dhobi ki kutti

The Organisation of Transformative Works (OTW) is an organisation founded in white American racism, which has over the years doubled down and recommitted itself to upholding racist values. It has created a workspace infected top to bottom with racism, and has sustained racist attitudes towards the users of its various projects.

Three years ago it attempted to deflect the calling out of its risible anti-Blackness by responding to a community-led open letter with a mealy-mouthed statement that was followed three years later by an update which indicated no values had been changed or people held accountable. The only actions were ones that the community had to pull, like teeth, from the organisation.

This past month the OTW has added to its achievements as an institution upholding liberal white American values the championing of genocidal colonialism.

I will document and analyse the particulars of this in some length below, but I want to make it clear, right at the outset, that the OTW does not deserve the grace of being reasoned with. It should not be engaged with. It must be treated as an oppressive entity that seeks to speak for the very people it harms, and the goal must be to diminish its position in every way.

( Statements made by the Board of Directors regarding Palestine )

I want to highlight from within this rather incoherent set of statements, that:
1) The OTW has defined using "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" as harassment, because some volunteers find it threatening to read it as a status.
2) The OTW sees its job as protecting from discomfort the volunteers who espouse the kind of Zionist politics that frames this phrase as a threat.
3) The OTW is equating a phrase for decolonisation with "illegal things" effectively criminalising it.
4) The OTW views Israeli Zionist volunteers as being from "affected areas" deserving of protection, while it frames Palestinian (entirely hypothetical) volunteers, members and users as, as best, perhaps capable of not being "inherently harmful".

I had started typing up a long citation filled analysis, but really, this is just so ludicrous. It is ridiculous to say you are not political, when what you mean is that you are not liberatory.

And we deserve a liberatory organisation representing our interests. Fanworks only exist because of fanworkers--we need an organisation that is like an international union, not an undemocratic cabal of white, Global North hobbyists. We need fanworker representatives reaching out to other threatened artistic communities across the world, the many who are being arrested, attacked and killed for daring to make art that threatens majoritarian, fascist powers. For fuck's sake, how impoverished does your imagination have to be, to not connect your freedom to make art with Black peoples' freedom to breathe, and Palestinian peoples' freedom to live?

What disinvesting from and dismantling the OTW will look like is individualised for everyone according to their needs and abilities. The OTW has always had a very imperial British "we gave you trains" attitude towards the infrastructure they provide the communities they seek funding and social status from. It is perfectly legitimate to continue to use the trains while working to drive the colonisers out of power.

The most obscene part of the conversation that OTW tries to force fandom to have, of course, is derailing any impulse towards justice that centres the people actually harmed. Because it is inconceivable for the OTW to structurally think of Black fanworkers or Palestinian fanworkers as 'one of us', it expects everyone it interacts with to share this attitude of Othering.

The truth is that every kind of ethnicity and community has what we know as fanwork happening in some form or the other, and all those fanworks and therefore fanworkers are worthy of being cherished and sheltered. And the most instinctive, prolific fanworkers are children, everywhere, who take the stories they hear from adults and find ways to narrate themselves into them. Any ideology that demands the death of children is inhumane, of course, but it is also, specifically, anti-fanworker. Protecting the comfort of a gatekeeping community of fanworkers who espouse genocidal, colonial violence against children is destructive to the global future of fanworkers. There is no neutrality against ideologies of oppressive violence.

I can do so little, myself, and my own nation is full of bigoted warmongers who find opportunistic alliance between Zionism and their own Hindu ethnofascist genocides. But I've been trying to remind myself that at least I can exercise my imagination in the service of freedom.

I thought of what I would like an organisation that represented me as a fanworker to say, and I wrote it out. The Fanworkers International Coalition (FIC) doesn't exist, but if it did, I would want it to make a Statement of Solidarity with Palestine. If it did make such a statement, I would sign it.

So I have. And if you feel the same, so should you.

