Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Per an email from OTW a couple weeks back, I learned that they’re updating the Terms of Service (TOS) for Archive of our Own (AO3).

They finally address requests for including warnings for Hate Speech, Racism, Slavery at some length, but they’ve hidden the discussion deep in a draft.

tl;dr — No new warnings. Only a handful of people have commented. They’re soliciting comments until 17 November 2024. The rest of this post is linked excerpts from OTW’s reasoning against warnings, and from folks who've commented.

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Dr Sami Schalk is a disability studies scholar and professor in Gender and Women Studies at my local university. She’s been estranged from her family, which has complicated grieving seven COVID deaths. I was moved by her essay in our state’s queer monthly:

( 200-word excerpt )

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Why shouldn’t I get a manicure, even if it will draw attention to my multi-colored (not discolored) hands? Why should I try to cover myself with bad makeup when people with other unusual physicalities don’t have that option? What if rocking my vitiligo would help my children tackle any future challenges better than “fixing” it could?

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begin quote  But I also think that some day historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences. They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same. And then they will match that rhetoric of individual responsibility with the aggression the administration showed to bail out the banks, and the timidity they showed in addressing a foreclosure crisis which devastated black America (again.) And they will match the rhetoric with an administration whose efforts against housing segregation have been run of the mill. And they will match the talk of the importance of black fathers with the paradox of a president who smoked marijuana in his youth but continued a drug-war which daily wrecks the lives of black men. I think those historians will see a discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk. quote ends