This has been cloned for documentation purposes. Please share and support dhobikikutti on their post over here.

On 25 August 2023, dhobikikutti resigned as a Tag Wrangler from the OTW.

Copy of Resignation Letter to OTW Board

25th August 2023
To Kari Dayton, President of the OTW Board, and Michelle Schroeder, OTW Board Director:

On 13th June 2023 I had posted an open letter to you to formally accuse the organisation leadership of fostering a culture of structural racism and discrimination. I had asked that you respond to my demand for an external audit before 16th June, so that ownership of the action rested with the current Board. I have, till date, received no response from the Board regarding this letter.

On 3rd July 2023 I asked a question in the Public Board Meeting regarding the Board’s response to a fellow member’s racism: “how can I or any other volunteer of colour possibly trust a Board that refuses to hold their fellow Board Member accountable, or have any confidence in your capability to select a Diversity Consultant who will actually be empowered enough to advocate against the pervasive culture of racism that permeates this organisation?”
I followed up in the Board channel in response to your answer, pointing out how your reply perpetuated racism. I have, till date, received no response from the Board to this comment.

On 24th July 2023 I shared the full text of the CCAP I was sent by my Tag Wrangling Committee Chairs, and stated that I held the chairs and Board responsible for the CCAP, which was a blatant example of racist retaliation against me. I have, till date, received no response from the Board to this statement.

On 26th July 2023 a Board Member replied to another volunteer’s comment to assert that my actions were against the code of conduct, but their own racism was not. I asked each individual Board member if they would care to respond to the racist doubling down of their fellow Board member. I also linked the Board to a public statement I had made calling for the OTW membership and larger user base to demand Alex Tischer’s resignation. I have, till date, received no response from the Board to this question or demand.

On 27th July 2023 I asked you—Kari and Michelle—to call a public meeting to dismiss Alex Tischer from both the board and the org. I pointed out that you were going to be sharing a Board with at least two Asian members who had been directly impacted by Alex’s racism and that you were responsible for managing the hiatus status of your fellow Board members. I have, till date, received no response from the Board to this demand and observation.

On 28th July 2023, following Alex Tischer’s resignation, I said in the Board channel, “I hope the current board will fulfil their duty towards the volunteers who have protested these systematically racist conditions by removing Alex from the org.” I have, till date, received no response from the Board to this statement.

On 24th August 2023 I received an email from the Tag Wrangling Chairs (the full text of which I will reproduce below). This email claimed entire responsibility for the CCAP, maintaining that the Board and Volcom was not party to the opinions voiced in it. I have, till date, received no response from the Board (nor from Volcom), regarding this email, which continues the pattern of ignoring racism as a vector of abuse that I have suffered from.

Your actions and inactions towards me are racist.

It is a form of racism to ignore testimonies of experienced racism, and to rebuff through silence a volunteer of colour who is repeatedly asking for justice from the only official channels they have access to. It is a form of racism to continually permit organisational leadership to both be racist, and to take no responsibility for their actions.

While I have both the ability and the energy to continue what Sara Ahmed frames as ‘complaint as diversity work’, I have realised that the ultimate goal of the OTW leadership is to create scenarios where volunteers of colour are pitted against one another while white leadership can affect helpless indifference. I have no wish to participate in the farce of asking the three Asian Board members of the upcoming board to take responsibility for the institutional racism that they themselves have been subjected to.

I am, therefore, resigning from my position as volunteer in the tag wrangling committee, effective immediately. I do not resign out of burnout, or indifference, but because you are demanding that I obey racist rules and regulations, and I can no longer remain complicit with the OTW’s contempt and bigotry towards volunteers and fans of colour.

I remain, as ever, open to providing whatever advice and empathy I can to volunteers of colour within the organisation who continue to attempt to reform it. Even when we might be in disagreement, I stand in solidarity with your right to a volunteer experience free of racism.

Kutti (Dhobi ki Kutti)

Hi Dhobi ki Kutti,

We understand from your response in the otw-board-public room that you are "waiving [your] right to confidentiality". Nevertheless, we Tag Wrangling Chairs will continue to treat this as a confidential matter per our CCAP procedure and respond privately.

We apologize for the lack of clarity of the previous email. Based on your response in the work room, it appears that this may have caused misunderstandings regarding both the purpose and scope of the CCAP process that we would like to clear up. We want to give clarifications to any ambiguous language that was used.

Clarifications

* In Tag Wrangling, we issue CCAPs with the intent of finding a path forward wherever possible, not seeking to remove volunteers. We issued this CCAP instead of giving an informal warning because you had committed several major policy violations within a short period of time, and we wanted to provide you with guidance to prevent you from committing further violations that could result in removal from the Org. As a Tag Wrangler, the Tag Wrangling Communications Policy and duty of Confidentiality within our Code of Conduct (CoC) do apply to you just as they apply to all members of the Committee. It is not our intention to intimidate you nor place restrictions on your ability to voice your opinions within and outside of the OTW beyond asking that you abide by these policies.


