There’s a saying that goes Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.
So! On this first day of Black History Month, I want to give white people (and Black people too who aren’t online much) a little insight into what it’s like being a very online Black person. Back when I used to write and post constantly, I would do posts like this pretty regularly, but now that I don’t blog as much as I used to, I haven’t done as many behind-the-scenes views into social media as a Black person.
First, I want to remind everybody that SLTA (the previous name for this site) is a blog. It’s just me. I have a thought, I flesh the thought out, and I put it on the internet. It serves a few purposes. One, it’s a hobby and something I like to do. I like to create things be it arranging music or baking cakes or knitting coats or painting pictures or writing little essays about what I think. Two, it’s affirming in many ways. If I’m angry about something or upset or confused or sad, it feels good to put it out there and then have other people read it and go “yes, I feel this way too.” As a person who doesn’t like to talk about my emotions, it makes me feel less alone to put them into words for others to read and connect with. Three, it’s a way to keep in touch. There might be 20,000 random people on my Facebook, but 500 of them are people I know from elementary school to my first job to a vacation I took to Montreal. I don’t have any babies to post pictures of on Facebook, to which my 3rd grade best friend might say “OMG she’s so cute!” I have a blog that my 3rd grade best friend can comment “LOL that is too funny.”
Fourth, it was a way to keep a roof over my head when I was writing more often and making more money, but even then — it’s just a blog. I don’t actually owe you anything. I don’t owe you a safe space. I’m not obligated to censor myself because a shitty person might agree with me and bring their shitty social network into my corner of the Internet.
Anyway, racists, bigots, and other troglodytes of ill repute find their way to Black people on social media, and they harass us. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years simply fighting for the right to keep a page on Facebook at all (this also goes for Twitter). When I open my Facebook inbox and someone has called me the n-word or they’ve sent me a picture of a noose, I report them. That’s one report against this person. If that person has taken offense to what I’ve said (if you’ll notice, I rarely say “white people” in a Facebook post because racists have taken offense to being discussed as a group and they report that phrase), they’ll report me. That’s one report against me.
But they will use the search function to pull up other things I might have said that offend them. That’s three more reports. And then they will share those posts on their own page to show their racists friends that there is a Black person talking too much on the Internet, and they will come and report me too. Suddenly, Facebook has logged 100 reports against me and I’m locked out of my account for a month. At the height of my visibility I was getting kicked off of Facebook once every 3 or 4 months. I made five Facebook profiles and linked them all to SLTA so Facebook wouldn’t take down SLTA permanently. Anytime I made a post, I would log into one of the aliases, post to SLTA, and then log back into my page, because if that post got reported, it would count against the alias and not the page itself.
Do you see how much work that is just to counteract bigots with too much time on their hands? That was just to keep the page up and running itself.
I stopped checking my inbox. I check it a bit more now because I post less and I only get super political like once a month instead of 3 to 5 days a week, so I don’t get n-words and ropes and burning crosses that often anymore. For three or four years, I didn’t check my inbox at all, because I was tired of sifting through hate mail just to get to a genuine response or question about something. I don’t know how to explain to people what it feels like to get burning crosses from strangers in your inbox just because you said Black people should have the right to vote without intimidation, but it doesn’t feel great.
Now, on to the posts themselves — it takes a lot of work to moderate a comment section. When SLTA was on tumblr, I didn’t have to worry about people leaving comments, but when I moved to WordPress, there was a built-in commenting feature. Technically, it’s still turned on, and people with WordPress accounts can leave comments…but they’re not public. It’s too hard for me to log in to WordPress from my phone to moderate comments when I’m out and about, so I never turned on the public function, and people’s comments just go to my inbox and wait for approval.
Finally, Facebook comments. I’m not gonna lie, this really pissed me off.
So what you’re saying is, the nooses and burning crosses in my inbox are a reflection of the company I attracted. That’s what this comment means. Me expressing an opinion about Whoopi Goldberg — that isn’t even controversial or derogatory and I would say it about 95% of celebrities who want to give a lecture about history — has nothing to do with racists and bigots and misogynists ending up on my Facebook page.
They are literally always following every Very Online Black person, looking for a reason to either harass us or leave hateful comments to express what terrible people they are.
Because of how Facebook works, all it takes is one person to interact with a post before it is outside of your sphere of influence. One childhood friend from the Deep South could have liked my post, because they read my blog sometimes and like my posts, and it could have shown up on Racist Uncle Billy Bob’s Facebook feed, who was looking for a reason to call Whoopi Goldberg names that day. So he did. And that means the post has now shown up on on the pages of some other racists in his bowling league. So they come leave comments. All of a sudden, fifty white people are calling Whoopi Goldberg a *** ***** **** and it’s my fault because I had the nerve to say that Whoopi Goldberg (the lady who let her white boyfriend show up in Blackface, the lady that said what Roman Polanski did wasn’t rape-rape, the lady who supported Bill Cosby until it was no longer professionally wise to do so, the lady who said the Holocaust wasn’t about race) is wrong again and we shouldn’t listen to her.
Are you serious?
Let me tell you why that’s a surprise to you: Because I’m always deleting comments on my Facebook posts. On every post, I have to delete some bullshit because I actually don’t like super-negative comment sections. I usually let comments live that disagree with me if there’s no namecalling or outright bigotry, but I’ve spent a lot of time deleting comments so that people who have been following me for the past ten years can interact in the comment section without being harassed.
I happened to be out last night, so I wasn’t by my computer. I used to delete comments all day from my phone. While my friends pulled up Grindr or Instagram, I would pull up Facebook and see what comments needed to be deleted before I went back to my 3rd brunch mimosa.
Those posts weren’t about Whoopi Goldberg. My disdain for Whoopi Goldberg didn’t attract vitriol from bigots. Those posts were about how much I love Beyonce or about gerrymandering or about packing the Supreme Court or about gun control.
I shut off my unlimited data during the Pandemic because I don’t leave my house as much, so my apologies to y’all that you had to see what I see and have seen and will continue to see every single day, because I wasn’t quick enough to delete them before you felt the need to tell me that my opinion on Whoopi Goldberg created a safe space for racists. People have been calling me the n-word in my own comments for the past ten years. I’m sorry you had to see them call Whoopi Goldberg one for a few hours.
That is what it’s like being online while Black. We see this shit every day.
Leave a Reply