Part of me was thinking of trying to put my own skin in the game of holding white people to task for just the hard and soft dominance they uphold across the Internet but especially here. But to be honest, I'm exhausted of trying to be a white whisperer. I would hope that it isn't just my Black blood and exposure to Black relatives that led to me being able to break out of my own indoctrination into whiteness from childhood and that white people can learn the same as I did and am still doing... but the fact it's been a constant struggle for the roughly 26 years I've been online has left me jaded.
So instead let me just make clear my support of other BIPOC on here, and in particularly thanking you for being here and vocal. Much of my life on the Internet was before there were such numbers of people being openly POC and critical of whiteness online and off, but every year I've seen more and more of y'all and it fucking helps me hope for the future.
That's the basics, if you want to read much too long rambling about my history that is mostly just me trying to process the trauma the link is right there.
When I first got on the Internet, I essentially handled race by not talking about it or making it clear at all. Part of this was a difference in how (regretfully) I saw myself as apart from other Black people at the time, but it was also just because it was so much more white back then. Plus, it was freeing to be simply part of the mass of Internet users and not seen as Black. This wasn't necessarily, I thought, any shame at being Black, just that so much of my life then was wanting to be seen as a person first and foremost. I didn't want to be a "very smart person for a Black person", I wanted to be a "very smart person who is a Black person".
Well, this is probably a bit of making past me seem better than she was, because basically I had mostly bought into the ideas that racism had been mostly defeated with the successes of the Civil Rights movement and that now most of the complaints of racism were essentially whining. That's where growing up under Black (and white) conservativism gets you. And this blindness basically continued... for a very long time.
These masked days were some good days in my recollection because while I was mostly on the margins of every community I belonged to, most of my interest was just listening more than posting. I would read furry newsgroups and MST3K newsgroups and Slashdot and then eventually keep up with the news on Fark and mostly read people's comments more than posting my own (guess this hasn't really changed). Looking back, I was definitely surrounded by whiteness, but I had been trained to not see it as such, but in its common guise of "just being the way things are". I wasn't really exposed to much overt racism, so really I had little reason to break out of that mindset.
And plus, as I said, it was not as if there were many Black and other POC voices online to counter these.
Eventually, I barely graduated college after losing my scholarship because I definitely needed a bunch more help dealing with going to a primarily white institution than I accepted, and then went on to work in the mostly-white tech industry where I also began to burn out. I don't know what led to me ending up on 4chan during these very rough early adult years, but it was once again to be freed through anonymity.
I make a bad post? No worry, no one will be able to tie it to my next one. It felt good... but then I would do things like wander to the sports section and hear people refer to basketball as "apeball" and I think slowly the problems of 4chan became readily clear to me, and I "graduated" to what seemingly was a better haunt, Something Awful.
And forced to once again assume a pseudonymous mantle, I chose a now old screen name of mine that I felt described me well, but more importantly I chose an avatar that hinted at my interests and my Blackness. I was very into Firefly then, and was very taken by the character Jubal Early, who is a Black bounty hunter antagonist for a single constantly asking questions of an existential nature as he did his job. In the end of the episode he appears in, he gets shot out of the airlock, and for the closer of the episode as he is floating in space, he says to himself "well, here I am."
And so that was my first avatar and tagline on SA, and the end of the fully masked years into the mostly masked years. I still mostly didn't forefront my Blackness, but I didn't really hide it either and joining in the hype of getting Obama elected, it was even more pressing to not just reveal my Blackness but being biracial. Even on there I didn't really get bullied for being Black but the new part of myself I hid: being a furry. But look, y'all know the deal with that, so I'll skip over it.
If the Obama administration did nothing else it immediately revealed how much racism was still extant. Obama was pretty much perfectly crafted to be a safe respectable Black person but he absolutely broke the brains of so many white people who were not even ready. And seeing this, the cracks in my Black conservatism began to break.
It wasn't just online. I remember showing up for a game night between friends dressed in a hoodie with some Arizona Ice Tea and some Skittles completely independently shortly after Trayvon Martin's death carrying and holding the same thing. I didn't even notice until a friend pointed it out to me.
But also, I began to be exposed to more leftists and while I started that administration as a libertarian-liberal, by the end of the first term, I was making my first steps into actually protesting out for Occupy, and quickly becoming disillusioned with shit like sharing a beer in the Rose Garden. But I was still not generally exposed to Black leftists, but rather very frustrating Black liberals who seemed more interested in representation in media and supporting more milquetoast liberals like Obama and the rather topical Kamala Harris who would deny me my Blackness and eventually my transness to reduce me down into a "Bernie Bro caping for a white man" as if dark skin magically made people have good politics.
The fact that these people had claimed the mantle of "head nigger in charge" on that website accepting their little segregated area in The Great Race Space was infuriating but I didn't really realize why until much later, when the edgelord history of SA and long deference to FYAD came to a head in early 2020 in a bunch of really stupid drama I don't care to go over. I left to join an off-site, Bread and Roses. Here was where I dropped that username for Chimerror and began trying to forefront my Blackness more. And I remain glad about that. But this is also where I really began to run into the issues with white dominance of leftist spaces.
It was where I ran into people who seemed to think that their marginalized identities were a badge of honor and proof of their perfect knowledge of how oppression works. Where one of the main moderating decisions was exactly against a Black poster jokingly referring to Obama as "this nigga" because they just had no real knowledge of the "royal nigga".
I feel like I really did try to be a Black voice there while trying to keep my distance from becoming the "head nigger in charge" but one big explosion that led to me basically feeling like just being a pawn in the internal political struggles of the mostly white posters there, and I just left in a huff, happy to remain on the Fediverse yelling into my personal void.
And then, similar issues of anti-Blackness happened there, which was actually part of (as I understand it) which led to the reason why Cohost was made. I don't have the knowledge to relitigate that, and to be honest, I'd rather not, because I want to hope in people. But then it happened again here. And again and again...
This would all seem very discouraging and it definitely was, but at the same time, I began to realize that it was happening because Black people and other POC were actually getting online enough to show up. And I was able to find other Black voices (mostly on Twitter until that exploded). I was able to read people talking about anti-racism with more solutions than media representation. I was able to read people who actually lived in the Global South. It was just a trickle, but after decades it was so very welcome.
I don't want this to be about my various personal grievances with other websites, and I am not one to hold on to grudges, and I certainly did not always act with the type of honor I probably should have. I honestly do think a lot of well-meaning white people get caught up in this because they have similarly been trained to use their privilege to recenter themselves and retain their comfort and can't tie that many of the things they hate about the Internet is exactly a result of the broken social dynamics of whiteness that hides conflict.
No, like I said, I want to mainly talk to the other BIPOC here, and say that I appreciate y'all even if I often strongly disagree with your opinions and views and have even gotten in tiffs about that. I don't want that trickle to dry up because I no longer have that comfort in white spaces I used to and I still have so much more posting and sharing I want to do. So thank you, if for nothing else, being there.