* The opinions voiced in the CCAP are NOT the ‘official response of this Org's Board and Chairs to [your] behaviour over the course of the last month’. The investigation of alleged policy violations, drafting, and execution of corrective action plans is entirely the responsibility of the chairs of your committee(s): in this specific case, Tag Wrangling Chairs. It is standard procedure to copy VolCom Chairs and the Board when any CCAP is issued for documentation purposes only.


* We also want to clarify what we meant by "public rooms” in the Org's communication platform. The public committee work rooms (rooms ending with -public) are often called "the public rooms” by Tag Wrangling Chairs, and we should have realised that such phrasing could be misinterpreted to mean all rooms that are public. The public work rooms are typically cross-committee workspaces, and there are a wide array of volunteers in these spaces who are not Committee Chairs or Supervisors but may not be able to leave the space as it is a work space. It is not required that you avoid asking potentially tense questions in these rooms repeatedly, but it would be a kindness if you made a point of threading those questions to limit the impact on those volunteers.


* The paragraph "If you wish to ask a question about a particular-" was intended to give you a clear way to continue to ask questions which link to social media posts without worrying you were violating policy, by asking Chairs privately. Although we would request that you ask questions with links like this privately, you are not required to keep the answers you receive private within the Org, so long as the answers do not also contain information that could link the fannish and/or real identities of any OTW volunteers (other than yourself).

* The paragraph "Be more cautious about how you link things-" asks that you exercise caution and consider whether your question can be asked without the inclusion of links (since asking questions without links that violate the CoC isn't an issue at all).


* As part of this corrective action, we have specifically asked three things of you which we will remunerate below in the hope of providing additional clarity to these requests:

* One: Due to an abundance of caution, we would like you to please cease linking to social media posts which may, however unintentionally, link the fannish, OTW, and real identities of volunteers within the OTW together or further draw attention to instances where this has occurred.


* In accordance with the Tag Wrangling Communications Policy and duty of Confidentiality within our CoC, we ask that you:


* Two: Do not quote or cut and paste sections of documents, email communications, or internal conversations into external conversations or public forums if these documents, email communications, or internal conversations have not been released externally by the OTW and/or all the parties involved in the discussion have not agreed to you doing so.


* Three: Do not summarize internal communications and conversations for external spaces. Internal communications are not, and should not be, considered material that can be shared elsewhere (even in summary form) if they have not been released externally by the OTW and/or all the parties involved in the discussion have not agreed to you doing so.

Further clarification for One: This does not mean you cannot link social media posts at all. We are asking you to be certain that the social media posts you post do not -however unintentionally- link the fannish, OTW, and/or wallet identities of volunteers within the OTW together or further draw attention to instances where this has occurred.

Further clarification for Two/Three: It is your willingness to disregard these policies that generated the most discomfort from the volunteers who contacted us and Volcom over the last month, not the content of your conversations within and outside the OTW as a whole. Whether something is an official statement from the Board or Chairs or not, if it is not released externally, it should still not be disseminated for public consumption.

These are the only actions you are required to take as part of this CCAP.

We hope that if you have any remaining questions about this CCAP or are still unclear on what we mean by any of the required actions, you will ask us for clarification.

We understand that there is a fine line to walk in terms of calling out issues and documenting problematic behaviour and policies while still operating in compliance with these policies. However, we do believe it is possible to walk this line, and if you truly do not believe it is possible, we are happy to work towards improving our policies to ensure they allow for accountability and documentation of issues so that our policies cannot be used to perpetuate abuse.

We are certain that, as a Committee, we can work together to do this while still providing for our volunteers an expectation that their communications and the information they share will be kept confidential to the best of our ability and that there is an avenue of recourse if they are not.

Finally, we Chairs apologize for anything we may have done during your time with the Tag Wrangling Committee which has made you feel that you cannot come to us with your concerns directly. We do care about your experiences, and we are open to any feedback on creating a better environment for our volunteers. If you have questions about the CCAP (or otherwise); need assistance; or would like to lodge a complaint, we are here to listen and to help when and wherever we can.

Warm Regards,
[Name Redacted]
On Behalf of TW Chairs

Commentary

(link) axolotls:

Oh yikes. What others have said, this is such racist doubling down (and that threat in basically saying the CCAP was issued to avoid having to remove you! Removal from the org, for calling out racism!). I admit I didn't expect it from the Tag Wrangling Chairs, but then, all evidence says the org is rotten to the core. I really hope there are structural changes that could be done to counteract this. People who are unaware of their racist actions yet keep oppressive systems going are always going to be around, but maybe once that's noticed it could be acted on somehow... I wish the incoming Board a lot of luck. I'm sorry it had to come to this for you, I hope your resignation and this letter makes some waves.

dhobikikutti:

The funny thing is that I hadn't even begun to really question the Tag Wrangling Chairs about any of the problems in that committee--the only interaction I had with them was to say it was great that tag wranglers removed the slur acronym for Omegaverse from all canonicals, and that it would be nice if that was publicised. But yes, I would say the org is definitely seeped in racism to its core.

vass:

Came here through a link today, and am catching up on what happened.

