Call-Out Culture Isn’t Toxic. You are. – Riley H – Medium
Every month or so, an article comes out screeching about how terrible, horrible, no good very bad “call-out culture” is. Before I get into that, I want to start from the beginning.
Why Do Call-Outs Exist?
The idea of “calling out”, first and foremost, came from Black femmes on social media who were being violently harassed every single day. Rape threats. Death threats. Ban evasion. I watched as the idea of “calling out” developed around 2011–2012 on Tumblr, a site that had no real means to block someone or prevent them from harassing you in any way they saw fit.
Why did we use call-outs back then? Because the only way to stop people from abusing us daily was to scream at them until they stopped.
That was the original goal of a call-out. To make someone stop harassing you.
So How Did Call-Outs Become What They Are Now?
Those same constantly harassed Black femmes realized that people were learning when they did those call-outs. There’s no better learning experience than to watch it directly. Their hypervisibility allowed multiple people to watch, in detail, from beginning to end, how something that seemed okay to white sensibilities quickly devolved into racism. People actually began to learn about why Black femmes appear to “jump the gun”, that is, call something racist before they themselves can see the racism, because they could view the progression through the process of a call-out.
The hypervisibility of Black femmes allows what they do to be seen and also not be seen. What the people viewing Black femme call-outs saw was what they eventually began to turn call-outs into. They saw these “Sassy Black Girls” doing some proverbial neck-rolling and finger-snapping at people online and they wanted to be that too.
They didn’t and still don’t realize that for Black femmes, call-outs may be the only way to stop a violent motherfucker from sending you threats from multiple accounts. Particularly on these social media platforms that never listen to our complaints, even when we have screencapped evidence of threats.
Then How Can You Say It Isn’t Toxic When People Are Misusing It?
People misuse everything. Again, the hypervisibility of Black femmes allow what they do to be seen while also being unseen. Black femmes doing call-outs are either mean bitches or Sassy Sassmasters. There is no consideration or our pain, aggravation, or PTSD from the perpetual abuse we face online. The multiple attempts at more calmly speaking on things that happened before the call-out? All ignored. Anything that may give us humanity is ignored for the sake of the spectacle.
Calling out was originally our last resort…and for fun, performance and ally cookies, it’s been appropriated and now we’re the ones suffering from the results of your multiple articles on Why Call-Out Culture Is Totally Evil.
Calling out wasn’t and isn’t toxic. It was all Black femmes had for protection in multiple online worlds that didn’t care about protecting us. What’s toxic is the people who stole. The people using it now. The people who don’t bother to connect it to its context and history, its creation. The people who never bothered to understand why it existed in the first place.
Is this by crackerhell riley???????? The OG scammer and callout ringmaster???????? LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOO
The same Riley who got their friend to say Asians are just white people with slanted eyes? The same Riley who crowdfunded for a video game they had no damn intention of creating? The same Riley who would be the first to sic their lil crew onto minors for disagreeing with them on shit? That Riley????????
“ Black desi. They/them. Pro software engineer and game developer. Creator of #TransLawHelp. Pay me: http://cash.me/$ril-yatdtwps
ITS THAT RILEY LMFAO
also WHO IS SURPRISED THAT THEIR MEDIUM ICON IS CIEL FROM BLACK BUTLER?? YOU KNOW THE 12-13 YEAR OLD WHO WAS ALLUDED TO BE HUMAN TRAFFICKED AND SOLD HIS SOUL TO HIS DEVIL BUTLER AND HALF THAT FANDOM SHIPS THIS ACTUAL CHILD WITH HIS ANCIENT GROSS DEMON??? SEXUALLY???The same person who told a Native woman to go get raped by a white man???????
Hoo boy
Riley’s favorite tactic was always describing sexual assault happening to people, like to the point where I literally had a chat with @jhenne-bean about this back in 2012(!!!):
Jhenne: (2:51:49 PM) Well this is Riley and I’m probably sucking the White Man’s dick or something equally White identifying. Me: (2:52:05 PM) hdu suck whiteboy dick Jhenne: (2:53:54 PM) i kno Jhenne: (2:53:56 PM) isrry Jhenne: (2:54:03 PM) it just looked so privileged
9:00 pm: DTWPS: #eat a dick jhennebean you white supremacy sucking ass Jhenne: (9:11:48 PM) i win five bucks I bet my friend. I bet her I would have to eat a dick eventually
https://jhenne-bean.tumblr.com/post/19614113934/missturdle-jhenne-25149-pm-well-this-is“I watched as the idea of “calling out” developed around 2011–2012 on Tumblr, a site that had no real means to block someone or prevent them from harassing you in any way they saw fit.”
No, it took the shape it currently has during/after RaceFail 2009 on LJ. But I don’t think Riley wants people to know they were on LJ back then, because as gishi-nashi-ni on LJ they were known for saying really virulently racist things about Black people they didn’t like.
By distancing themselves from that persona, and advancing the idea that anti-Black racism is the only racism that really matters, they get to continue to say really racist things about other minorities with impunity and get accolades for it - and they also get to expose Black people they don’t like to racist harassment by calling them out as Problematic.
Riley is a racist sleazeball who gets to be as racist as they want while calling it anti-racism.Why does it seem like every horrifying unpleasantness has some root in Racefail ‘09?
Okay, dare I ask what Racefail ‘09 was?
http://fanlore.org/wiki/RaceFail
I’m too tired to go into the whole thing, but the attendant “how to write correctly” offshoots were the first time I heard “don’t write wlw characters who get raped.”
I was finishing up a manuscript at the time in which one of the main characters being a survivor was key to the plot. I almost threw it all out. Because if I couldn’t talk about sexual assault being a background fear and a background REALITY in many women’s lives, writing wasn’t about telling the truth. So why do it?
Then I decided not to listen to that and finished the thing. And I’ve been a curmudgeon about “hey writers! Do what I say representation is supposed to be!” ever since.
Release date was December 1st, 2016. :-)
Me: *reads the wiki*
Me: Holy fuck“Holy fuck” was pretty much what it was like to live through it, at least for me. Just about every character I liked in anything was “wrong.” Like I wasn’t supposed to love Geordi Laforge for being disabled like me and successful and respected. I was supposed to recognize that he was “a twofer,” a character writers only create to kill two diversity birds with one stone.
It was SO TIRING. And you couldn’t SAY it was tiring, because if you did, you must not want fandom to be welcoming to POC.
…… :-/
also the wiki claims that this was one of the positive results:
“Regardless, some good things have arisen partially thanks to RaceFail 09; including the founding of Verb Noire, an assistance fund aimed at helping fans of color afford Wiscon[48] and foc_u at LiveJournal, “a place to serve as a central hub to combat the destructive effects of RaceFail.”[49]
But Verb Noire never published anything. It folded under mysterious circumstances.
http://web.archive.org/web/20150929061555/http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Race_wank
For a wiki with the opposite slant…
“and was loudly castigated for calling black people lettuce.”