/via theory. i cannot prove to you anything i say about my own experience of pain; i talk around the shape of the pain and the places we have warped around it. 

It is almost grotesquely vulnerable, in retrospect. That is the performance that made sense, in response to injury. I hurt. Let me tell you how. Please believe me. I offered no steps for redress. I think I already knew, at twenty-one, something I feel more acutely at twenty-five: public vulnerability often just gives people more ways to hurt you. I did not want to be disappointed again. I think I wrote it anyway, even anticipating it would change nothing, because I wanted to make visible that there was an emotional toll to whitewashing. I wanted at least to cry out in pain, to do my due diligence as a victim of sorts, even if I don’t think of myself in those terms. 

There is no catharsis for me in that essay anymore. Noble suffering has little appeal to me anymore, emotionally as well as practically. Now that I rarely post publicly, I express myself more honestly as well as, frankly, rudely. On private accounts, I mock fanartists who lighten the hair and eyes of their favorite characters. I ridicule fanfiction writers whose fantasies trivialize the suffering of people of color (whatever type of fantasy you’re imagining right now, it’s worse). I vent my frustration. But paradoxically, the more I express myself, the more powerless I feel. Because when it comes down to it, I’m just a hater. 

Nietzsche calls this ressentiment. In Genealogy of Morals, he names “a resentment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge.” This concept has often been used in popular discourse today to put down what its detractors might call “grievance studies,” laughingly imagining modern social justice as nothing but a “slave morality” that emerges out of jealousy towards the white upper class. 

But I think there’s something productive to salvage from this term. I turn next, actually, to Frantz Fanon. Brief note here: I am not comparing fandom racism to the institutions of slavery or colonization that Fanon critiques in their violence, dehumanization, or intensity. Rather, I am suggesting that since we already have a theorist of psychic structures that impose feelings of inferiority, powerlessness, and resentment in racialized subjects, we should look to him. 

Anyway. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argues that the Hegelian lord-bondsman dialectic (in which “Self-consciousness exists by itself and for itself,” always seeking recognition from the other) fails to be applicable in Fanon’s contemporary Black context. After all, while Hegel acknowledges that mutual recognition is impossible in an unequal relationship, in Hegel’s dialectic, it is the lord’s desire for recognition from the bondsman that elevates the bondsman. There is no such desire for recognition by white men vis a vis their Black slaves; moreover, when some semblance of recognition ultimately came in the form of abolition, it tended to be a unilateral white decision rather than the result of the dialectic being resolved. 

Fanon continues that while white men will claim there is no difference between them, Black men will know keenly that there is. Those who have been subjected want a fight, Fanon writes. “Unable ever to be sure whether the white man considers him consciousness in-itself-for-itself, [the Black man] must forever absorb himself in uncovering resistance, opposition, challenge.” He urges that therefore one must not be simply reactional, trapped in that cycle of constant opposition, but actional for liberation to occur. He cites active revolutionary movements around the world in his conclusion, building solidarity with those who fight against oppression everywhere. 

Now it feels very dramatic to recount all this to you. I suppose I am trying to legitimize and universalize my desire for a fight today, while acknowledging its limits. I have been trapped in a cycle of constant reaction for the past five years. I see something, I get angry, and I vent my frustration. I see something, I get angry, and I vent my frustration. This is fine, on some levels. This is kind of how social media keeps you engaged in general. And I don’t think the answer to my problems is to follow Fanon literally and take up armed struggle against people who draw Shen Qingqiu looking like green eyes white dragon. And, finally, fandom is inherently a space for reaction against a canon. The real question is whether I can do something transformative with my anger. 

The problem, of course, with that question is that it pisses me off. A lot of things do, and I’m not particularly sorry about it. But that question upsets me because it’s the responsible thing to do. I’m tired of being responsible. I manage my feelings as best I can. I phrase my complaints in ways that will make people think I’m reasonable. I write long vulnerable essays that I design to protect the very people I’m criticizing from being hurt the way they hurt me. 

And while I’m writing the most honest thing I can manage, I also feel that it’s the useless thing to do. While I’m writing a namedrop-y essay, let’s bring out Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” And do my essays change anything? I don’t think they change anything more than my private venting does. I never intended them to change anything, actually. I wrote them because I wanted to feel less alone, and I wanted people like me to feel less alone too. But feelings can only get you so far. Especially when you can’t acknowledge all of them. 

How does change actually happen, then, if not through Tumblr essays? Realistically, we all need to learn how to speak so others will listen. The burden of minimizing one’s feelings in order to be taken seriously ought to fall primarily on white fans, to call in their friends when they inevitably misstep and to be called in, in turn, when they also inevitably misstep. I need other people to be willing to risk relationships and reputations to do the right thing. Which is a big ask. But I’m asking it this time. 

