Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]

On Peertube, yes! I’ll post at least three versions of the cartoon, in fact:

• A regular version with closed captions;
• A version with audio description for the blind and visually impaired; and
• A version where the voice tracks are disabled and most of the on-screen text is removed, so that anybody who so desires can dub the cartoon into their own language.

I have done exactly 3½ minutes of animation over the course of the past 24 days. It’s probably the most I’ve drawn since I was a little kid, and I’ve been having a blast with it. I don’t want to oversell the quality of the animation — it is very amateurish, there’s a lot of limited and reused animation, that’s part of the point — but the animation I’ve done still represents maybe on average 2 or 3 hours of work each night, so about 60 hours of work in total (probably well over 100 hours of work when counting the work that went into the prescoring, opening and end credits, and storyboarding).

I’m hoping to have about 9 minutes of animation done by July 15, but at this rate it’s looking more likely that I’ll only get about 5 or 6 minutes done, and I’ll leave the rest as storyboards. But we’ll see.

A lot of it has to do with equality and countering bias. If you’re writing alt text for a photo or doing audio description for a video, then the recommended policy is that you either describe everybody’s race or nobody’s: if you only describe the races of minorities, and leave people to assume white when you don’t describe people’s races, then this plays into the idea that being white is the default and anything else is somehow “exotic” or “other” or whatever. By not describing people’s races you also make it harder for whoever you’re talking to to apply their own biases/prejudices towards the person you’re talking about. Describing people’s races excessively can also make it seem like you’re yourself weirdly fixated on that one aspect of their being, which would be reductive.

This being said, I can only assume that your manager isn’t some great anti-racist activist. They’re really just trying to cover their (company’s) ass, which is why they didn’t explain the rationale very well (they don’t actually understand it) and their behavior isn’t consistent (they don’t actually care). There is also nuance to all of this, too, naturally, since “colorblindness” is not true anti-racism, so there are cases where it’s actually better to mention people’s races/ethnicities than not mention it; and if certain features of appearance weren’t stigmatized/racialized, they’d be just as suitable for a short description as any other feature. The problem is that you cannot easily teach these sorts of nuances to people who haven’t actually experienced racial prejudice: white people will (deliberately) misunderstand the nuances or try to do borderline things. So you end up just getting these blanket bans and taboos on mentioning race that make the frank and actually important discussions about racism difficult.

This is how I understand it, at least. Bear in mind that I’m not racialized myself, but the other commenter — infuziSporg — is.

Edit: Turns out I misunderstood, infuziSporg is white.