Not me personally. I'm not a public figure. Not enough people know I exist to be the target of the kind of yelling that drove Lindsay Ellis off of YouTube. I have no doubt that I would be on the receiving end of something like this if I made YouTube videos and had as many followers as Lindsay, because I know I'm flawed and need a lot of work to improve myself. Just with the small number of people I have limited contact with, I occasionally get corrected, and I don't always react well at first when I receive this kind of criticism. Because I'm not a public figure, I don't get subjected to the kind of massive harassment that drove Lindsay off of YouTube. What I get is genuinely constructive criticism that is generally short and sweet because I'm a nobody.
Further, I want to stress that I'm a fan of both Jessie Gender and Lindsay Ellis. Like most, I was introduced to Lindsay with her heartfelt analysis of Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, and quickly got swept away by her other videos. She once explained auteur theory through the lens of the Transformers movies, a hilarious trip through absurdity that was also very educational for someone like me who doesn't know much of anything about film theory.
This is going to sound sociopathic and I don't care. I'm not really that upset about what happened to Lindsay Ellis, even though I'm going to miss getting new videos from her.
Here's the thing, I don't think what the wokescolds did to her was an overreaction. Was it an overreaction to what she said? Yes, absolutely. The flood of harassment she was subjected to was very much an overreaction to what she said, but it was not an overreaction to the issue. I've seen plenty of people offering opinions about what happened to Lindsay as though this happened in a vacuum. It didn't happen in a vacuum.
People's grandmothers are being beaten to death in the streets.
We are in the middle of an all-too precedented increase in violent racism against Asian-Americans, and I'm surrounded by people who seem to think that the worst thing about all of this is that a few white people are being verbally abused for relatively minor misstatements or opinions.
Is Lindsay an anti-Asian bigot? No. Was her opinion about Raya and the Last Dragon something that was likely to contribute to anti-Asian violence? No.
I'll go one step further. I'll argue that the wokescolds who yelled at Lindsay were focusing too much on a relatively innocuous opinion about a children's movie because they feel guilty about not doing much about the real problem, which is the environment of hate combined with the Republican inability to admit that Trump's pandemic response was beyond reprehensible. We all feel guilty about living in, participating in, and failing to fix our horrible, broken, racist society, and some of us take it out on some public figure who had a poorly-considered hot take about an animated movie about a magic dragon.
I don't care.
Lindsay is white and intelligent. She'll find something else to do. She has options that are not available to many victims of racism, particularly victims of racist incidents that kill them or someone they love. YouTube isn't going to run out of film critics or people explaining film theory because of this incident.
Tadataka Unno was told by doctors he would never play piano professionally again as a result of a violent attack by slobbering anti-Asian goons. Thankfully, the doctors turned out to be wrong, but why in the flying fuck are we as a society spending more time talking about what happened to Lindsay Ellis than what happened to Tadataka Unno?
Oh right. That.
All of the ink being spilled about wokescolds harassing someone over a relatively minor statement or opinion would be a valid and important issue if we weren't spending more time talking about this than the things that are making all those wokescolds so angry in the first place. All the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about wokescold mobs only serve to illustrate the problem further, and the problem is not people being too angry about racism.
People are not being too angry about racism. People aren't angry enough.
Republicans almost single-handedly created this massive spike in anti-Asian violence by dredging up old "yellow scare" bullshit that is still embedded in our society and deliberately stirring up anti-Asian hate in order to distract everyone from Trump's failure to adequately respond to the pandemic, and all the things Trump did to actively make the pandemic worse.
Yes, we should focus more of our ire on the people deliberately making racism worse instead of hounding liberals like Lindsay Ellis. While I think that what happened to Lindsay was wrong and she was no doubt traumatized by what happened, I'm not losing any sleep over the occasional minor celebrity being chased out of the public sphere by wokescold harassment. I'm more worried about all the families that now have to care for a loved one with violence-induced disabilities, or who will never speak to a loved one again.
It sickens me that people are more worried about making white people feel bad about racism and the results of racism than they are about the very large number of minorities suffering much worse under the effects of racism. Once again, the feelings of white people take precedence over the lives of minorities, and I'm getting sick of it.
There's a parallel here. People are more upset about people expressing joy at the death of anti-vaccine nuts than they are about the hundreds of thousands of needless deaths caused by the lies of anti-vaccine nuts. People are more upset about someone calling Republicans fascists than they are about how many people would die if Republicans succeed in ending constitutional rule and installing a fascist regime.
Again and again, our priorities are so distorted that we're more worried about the feelings of members of the privileged group than the much greater harm caused by the privilege itself.
Which I guess is the point.
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