I didn’t even really want to write this essay. I actually wanted to write about how we perform race in digital spaces, with an eye to sinophilia, cultural appropriation, and extraction (I promise my take would have been new, for those of you who also thought you left those discussions behind in the 2010s). I didn’t want to write to white people, for once. I really wanted to spend time with a flawed text, pick apart its failures and slippages in meaning, and see what I had to say back. People of color rarely get to “talk back” in these spaces, and that enforced silence on racial performance is very frustrating to me for a lot of reasons, including selfishly because I find critique to be as central to my writing practice as my creativity.

But I’m writing this instead because things got in the way. I had the same hesitations that I did four years ago when I wrote the essay I referenced above. I was concerned, like many fan studies scholars before me have been, with the ethics of directing undue scrutiny to a single amateur fan. Because, as always, others’ safety supersedes my anger. Which, naturally, made me angrier. Which, therefore, led to the creation of a piece where I could express it, theorize it, and do nothing about it. 

“IDK GUYS I JUST FEEL SO CASTRATED SOMETIMES.... “ I wrote this afternoon, in reference to my own anger. “and i know that's just what being asian american is like. but who's up feeling castrateddddddd,” I continued, a tongue in cheek reference to David Eng’s Racial Castration (which is more about Asian American emasculation generally). I was mostly talking about my feeling of powerlessness and my inability to feel like a whole person because of it. But there’s a much more relevant recent piece by Eng, one he did with Shinhee Han: “Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America.” In it, they extend the historical framework of Asian racial triangulation between Black and white labor to the psychic dimension. Asian Americans, they argue, tend to internalize and carry the guilt and shame of others. 

I’m still working out how I feel about the piece as a general theory, for the record, because I have serious concerns with how they position Asian interests in relation to Black interests (if the two can be so wholly separated). But part of the composite case history they relay was deeply affecting to me. Clara, the composite patient, at one point confides in Han: “I am sick of beating myself up for every single thing I do. I live in terror of making mistakes. Even when I do something well, I doubt myself and don’t trust myself.” When the two explore the feeling, it is rooted in a childhood accusation of plagiarism, in which her teacher believed she was not capable of creating high quality writing because English is her second language, while her parents deferred to the teacher. Although eventually exonerated, the hurt stayed. “When I suggested that all this time she had been holding her parents’ guilt for failing to protect her innocence as well as the teacher’s shame projected onto her, Clara burst into tears,” Han explains. Clara struggled to feel angry, as she deserved to, because she internalized the consciences and projections of others. She is a receptacle for others’ emotions; this is true on multiple levels since she is also a constructed case history. She was born to hold others’ feelings. 

I don’t just struggle with the affect of anger, one’s reaction to a threat. I also struggle with shame, or one’s reaction to failure. It is rooted in my feeling that I have failed to change anything. I once hoped that if I simply catalogued enough, learned enough, wrote enough, that the knowledge would find a way to coalesce into some meaning so undeniable in its truth that— Look, it’s an infantile fantasy. All that really resulted is that I have an incredible mental Rolodex of racist Twitter artists that I can never put to use. Knowledge wasn’t power itself, just knowledge of power. 

The marketplace of ideas is a bullshit concept. But I wasn't even trying to win in it. I was approaching it obliquely, in some form of trickle-down narrative change. If I simply write good fic, characterization I like will win. If I simply write good essays, politics I like will win. It's only when I say my innermost desires plainly that it’s obvious to me how naive they are. Like, hooray, you’re disenchanted with incrementalism. Should we throw a party? Should we invite Lenin?

I’ve been circling the problem of catharsis in this essay. How will I help you process my feelings of rage and shame? (More importantly, how will I process them for myself?) What is to be done about any of this? In some ways, I gave the answer away halfway through: I need you to say something too, because there are a lot of people who don’t listen to me who will listen to you. This is true no matter who you are, reading this. So I suppose the reason this essay continued past that solution, is that I want to make visible the stakes. 

The vast majority of my posts are now on private accounts. I miss talking publicly, making new friends, seeing new art and fics and fannish joy. But the fact of the matter is that I cannot express myself freely as it currently stands. I am forced to manage others’ racial failures for them. I am not alone in this. Like, I’m not the only person who notices or experiences racism in fandom!!! The toll that your silences have taken is spread across countless people of color, who have slowly begun to withdraw from public life. Because, frankly, it’s embarrassing to love something so much that does not love you back. It is embarrassing to be hurt by something that never loved you at all. My heart is resilient enough to bear this. But we all have limits. 

Okay, that’s enough of “one day I’ll be gone and you’ll be SORRY!!!!!” 13 Reasons Why type bullshit. That’s my FOR REAL final expression of ressentiment, my desire to make other people feel the guilt and shame I do. It’s beautiful how writing can bring people together. Or something. 

I leave you now with something concrete you can do to temporarily allay that feeling, and materially help some of the most vulnerable people around us: some good friends over at @kfsf-initiatives are raising money to help a young man named Ahmed keep his community sheltered amidst adverse weather. Here is the link for the campaign. It’s very close to its goal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=943USDAM3Q2D8 It is efforts like this that keep me believing in the people that participate in fandom. I would like to help make our online spaces more equitable, and addressing people’s offline needs first is a prerequisite to that. Thank you. That’s all from me.