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cimoreneI've been wanting to make a post for International Blog Against Racism Week. I know what I want to post about, too. A post on this subject has been in my mind for a year. It's hard to know how to make it, though. I'm not sure what to say, but I think that's part of why it's important to say it - because it's not a coincidence that it's hard. It's an internalised censor from culture at large silencing the minority's voice, so I'm going to struggle through making this post anyway. I'm not sure if I can expect it to be articulate.
About a year ago, something went down on my friendslist under friendlock. An lj friend posted some really upsetting humour about the Holocaust under a filter. The post said on it that it was filtered, and the content was cut with a warning that it was tasteless. I remember that word because of how ridiculous a misnomer it appeared to me after I looked at the post.
The content was a series of macros, images with lolcat-style misspelled captions referring to a current fandom pairing war. The intent was to ridicule shippers who were considered to be acting entitled by claiming to be oppressed. As such, the captions were things like "My fandom really has it bad" and "My fandom is so oppressed", that sort of thing - superimposed on actual black and white Holocaust photos.
As you scrolled down the entry, a horrifying line of graphic images of emaciation, starvation, chained prisoners, burial trenches, and dead bodies unrolled before your eyes with these captions. Then there was a laughing apology, reiterating the OP's belief that the images were really in bad taste. Most of the comments in the post were laughing.
Although the original post was horrifying to me, I think what made the incident stick was the comment exchanges. There were cheerful comments like "LOLAUSCHWITZ! Ahaha, I'm going to hell." And then there was the first thread where a commenter wanted to call the OP on the post. She apologised for her intrusion and said that she found the content upsetting - obviously struggling, I think, with the same sense of shame at taking offense that I've been battling in trying to compose this post. It's not that the responses weren't polite. The creator of the images asked that the OP not be blamed - she had practically forced her to post them, she said.
The OP said she was sorry that anyone had been offended and that wasn't her intent. She didn't apologise for the images themselves, though, or indicate second thoughts about the jokes themselves or the issues involved. Instead, she said that different people have different thresholds for humour, between what is offensive and what is funny. Essentially, she said that whether the graphic Holocaust images as a metaphor for fandom kerfluffles were funny shock humour or not was simply a matter of taste or opinion which she and the people offended happened to disagree about. After a lot of thinking about it - a year, you know? - I think that what bothers me so much about this exchange, though it's hard to place my finger on it, is that sidestep away from guilt or apology. It appeared as if the comment hadn't caused her to think any more about it or to change her opinion. And though something she said indicated she would make a follow up post, I waited for one for months before giving up and defriending.
You'll notice that I'm conspicuously not naming names. I've thought a lot about that issue. On the one hand, it seems no malice was behind this, but on the other, the issue seems huge to me, and I feel that a friendslock is providing a basic shield from the kind of public scrutiny that that behaviour would usually be subject to in fandom. Although I think that accountability is a good thing and that racism isn't okay in private at all - in the end, I simply have to respect the privacy of friendslock, so I have to ask that no one do anything to endanger or breach that privacy in my journal.
Finally, I have to apologise for how I haven't really been able to move beyond just... relating the facts and into conceiving a coherent essay or bringing this to some sort of point. I'd love to be able to dissect it and discuss it - appropriation, how the race issues in the Holocaust can sometimes become invisible to some people; my own and other people's backgrounds and whether they can or should make any difference to how they experience this; safe spaces and how safe they actually are (I think this conflict shocked people on both sides with how the space they thought was safe was not); the line between "thresholds" involved in shock humour, and irony, and how this relates to, say, Tarantino movies. I... probably can't talk about those things in any significant way just now, though. I'm still bewildered and hurt by it. It's possible I won't respond to any comments on this post, either, because it's still mildly triggery. I apologise for that, too.
About a year ago, something went down on my friendslist under friendlock. An lj friend posted some really upsetting humour about the Holocaust under a filter. The post said on it that it was filtered, and the content was cut with a warning that it was tasteless. I remember that word because of how ridiculous a misnomer it appeared to me after I looked at the post.
The content was a series of macros, images with lolcat-style misspelled captions referring to a current fandom pairing war. The intent was to ridicule shippers who were considered to be acting entitled by claiming to be oppressed. As such, the captions were things like "My fandom really has it bad" and "My fandom is so oppressed", that sort of thing - superimposed on actual black and white Holocaust photos.
As you scrolled down the entry, a horrifying line of graphic images of emaciation, starvation, chained prisoners, burial trenches, and dead bodies unrolled before your eyes with these captions. Then there was a laughing apology, reiterating the OP's belief that the images were really in bad taste. Most of the comments in the post were laughing.
Although the original post was horrifying to me, I think what made the incident stick was the comment exchanges. There were cheerful comments like "LOLAUSCHWITZ! Ahaha, I'm going to hell." And then there was the first thread where a commenter wanted to call the OP on the post. She apologised for her intrusion and said that she found the content upsetting - obviously struggling, I think, with the same sense of shame at taking offense that I've been battling in trying to compose this post. It's not that the responses weren't polite. The creator of the images asked that the OP not be blamed - she had practically forced her to post them, she said.
The OP said she was sorry that anyone had been offended and that wasn't her intent. She didn't apologise for the images themselves, though, or indicate second thoughts about the jokes themselves or the issues involved. Instead, she said that different people have different thresholds for humour, between what is offensive and what is funny. Essentially, she said that whether the graphic Holocaust images as a metaphor for fandom kerfluffles were funny shock humour or not was simply a matter of taste or opinion which she and the people offended happened to disagree about. After a lot of thinking about it - a year, you know? - I think that what bothers me so much about this exchange, though it's hard to place my finger on it, is that sidestep away from guilt or apology. It appeared as if the comment hadn't caused her to think any more about it or to change her opinion. And though something she said indicated she would make a follow up post, I waited for one for months before giving up and defriending.
You'll notice that I'm conspicuously not naming names. I've thought a lot about that issue. On the one hand, it seems no malice was behind this, but on the other, the issue seems huge to me, and I feel that a friendslock is providing a basic shield from the kind of public scrutiny that that behaviour would usually be subject to in fandom. Although I think that accountability is a good thing and that racism isn't okay in private at all - in the end, I simply have to respect the privacy of friendslock, so I have to ask that no one do anything to endanger or breach that privacy in my journal.
Finally, I have to apologise for how I haven't really been able to move beyond just... relating the facts and into conceiving a coherent essay or bringing this to some sort of point. I'd love to be able to dissect it and discuss it - appropriation, how the race issues in the Holocaust can sometimes become invisible to some people; my own and other people's backgrounds and whether they can or should make any difference to how they experience this; safe spaces and how safe they actually are (I think this conflict shocked people on both sides with how the space they thought was safe was not); the line between "thresholds" involved in shock humour, and irony, and how this relates to, say, Tarantino movies. I... probably can't talk about those things in any significant way just now, though. I'm still bewildered and hurt by it. It's possible I won't respond to any comments on this post, either, because it's still mildly triggery. I apologise for that, too.
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Date: 10 Aug 2008 10:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 13 Aug 2008 03:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Aug 2008 10:55 am (UTC)