A Personal Statement: How Good Intentions Can Produce Harmful Effects

Over the past weekend, I have been trying to address a bruising controversy brought about by choices I made regarding this blog. In the process, I have caused emotional and reputational harm to several female BIPOC scholars.  What started with the best of intentions has had negative impacts on multiple fronts. More care should have been taken at every stage of the process.

Here’s what happened:

Billy Proctor and I had been discussing plans for the blog this fall. When I did a series of Zoom book clubs over the summer, many had expressed interest in learning more about Black comics. I had been hearing about a wave of new titles released over the past year. Due to the lockdown and some current transportation issues, I had not been able to go to my local comic shop since March and I wanted to know, myself, what I should make sure to read from this new and emerging work. As always, I wanted to use this blog to amplify emerging voices in the field -- in this case, especially Black comic scholars. So, we decided to try to pull together a series. I only briefly discussed the mechanisms for doing so, figuring we would dig into those questions more fully later. But from the first, I had vaguely signaled that we would need a diverse group of editors to make this project viable.

After our initial discussion, my attention was drawn elsewhere leaving Proctor to act on these plans. He was only vaguely reporting what was happening and I was distractedly waving him forward, trying, as always, to do too many things at once. I own my failure to oversee this properly. But I also want to make clear the disconnects in the process. Proctor drafted a call for papers which he posted on several comic studies listservs. I did not review or even know about the CFP before it was posted and not being a subscriber to these lists, I was not aware of what was happening until there was significant pushback against these plans. I also did not read or even know about the reframing of the project, though I had been consulted about expanding the remit to allow other BIPOC participants. When I learned of the criticisms on Friday afternoon, I was sympathetic with many of the critiques of what had happened. The initial approach was deeply flawed and the hasty response to the criticism had only made things worse.

I started working behind the scenes to find a way to substantively address the concerns. Specifically, there was a call for Black scholars to be the curators for such a project, which I acknowledge should have been the case from the start. As I heard of the pushback, I reached out to try to identify some early career Black scholars who might want to take ownership over this project, offering them complete control over the content and contributors and asking them to totally reframe the series to reflect their own perspectives. For technical reasons, I would need to facilitate the actual posting. Otherwise, I was ceding my platform to them. When Billy had told me he had heard from other BIPOC scholars who wondered if the blog might also provide space for them to write about comics by, for and about their communities,. I wanted to also facilitate their participation, but again, I was only vaguely following how he was going to do so. After some false steps, Billy identified someone who volunteered to take ownership over this second series.  As of now, my plan has been to run two series, first one under Black editorship on Black comics, and a second under BIPOC leadership dealing with “multicultural” comics.

In the midst of coming up with these plans, Billy Proctor accidentally posted one email from a back and forth exchange around these topics onto a Comic Studies list-serve. Proctor inappropriately characterized Samira Nadkarni who had been a leading critic (among others) of the original plans and further evoked Rukmini Pande, who has been a key figure critiquing racism in fandom studies. There has been an outpouring of outrage over what Billy said and the fact that he felt comfortable using such a negative characterization in my presence. I am deeply sorry for my role in this exchange. I have publicly apologized on the comic studies list where the email was posted and I also personally apologized to the women involved.  Billy Proctor has since stepped down as Associate Editor of this blog and will have no involvement with any future series we may launch, behind the scenes or otherwise. 

Let me be clear where I stand. I admire Rukmini Pande's contributions to the field enormously. She has transformed fan studies (and to a degree, fandom) by her willingness to challenge orthodoxies, to question our historic silence about race, to model what transformative scholarship might look like, and to call out normalized practices that reflect white supremacist logics that have gone unexamined and unquestioned for two long. I am just getting to know Samira Nadkarni through this exchange but I also deeply appreciate her critical voice in raising questions around the initial framing of this project.  I appreciate her willingness to call me out, even though her critiques have not always been easy to hear. Both women have suffered previous harm as a consequence of other public discussions over racism in fandom studies, and I am sorry that my poor choices may have contributed to further wounding them.

