Toxic Controversies, the Online Imagining of ‘Blackwashing’, and Anti-Fan Victimhood

This chapter addresses the hitherto unresearched topic of online audiences’ highly problematic claims of media ‘blackwashing’, where non-white actors play white characters or take roles away from white actors. The chapter begins by charting whitewashing’s empirical qualities in mainstream Western film and television, demonstrating long-standing traditions of racial marginalization and the hegemony of whiteness. Analysing Reddit and Quora threads and posts, the chapter subsequently explores how anti-fans conceptualise blackwashing in relation to whitewashing, whereby a post-racial conflation of the two terms creates a moral absolutism that neglects the latter’s tangibility and, in turn, mythologizes the former. Consequently, racist knowledge economies maintain and extend digital toxic spatiality. The chapter then analyses how users’ moral absolutist stance develops a deontological ethical schema through which they criticise non-white media representations in three interconnected ways: 1) canonical fidelity to pre-existing franchise (trans)media characters; 2) accuracy of historical figures within media pertaining to race; and 3) blackwashing as a general practice in mainstream media. Emblematic of wider culture wars that seek to reclaim whiteness, such discourse neglects or fabricates media production political economies that overwhelmingly normalise whiteness in above- and below-the-line roles. Concurrently, the chapter argues blackwashing anti-fandom operates on a continuum of proximity with media objects: from intimate to distant engagement, to proto-anti-fandom towards what I term ‘imagined media’; inverting Benedict Anderson’s (1991) model of imagined communities served by media. Finally, the chapter triangulates blackwashing within general toxic online practices; extant myths of ‘reverse racism’; and current socio-political relations including: civil rights protests and the perpetuation of white supremacy, white victimhood and ‘cancel culture’, and post-truth politics, evidencing how anti-fandom intersects with wider ideological climates. Thus, the chapter develops the complexity of toxic fan practices, supports the growing body of work on race and fandom, and diversifies anti-fan discourse.