BigBadBoycott organizers reach agreement with tabletop convention leadership
“Big Bad's leadership has acted and failed to act in ways that have been harmful to the community, especially to people of colour.”
Organizers of a boycott aimed at Big Bad Con 2024 have accepted the annual tabletop design convention’s response to their demands. A letter published on September 27 titled “Our Stance in Support of Palestinians” contained explicit calls for “immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an embargo on US military support for Israel”, along with a denouncement of genocide, apartheid, and human rights violations carried out in the region by Israel. The convention released its statement on the same day that Israel extended its military campaign into Beirut, Lebanon, while the estimated death toll in Gaza tipped over 300,000, according to the Institute for Public Accuracy
The letter comes weeks after two prospective BBC panelists pledged to boycott the convention as a response to accusations from game designer Esther Wallace and tabletop performer Hamnah Shahid that convention officials “censored anti-Zionist language from event programming”, according to a public document of information supplied by the pair. Earlier this year, Wallace was invited to sit on a panel titled “Jewishness and TTRPGs” that “originally included the phrases ‘anti-Zionist’ and ‘from the river to the sea’” in its description, according to the organizers.