There is very little I can say -- the email in its tone and in its substance was inappropriate. I am horrified that this email was distributed on a public list -- not because it is embarrassing to me but because it did public damage to the women referenced in the exchange. I try to promote the work of younger scholars in my field and even where this is not possible, to above all, do no harm. And in this exchange, I failed at that basic expectation. 

I have read various assumptions being made on Twitter about what I did or did not say to Billy Proctor in response to that email. One of the ways whiteness reasserts itself is through what gets said amongst white people in private conversation. Our mutual support for each other shores up the existing conditions of systemic and structural racism and misogyny. When things get said in our presence and we remain silent or we offer words of encouragement, we become complicit in those attitudes. We say things in private we would NEVER say in public and doing so makes them impossible to combat or challenge the casual racism and sexism that run through everyday conversations even among well-meaning people who are otherwise working for social justice.  I have seen people read Billy’s email as suggesting we were circling the wagons against the BIPOC women. For my part, I was seeking out advice from senior BIPOC women so I could get insights on the best way to de-escalate this situation and figure out how to shift the editorship around this project to empower younger BIPOC scholars. Aware of some of the history, I was trying to find ways to avoid harm to the people involved.

As I was working to quickly address the core concerns that had been raised, I also allowed a sense of defensiveness to enter our exchange without fully realizing it myself. I work hard to hear, respect, and act on criticism, but I do have some feelings to work through when I am publicly called out. I should have slowed down to process those feelings. Instead, a certain degree of distrust entered my language and it enabled Proctor to write what he did. Systemic racism runs deep, it can reassert itself in unexpected ways, it transmits itself through unexamined assumptions and we need to correct each other when racist modes of thought enter our conversations.  We need to guard against our raw emotional responses which often surface unprocessed assumptions. I let everyone down by not making the right choices in the moment as I was trying to resolve a complex and tangled set of concerns. For this, I am really and truly sorry. I will do better.

Structural racism enters the conversation in other ways also. Because of structural racism,  Billy Proctor was already in my social circle and Samira Nadkarni was not. Because we knew each other, Proctor volunteered to help me with the grunt work on the blog, when others — for a multitude of reasons — would not have felt comfortable doing so. Because we were both white men, I felt comfortable in my interactions with him. Because I knew him, I did not want to harm him even as it was clear that his mistakes were making it impossible to continue to stand behind what he had done.  The social patterns created by structural racism also mean that I was more likely to respond defensively to Samira Nadkarni criticizing our project because I did not already know her. I recognize that such an impulse is wrong, because it contributes to those lacking access and power not being taken seriously when they risk speaking out. As a personal blog rather than a publication with an organization behind it, I have been personally trying to identify younger scholars to promote. But this means that, again, those people already inside or adjacent to my circles have structural advantages in getting asked to contribute. One reason I wanted us to have a call for papers was because I recognize this issue and wanted to expand access and identify new contributors not already in my network. As a consequence, I feel even worse that these efforts to reach out were so badly handled.   Again, I want to do better.

I owe this apology not simply to the women who were unfairly evoked in this specific incident but more broadly to young women, especially women of color, in the academic world, who so often are struggling to find their own voice as scholars, who are so often mischaracterized and dismissed when they pose important critiques of institutional, systemic and structural racism and misogyny. I admire these women’s courage in calling out senior scholars and entrenched assumptions in their fields. I would hate if anything I have done here has the effect of discouraging them from full throated participation in the core debates of their chosen fields. We need your contributions, even if it can be sometimes hard for older white male scholars, myself among them, to hear and process your critiques.  We all need to do better.

Where does this leave the two series? I honestly do not know. I am still working with some younger scholars who wanted to participate in overseeing them and still hoping to develop a framework under which they might move forward. I still believe something positive can come from this, but I want to go slow and find the most constructive way that this blog might address these topics. Whatever happens, I will be as open as possible in soliciting participation so that involvement goes beyond my pre-existing networks. I welcome any and all constructive feedback on the best way to proceed.