so I haven’t really been on TikTok that much lately one I haven’t been reading that much and so there hasn’t been anything for me to talk about but two y’all the election content on here actually makes me wanna lose my mind so I’ve just not been on here but I did wanna come on here and talk about the SMP boycott and the R4A situation because to be honest I’m feeling angry and I’m feeling disillusioned I’m angry because I’m watching mutuals and like former mutuals like repost videos with racism and baseless accusations line I’m seeing them like Kiki in the comment section of these videos and I think that this is honestly like feeding into the disillusionment of like I thought that there was a community where there perhaps wasn’t and I’m just realizing like there is a lot of misalignment um within people who were like using the same language right which is probably why we thought that there was this community but I think that this misalignment on a larger scale is one of the reasons why we got here to where we did with the R4A s m P boycott I feel like at this point y’all we have gotten so far from the plot that there is no plot anymore but let’s go back so that you can understand sort of what I’m talking about when I talk about this misalignment the boycott started on October 23rd after lean who initiated the boycott tried to bring it to the attention of of people at SMP that like hey you have this employee who is working with influencers some of which some of whom are Palestinian and Muslim and this employee is posting this like anti Palestinian and islamophobic rhetoric and the response was like very dismissive from SMP and so like the boycott started this context is really important because this is in the first few weeks of what would become an 11 month encountering genocide so the rhetoric that the employee was sharing was manufacturing consent for this genocide but not only this genocide like other violence being inflicted upon Palestinians even here because a week after the boycott started the six year old boy in Chicago who was Palestinian was stabbed to death so it became even more urgent to denounce this rhetoric and I think one of the things that’s like missing from the conversation that like will help sort of make at least to me what is helping that make sense this sort of like what the hell happened is that Leen is someone who is Palestinian but also like has experience as an advocate as an activist as an organizer for Palestine and so when she is starting this boycott and she’s thinking about these demands it is with that orientation of like yes this is about what happened at s m P but it’s also larger than that right it is about this larger dehumanization of Palestinian and so when we’re looking at the first two demands right they are specifically about the inciting incident of the anti Palestinian and islamophobic rhetoric and then like repairing harm particularly to Palestinian and Muslim readers the last demand was about influencer safety at large because this person who was spewing this rhetoric had access to like influencers personal information and so when we step back and we look at the overall purpose of this boycott how we got here it from its inception was meant to be a more radical boycott a boycott that pushed and challenged the system but I think what happened was when the conversations about legalities and New York labor laws hit the scene there was a shift from what the original purpose of the boycott was it became this thing where like demand number one and two kind of became like off to the side right and demand number three became the thing and that’s because demand number three is something that you can work within the system to get which is exactly how we saw the win there was H R and corporate language use pulled from Macmillan themselves to be like hey this is what you all said you do so then like why aren’t you doing it it’s not to say that that was the wrong decision or the like the wrong path to take it’s just to say that while that secured a win for demand 3 there were still these other demands over here that also people including myself were like but what about these and you know people are like well they can’t speak about uh individual employee okay great I’m not asking them to I’m actually asking them to speak about themselves as a publisher because after about a week of silence to be honest for me I was like oh y’all are complicit and you’re actually okay with um anti Palestinian racism you’re okay with Islamophobia and so I I don’t need you to speak about your specific employee I need to speak of I need you to speak about like what’s going on with you all I am not a lawyer but I don’t think it would be illegal for a general we denounce anti Palestinian racism they they got somewhere like they did say Islamophobia and then they were like and every other form of discrimination instead of that just throw in anti Palestinian racism and then there needed to be like conversations with Palestinians and Muslims to talk about like what happened that’s mitigating harm that’s repair but for me I felt like SMP was like here’s some things we’re gonna do and instead of going to the table and being like okay great but what does oversight look like for these things and what about the conversations that needs to be had with Palestinians and Muslims and like what about all of these other things it was just like actually we’re done with the boycott demands have been met like out of here which to me is like wait a minute what’s going on and like I do know that they said like there’s more work that needs to be done but to me it’s like yes if there’s more work that needs to be done then you don’t give up all of your leverage and in the boycott right like you you keep going until there’s been actual movement on that work and last thing I wanna say in terms of misalignment I straight up had a white person on threads tell me no one is owed free labour if y’all wanna continue the boycott then just do it and this is this is what I’m talking about like that mentality I’ve been in some organizing spaces I promise you that mentality is not welcome in any of them they would be like how about you go read some books beloved and come back when you’re ready because like in organizing spaces like there’s disagreement all the time and sometimes that disagreement means like people have to leave because they don’t like the approach that’s being taken sometimes people leave because they’re tired and then like we’ve done all that we can do like that happens all the time what’s unique about the situation is like the deletion of everything um and you know I’ve seen people being like well Lane did say like they’re not the moral authority on the boycott and so like take down the statement I want you to repeat back those words to yourself and tell me where and anything you just said you hear the words delete all resources and everything that was ever attached to the boycott that’s all I got to say like you’re not gonna be seeing any SMP content for me but also like I don’t think I would have ever been like ready to jump back back into like doing free labor for this publisher after like they showed their ass the way that they did and the last thing I’ll say is I’m seeing a lot of complete one 80s I’m seeing people say like okay we now need to like get out here and post all of this content from these marginalized SMP authors because like the boycott really hurt them and that is incorrect the boycott did not hurt these marginalized authors at SMP SMP hurt them it still remains true that if influencers withholding marketing withholding free labor from a big five publisher can negatively impact the cells of a marginalized authors book and there is something going on with the publisher and it’s probably the very racism that LED to the boycott to begin with I’m just saying because SMP can scrounge up some funds for their biggest often white authors but everybody else is told good luck that’s not an influencer problem yeah so I don’t really know what my like activity will look like on this app but I’ll be on threads in Instagram