“Heavily Rooted in Racism”
Proshipping Exists in a World Dominated by White Supremacy…but so does Anti-Shipping
On October 19th of 2022, Twitter user MAYRAGEOUS tweeted that “proshippers always preach ‘anti harassment’ wait until they realize their beliefs r heavily rooted in racism n bigotry” [sic]. On several levels, this tweet can be broken down and pulled apart even simply with the striking difference in the definitions that proshippers have of “proship” and the definitions that antis have of “proship.”
How a proshipper defines “Proship:” A term denoting an ideology based on mutual disassociation of fans within a fandom whose aesthetic tastes do not align.
How an anti-shipper defines “Proship:” A term denoting an ideology based on the acceptance and perpetuation of pedophilia, incest, and zoophilia by the creation of fictional fanworks depicting these acts.
Since the demographic of this substack is ostensibly “proship” or at least proship-leaning in ideology even if we don’t identify as proship, we’ll take a look at this through the lens of the first definition since it is the one that we all can take seriously and would, presumably, be the one that proshippers would “realize” is based in bigotry.
The main aspect we have to note is that proship is an ideology that promotes an anti-censorship stance and that is not to say we’re all free speech absolutists (I am), but we’re all of the mind that reading and writing freely without hinderance from public or private pressure groups is what drives forward movements, education, and passion for societal good and individual mental and emotional health. An example of what real life proship causes would look like would be things like petitions to end the censorship of what books are available to prisoners. The uncomfortable reality is that U.S. prisons have banned a striking amount of books written by Black authors. Realistically, when censorship is implemented, the very nature of it is inherently an “us versus them” toward minorities. Why? Because, as we all know, white supremacy is still in the very bones of our societal structure—it literally can’t manifest in any other way at the current time.
Now, knowing that censorship manifests almost exclusively as racist in implementation, does this mean that the inverse must also be true? Well the truth is that it can in the form of allowing hate speech (that’s not to say hate speech wouldn’t have consequence, it simply means that it wouldn’t be actionable to ‘outlaw’). But it turns out that anti-censorship simply doesn’t have the “legs” that censorship has in its ability to limit freedoms among minorities, especially since anti-censorship in a universal value set makes it so that everyone has an open forum in which to speak. Anything less than total freedom is a manifestation of censorship. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about the United States’ very particular freedoms, those that are specifically designed to allow for the freedom of speech, press, assembly—those rights that specifically allowed him to fight for civil rights. Those are the exact things that make up the ideologies of proshippers, are they not?
Proship ideology is based in a very deep connection to how we like to live and how we like to think and our belief that those things are none of anyone else’s business. I know that this very sentiment resonates among those with us and among us who have faced challenges due to their marginalization—their race, their religion, their disability. Antis like to delude themselves into the belief that the passive residue of proship is a sign of illness that might end up contagious or a mechanism by which LGBTQ+ communities might suck in and groom unsuspecting children (a notion very much funded and pressed by conservatives worldwide). They think that the notion of setting up personal boundaries is inherently racist. They think not kowtowing to every whim and demand from everyone 14 year old future scam-artist is inherently racist. They think the recognition of evil as a fundamental aspect of humanity is inherently racist (this can get ironic).
One must know how the old saying goes: good fences make good neighbors—you live your way and I live mine. You have fiction your way and I’ll have fiction mine. You let your child read those books, I’ll let my child read these. I will do my best to keep the stones short so that I might wave over them from time to time. Is anti-censorship still under the structure of white supremacy? Yes. Everything is. Is proship ideology deeply rooted in bigotry? No. Not any more or less than anti-ship ideology is. Nevertheless, there is only one ideology there which promotes the exact antithesis to the work of civil rights activists…and it’s not proship.