K Tempest Tumbles

crackerthingssaltycrackerssay:

Hello there, Neil Gaiman.

First, I’d like to thank you for assisting with spreading the word about the Arkh Project, which works to create a high quality video game for QPoC and other people who don’t see much representation in fantasy media. It’s moving slowly but steadily. I do appreciate the assistance you lent to this project.

Mr. Gaiman, I am a trans black disabled person. Shortly after I and a group of others tried to create the Arkh Project, massive harassment started to pour in for anyone supporting it. Just for writing about my life every day, I began to receive 10x the amount of harassment Laci Green has ever experienced. I still do. I receive people trying to stalk me and my family in real life, I have people attempting to dox me, find my house, find my family’s houses, and every other day on Tumblr alone, a new blog is made for the sole purpose of making me feel unsafe, throwing slurs at me, or something to that nature.

I have been subject to numerous armchair experiments done by awful people who thought it would be funny to study me like an animal in a cage. A new one pops up every other month. A woman on tumblr threatened to come to my house and rape me while I was getting addresses sent to my inbox to make it all very dangerous for me. I’ve been sent death threats, lynching threats, watched my friends receive comments to the effect of “I’ll rape you in your nigger cunt with my white cock and fill you with white cum.” The police do not care. Tumblr does not care, and of course, you had nothing to say on the issue because as queer people of color, our issues don’t even get “popular” enough to cross the plate of someone like you.

I recently heard that you supported Laci Green, while admitting you were “utterly ignorant” on who Laci Green was or what she was about. You made the following extremely loaded and insulting comments:

I can’t believe that hate is justified even if you’re sure you’re the good guys and even if you’re hating the right people.

Not-hating is harder than hating. Rational discourse and persuasion, and, if people are not prepared to listen to persuasion or to discourse rationally, going away and not rising to their bait, these are things that it’s hard to do, but which might make the internet a safer, saner, more pleasant online place for everyone.

I think that’s why I responded to, and linked in the last post to, Erin Kissane’s essay on How to Kill A Troll. She quotes Martin Luther King in there, and talks about love. I hope people will read it. 

This is how that MLK sermon ends:

Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.

Mr. Gaiman, you are a very well off cisgender white man. Your capabilities in life are far above mine and even when it comes to harassment you receive for being infinitely more well-known than myself, if issues happen online, you can nip them in the bud because your needs will be taken care of whether through your connections or money or merely being white and having the police believe you when you are afraid that someone might hurt you.

I do not have the same luxury. I have called the police to be told that my issues do not matter. I’ve called the police when I’ve been beaten and they told me to just “leave the violent situation then”.

What then should a person do, Mr. Gaiman? Should I spend all my energy trying to “eliminate hate” and following “MLK Jr”, who, by the way, you severely misquoted as many white people do when they insist on sticking to a morality that only works for them. It does not work for me. Should I allow myself to be driven into the mud for the sake of “not hating” and taking the high road?

I’ve tried rational discourse with them, Mr. Gaiman. But racism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, these things aren’t rational. No amount of rationalizing will cause people to see me as any more than an animal.

Should I allow myself to be killed in the street, as many people like myself are, before you find it admissible for me to “feel hate”? Who are you to judge the feelings and experiences of those people whose lives you will never live? How dare you.

Your usage of MLK Jr’s quote, on top of that, was an example of racism at its finest. Please do not ever take an individual quote of his out of context. He was much more than you know, and I do suggest you read ALL of his speeches, in their entirety.

Mr. Gaiman, Laci Green is racist, transphobic, anti-Islamic. That doesn’t mean she deserves death threats and absolutely no one supports that. But it wasn’t “internet hate”. It was the goal of people who purposely search around for a situation in which an oppressive person is getting taken to task on those ideologies and send death threats for the sole purpose of making life harder for people like me who merely want to live.

I just want to live. I want to create things like the Arkh Project. I want to exist the way other people are allowed to exist.

I can’t have that. People are actively spending free time making sure I disappear because I refuse to tolerate rhetoric that gets people like me killed, or locked up indefinitely. Why is it wrong to hate that? Tell me.

(via popelizbet)