Fanworkers International Coalition Statement of Solidarity with Palestine
Sign the Statement here

It is absolutely mindblowing, in the worst way, to watch people who have marked themselves as anti-racist allies, line up to coddle the feelings of zionist settler-colonisers who continue to spew their defensive liberal propoganda of gentle apartheid and peaceful genocide.

There can be no dismantling of racism without decolonisation, and there can be no liberation without dismantling all empires, even the ones we are most complicit in. When people over the world are losing their jobs and bodily safety for merely speaking up in protest and ally-ship, it is dispiriting how conservative English-speaking fandom is; a place where pseudonymity and commerce-free exchange provides freedom of speech that might not be available in brickspaces.

Anyway, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, and anything less than full-throated denounciation of the genocidal colonial project that is Israel is colluding with the oppressors. Strength and solidarity with everyone speaking up and bearing witness and first and foremost for the citizens and peoples of Palestine.

In 2020, when I asked the OTW Board to document the conversation around #BlackLivesMatter, and racism, and they put it off, I started gathering evidence. I had an idea of writing a report, a thorough, researched, documented argument that could prove to anyone without a vested interest in denying it, that the Organisation for Transformative Works was infected, from top to bottom, with structural racism.

( This post is not that report. )

ETA (29/7/23): The first round of candidate chats happened today, at the beginning of which Zixin was asked an anonymously sent in set of questions that the Elections committee had deemed so targeted that they shared them with her in advance, and chose to redact the last one from the public chat. Zixin shared her answers to the questions, including the redacted one, to the Board channel, in an attempt to point to the magnitude of harassment she was facing from Board and Chairs, including Alex Tischer. (I can only speculate as to who I think sent her those questions, but my suspicions fall on a Chair, rather than a Board member.)

Today she edited her post to say:
"I have changed my mind and will be comfortable should my words here be publicly shared outside the org, if that is what it takes for others to better understand the situation mainland Chinese volunteers (and any Chinese person) face."

I am posting the racist, malicious question below, and letting Zixin's complete answer stand on its own, as proof of the stakes that we are talking about when we support Chinese speaking volunteers.

And, you asked fellow volunteers about their feelings on using the OTW account to join a digital protest in China, without getting input from your chairs.

Elections Committee decided to remove this sentence from the question when they ask it in the public chat, for which I am very grateful. To clarify, I personally have no memory of using the OTW account to join any forms of protest in China or having the intention to do so. I have asked a few other Chinese-speaking volunteers who have been volunteering here since 2020 (when I started modding Weibo) in private after I received this question whether they remember me bringing up any conversation like this in the past, and they don’t remember anything remotely similar to this either.

I am grateful that Elections decided not to bring this sentence to the public, because I don’t want there to be open discussions about me organising or joining a protest in China, an accusation that has actually resulted in imprisonment for other people (and in worse cases, led to people being directly disappeared without going through any formal legal procedure, which has happened to more than one of my friends). One reason I ran for Board is because I believe that volunteers here who have interacted with me would not intentionally put me in a politically dangerous position, not because I am naive enough to believe the Chinese government cannot spot me when they notice my activities in the OTW (which a politically contentious discussion may lead to). It only takes one Chinese person (maybe a couple to speed up the process) working in bad faith to notice the wank in English media, trace down my personal Weibo account (where I have been outed in my volunteer identity), and click on a few links for me to potentially get invited for a talk in my local police station.

I want to take this opportunity to say that for me, I not only feel the discrimination for my skin colour, nationality, and ethnicity, but also for the political environment I am in. Alex, if you still don’t understand why asking Chinese volunteers to leave the org when we feel unsafe is dismissive, let me explain it here. I’m sorry I thought it was self-explanatory before. This feeling of lack of safety – that we might get persecuted for groundless rumours, for a false accusation towards the org, for using a VPN to access AO3 and Google – didn’t suddenly grow out of nowhere after AO3 was banned in China, or after we added a controversial language tag. It infiltrates our life, every second we breathe, study in school, interact with friends, go to work, comment on social media, etc.

