For anyone who still doesn’t get it, when you call a white character “smol” or “my son” or something like that, it doesn’t hook down deep into a subconscious chock-full of infantilization of white people. Your subconscious, or anybody else’s subconscious. Why? Because our culture as a whole is not biased against white people, and all your life you have seen many different and varied narratives about white people. Instead of one or two boxes in your subconscious marked “this is what white people are” there are literally thousands of boxes. You’re not reinforcing stereotypes (for yourself or anyone else) because there aren’t any to reinforce; or to the extent that there are stereotypes, they’re pretty small and harmless and only a small part of the overall zeitgeist.
None of that is true when you call a Black character “smol” or “my son” or anything like it. Our culture has EXTREMELY few narratives about Black people, and infantilization is one of them. There are few narratives, but they are strong, and we tend to try to shove all Black people into them whether or not they fit–this is what makes them stereotypes. Even people who actively work to unravel the racism they have been taught still have unconscious biases–there have been a lot of studies about this. When you use diminutives to talk about Black people, when you cutesify them, you are hooking right in to those ugly stereotypes that lurk in the bottom of your subconscious, and you are enhancing them. You are affirming them. And when you do that in public, you are reinforcing them for everyone else, too.
So, absolutely go see Black Panther, absolutely fall in love with the characters, and write lots of fic and meta about them. Just, you know, maybe google “racist stereotypes” or something like that and avoid them.
Also, society (and fandom) have an ugly tendency to white prioritization, where we focus on white people and characters and ignore people of color and especially Black people, even shoving them out of their own stories. And it’s not (in most cases) because of conscious bias. It’s because we have all those rich and varied stories about white people that we expect white people to be interesting/heroic/complex/fun and we don’t have those same rich and varied stories about Black people, so we’re used to ignoring them or only seeing them in a few stereotypical roles. So even if they are just as complicated and awesome as the white characters, we often either don’t notice or just don’t connect emotionally with them, and so we don’t squee about them, we don’t make gifsets and vids about them, we don’t write fic about them. They get shoved off to the side, ignored, denigrated, or turned into appendages for the white characters. I have seen so many times when a Black character is just exactly the sort of character a fan normally goes for when that type of character is white, and they may love the movie but find all sorts of reasons why the Black character isn’t really that interesting to them.
It’s not racist if your favorite characters happen to be white (although unconscious bias shapes what you’re interested in, that doesn’t mean that people only like white characters because they’re white). It isn’t racist if Tony Stark is your favorite MCU character going into Black Panther and he’s still your favorite character afterwards, no matter how much you like T’Challa.
But. If you only want to write about white characters, for whatever reason, why do you have to put them in Wakanda? White characters can shine just about anywhere. There are VERY FEW places where there are black people in media where they’re not supporting characters, where they have space to shine on their own. And that’s as true of fandom as it is of the larger culture. So don’t take that away, huh? Let’s let there be at least one space where Black characters can be front and center.
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