First of all, I'm so sorry for everything this organisation has put you through. That email from the tag wrangling chairs is a pile of stinking shit. If I knew nothing about the OTW except that email, I would still think "yikes, what a lot of red flags."

Second, wait, they removed that slur from the AO3's canonical tags? I hadn't heard (I don't read much Omegaverse) but that's a really good step and definitely something that deserves to be publicised. Thank you for the good news.

dhobikikutti:

Yes, the removal was prompted by a couple of individual tag wranglers and supervisors, who were paying attention to discussions going on in the AO3 public blog post comments. One supervisor in particular (who is white) has been attempting to change racist and offensive terminology for years, in a quiet but dogged way. The tag wrangling chairs did not, to my knowledge, do anything to either help or hinder this.
When I suggested that they make a public post to announce it, they were politely non-committal to me, and though they did mention the achievement in the internal newsletter, they chose not to include it in the external one.

(link) dhobikikutti:

Yes the problems are foundational. Just one small example - after promising an update from the DCRO in the monthly newsletters, you will notice that there hasn't been one after the initial first and only time. There have been no updates internally either.

(link) (links in this comment my own) dhobikikutti:

In belated response to [chestnut_pod's] valuable May post which triggered a lot of the external discussions, I'd like to share my own observation that the racism in the OTW is not a result of its structural dysfunction. All the problems of incompetence, dysfunction, undemocraticness, seige-mentality, etc etc, that critics have been commenting on for over 10 years are certainly there. And getting rid of all those flaws would certainly change the nature of the racism in the org. But even the most efficient, competant, well-run organisations are racist when they are built on white liberal values, and the OTW is racist because of its whiteness.

(link) dhobikikutti:

I do not think the OTW ever considered me any kind of expert, because the general assumption in it is that all the white people in charge are the smart, clued-in kind who know everything there is to know about the theory and praxis of racism (and therefore could never be racist). And bluntly, because I did very little theorising or critical analysis in there, since just asking questions was met with such hostility.
I'm not so worried about people outside fandom remembering things - people have been pretty good about keeping receipts. It's the OTW itself that does its best to destroy all evidence of how decisions are made internally. There are almost no meeting minutes, they don't document asynchronus meetings (which is what slack conversations should be treated as) and they never do any kind of accountability review to put down on paper any missteps of the past.

(link) Anonymous:

Kutti, I'm posting this anonymously because I'm cowardly, but as one of your former TW Chairs, I'm very sorry.

When you began speaking out, I was frustrated because I recalled you as a wrangler who only worked irregularly and who kept doggedly returning to fandom structure questions rather than working within given constraints.

I reflect now that this was a form of the institutional racism you're talking about, and that no matter how broad and inclusive we mean them to be, even fandom wrangling policies can and do contribute to systematic harm towards volunteers and users of colour.

I'm sorry for not listening to you at the time, and I'm sorry for not understanding the sheer number of walls in place at the OTW that you had to contend with. I'm sorry for my participation in this system, even though I'm no longer a part of it.

Thank you for your immense efforts towards change. I know it doesn't mean much, but I have learned a lot by reading what you've said. Thank you for speaking out so much against racist policies and trying to make the OTW a better place. Thank you for all the work you've done, measurable or not.

I wish you the very best.

dhobikikutti:

I've sat with this comment for a while now, trying to figure out what to say.
I suppose there is no real conversation to have, so there is no need for me to say much, beyond to agree, for any observer reading this, that yes, I did keep questioning structures, and yes, I do classify the response I got from you and the other chairs as part of the institutional racism that tag wrangling in specific suffers from.
I am not sure I would classify my pattern of work as irregular, as much as interminnent: I deliberately chose a few tiny fandoms where I had specific cultural knowledge and expertise, and for the most part I wrangled my tags every two weeks according to the rules. But there were gaps when I didn't so, yes, fair enough. (And I listed those fandoms as looking for co-wranglers for three years without getting anyone, as procedure advised me to do.)

Note to bystanders: Because I appreciate that it took some sense of accountability for this commenter to post here at all, I will ask that anyone reading this not make guesses as to their identity in this space, at least.

Anonymous:

I agree, there is no conversation here. I said it because I wanted you to hear it. Thank you for acknowledging it; there is no need to say anything else.

I want to clarify, for your sake and for any bystanders, that I am not a currently sitting Chair or a member of the OTW. I left in 2022. I have only been observing all this year's goings on from the outside, and this is where it left me.