Hey there. It’s me, a black person who has seen you post something like “Race doesn’t matter when it comes to content creators” or “When I am looking for content creators, I don’t think about their race” or some other thing like this.
The thing is: it does. How do we know it does? Because I have to have this type of discussion whenever I say that racism isn’t necessary for tabletop rpg story plot.
Because we have seen ye olde demographic skew when it comes to people being punished or banned for breaking the rules of Twitch or even federal law.
Your solution was to tell people that their struggle wasn’t real.
Because this is one of many things when you have a black or black female person that gets tapped to be the new Agent 007.
Because when movies like Black Panther, Us, or Get Out and put up exceptional numbers in their debuts, it’s always because of “pandering to woke folks” and never because the movie is a good movie or well done.
People have literally burned shoes in protest when Kaepernick used his voice and position to share a message standing against clear wrongs in society.
I know I know I know. You don’t want this to matter. You want to imagine a world in which every single one of us are treated fairly and where if you hustle and grind enough, you can come out on top. You can win.
And it’s not saying that you cannot, but rather that many have and the factor of color and the perspective that being a person of color brings often come with challenges that make success challenging in ways that it will never be challenging for if you aren’t a person of color.
If you aren’t black.
If you aren’t native.
If you aren’t latinx.
The list goes on and so do the reports of every single person who has been affected by it because racism is real and the obstacles it poses in getting to the world we want for ourselves is also real.
So what do we do then? Well, we fight it, but for some that fight is to hard to directly deal with. Realizing that the fight is there requires more introspection than we want to engage in. So now we need to talk about you.
Yes, you.
Because your solution was to tell people that their struggle wasn’t real. Not that you didn’t understand it. Not that you haven’t had the experiences that they had but want to learn. You straight up took the time to come to your social media account and put out into the ether that this straight up parallel (and continuance) of history that people are experiencing in the current time… isn’t real.
That the people going, hey I don’t use voice chat in my games because people yell slurs at me constantly has no connection to you, also one of the brown people, because somehow this isn’t you and yours.
While you may be willing and even able to jettison your blackness into some other universe where it really doesn’t matter, those people who you are playing games with and making content for certainly do and will never fail to remind you of it when you get that headshot in an FPS or whenever they get drunk or otherwise frustrated.
When that happens, and yes, I do mean when, I’ll be here to welcome you and your blackness along with the rest of us who will then be glad to talk to you about being black and creator and everything else you are all together.