I guess it’s hard to understand for people who have never lived under an authoritarian government before, but if you let this feeling control you and prevent you from participating in any activities that make you feel anxious, you don’t get to do ANYTHING in your life. You don’t get to write fanfiction (fic writers have been sentenced to 10 years in jail), you don’t get to post on social media (my mom is a civil servant and her workplace forbids her from having a Weibo account), you don’t get to discuss matters with your friends privately (WeChat has a vibrant censorship system that automatically blocks sensitive words and sends reports to public security), you don’t get to tell jokes in public (standup comedians and their companies have been banned because someone interpreted their jokes as mocking the authorities), you don’t get to use a VPN (people have been detained for using VPN services), you don’t get to volunteer for this organisation (foreign NGOs cannot operate in China without permissions from the Public Security Bureau, and it’s up to them to interpret what their definition of “in China” is). It is literally impossible to live a life without fear under this regime.

What you have suggested in the past, and have repeated again today – that we should leave the org if we felt unsafe or unwell because of volunteering – is dismissive of the fact that we cannot avoid it, and you are framing it as if leaving the org would solve the problem: It would not. If you were ever not clear about this before, allow me to make it clear to you now: it’s not that difficult for the National Security Bureau to trace down the identities of volunteers accessing org tools in the mainland, even if they have already left the org. We have made the choice of taking the risk of volunteering for the OTW when we joined, and I hoped org leadership could respect our decision and not dramatically increase the risk for the past, current, and future volunteers living in the mainland without consulting us.

First Warning for Constructive Corrective Action Procedure (CCAP), emailed to me on 19th July 2023:
( Full Text of CCAP )

Posted to the OTW Board Public channel on 24th July 2023:

( My response )

Kutti commented:

Hi Legal,
I am a current volunteer with the OTW and I am posting this here because I have been waiting more than 3 weeks for Board to answer my questions regarding the May 2022 situation and its aftermath, and have received no response.

My questions (asked on 28th May 2023) were:
1) Who is in charge (board or legal or volcom) of creating the documentation for defining what an emergency is and what is authorised in it
2) What timeframe can we expect for this documentation to be drafted

I would also like to let you know that I received only 2 all-org emails after the May CSEM attacks, and the advice in them was limited to:

"If someone outside the U.S. received CSEM, they may also want to also report to NCMEC, since what they received came via U.S. servers. They should use their own judgment about reporting it to their own local, national, or regional authorities. Anyone who receives CSEM should delete it from their e-mail and hard drive. If you think you may have been a target of this malicious activity, do NOT open any unknown e-mail to investigate or find out what it contains." (dated 5 May 2022)

"We strongly recommend not opening any messages from unknown senders claiming to be from the OTW, particularly if they contain attachments. Delete them immediately. [...] We encourage you to choose a password that you haven't used before and cannot be easily guessed, and we strongly recommend that you enable 2-factor authentication. [...] "there is a possibility that any personal information you included in your Slack profile may have been compromised. We recommend that you take steps to protect yourself in the event this does occur. You may want to make changes such as: reviewing and removing information on your Slack profile, such as social media accounts; if your Slack profile has links to social media, removing location information and other identifying data from those accounts; changing your login data from those social media accounts, changing their protection level, or deleting them entirely."

You did not share any information about what to do if we were SWATTED, what to do if we were doxxed, or how to deal with the trauma if we were exposed to CSEM material. You did not offer any psychological assistance, and over a year later, according to the latest information, there are still no resources available for volunteers should we be attacked again. You did not even, as rahaeli's thread did, provide us the peer-reviewed citation to play Tetris.

(https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-otws-commitment-to-safety-responding-to-recent-concerns-about-ao3/?replytocom=289648#respond)