Brackets
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m perceived, how I present myself and how that limits me.
I think there's a degree to which it's useful to be vigilant about what you put out there. Needlessly hurting people who don't deserve it is shitty and all-too-easy to do. But for the marginalised, especially racialised/TMA people, that vigilance has to be on a whole other level. I don’t just have to worry about avoiding being violent, I have to worry about avoiding being perceived as violent. Whether it’s talking or WritingTM or tweeting, when you’re operating in predominantly white spaces looking the way I do, the bar for being considered violent is incredibly low.
To these people, I have already cussed them out, beat up their nans and cast a curse on their bloodline when I raise my voice above a whisper. You don’t know that feeling until you experience that micro-moment where you slightly over-gesture someone flinches.
The result of this worry is that you end up boxing with kid gloves. The brackets I can’t stop using to caveat (if you pardon the strained metaphor) end up being head protection for people who deserved the full punch. I’m not alone in working through this fear. In a newsletter that you should already be following, David Davis describes part of the editing process as:
"a battle against my natural conservatism, kicked into overdrive by a fear of going too far and hurting someone; of going too far and landing on the wrong side of the discourse; of being misunderstood to the extent that my work is tokenized or dismissed rather than rigorously engaged with"
Now evidently, David and I are coming at this from wholly different perspectives and marginalisations, but the fears still stand. In my specific experience as a Black person, it feels like everything I say is going to be read in bad faith. A playful joke becomes a vicious attack. Slightly off wording becomes a vicious slur. The issue isn’t that I can’t be wrong, I have been wrong, will be wrong in future, and hope to take correction properly every time. The issue is that a misstep becomes a justification for their pre-existing notions, their paranoid fantasies suddenly become real.
One moment of me pulling a punch is ostensibly minor but has been stuck in my head for months. Writing about Bait and gentrification I said:
Bait captures how through capitalism, Whiteness/Englishness (as a system of domination rather than an individual trait) cannibalizes its aberrant members to create a falsified image of unity and purity that facilitates the slow descent into a not-quite apocalypse of holiday homes and Airbnbs.
The nature of English white nationalism requires homogeneity and a subscription to particular national myths around identity, so everything outside of that singular English identity must be consumed/co-opted – including cultures containing white people.
Now in reality that should read:
“Bait captures how through capitalism, White Englishness cannibalizes its aberrant members to create a falsified image of unity and purity that facilitates the slow descent into a not-quite apocalypse of holiday homes and Airbnbs.”
“The nature of English whiteness requires homogeneity and a subscription to particular national myths around identity, so everything outside of that singular English identity must be consumed/co-opted – including cultures containing white people.”
Aside from it being a little overwritten (it’s me, what do you expect?), the brackets and the ‘nationalism’ are a crutch. I could argue they’re there to help understanding, to avoid mirroring that thing where Afropessimists on Twitter make bold confrontational statements in 240 characters that only make sense when you have a deep reserve of knowledge - which they will refuse to directly share with you. That’s only partially true. The reality is that I was anxious as fuck about how it would be received.
As much as Unwinnable is a cool space that I was semi-familiar with at the time, it didn’t stop those anxieties. The pieces I'd written for them before involved race, but were not an explicit condemnation of Whiteness. I didn't know how they would react, especially given that at the time of that column only one other Black person was there (shout-out to Yussef Cole). Even if I did know they’d all be cool, I definitely didn't know if their audience would be.
And it has since turned out that UW has been a rad and genuinely accepting space for my Very Specific Brain (congrats white UW people reading this, you’re some of the Good OnesTM), but the point is that even in the most comfortable of spaces, that little bit of doubt is always there. The feeling that this will be the piece where I cut too close for comfort and end up getting doxxed or otherwise attacked in a way that I can’t handle.
Another thing that prompted this newsletter was this great piece by Porpentine where amongst many things, she talks about how callouts and mobbing are weaponised against the most marginalised people in particular progressive (I hate that word but it’s useful here) communities:
“These idealized communities require disposability to maintain the illusion—violence and ostracism against the black/brown/trans/trash bodies that serve as safety valves for the inevitable anxiety and disillusionment of those who wish “total identification”.
Feminism/queerness takes a vague disposability and makes it a specific one. The vague ambient hate that I felt my whole life became intensely focused—the difference between being soaked in noxious, irritating gasoline and having someone throw a match at you. Normal hate means someone and their friends being shitty toward you; radical hate places a moral dimension onto hate, requiring your exclusion from every possible space—a true social death.”
There are obvious material differences between myself and Porpentine. She is white and I’m not, while transness complicates whiteness it doesn’t erase it. At the same time, she is transfemme in the public eye, I never have to deal with the consequences of being perceived in that specific way. But despite the differences, the broad possibility of mobbing and that ‘social death’ is still commonly shared.
In the mainstream, I have to worry about neo-Nazis, the Daily Mail or any of a long list of known instigators finding the shit I say and deciding to make me their dartboard for the day. I search my tweets for offending items. I search my name in all its variations repeatedly to see where it pops up. I wish I could be one of those pricks who name-searches for vanity reasons but in reality, it’s because I feel like I need to get ahead of any potential attack line.
The reality is that it’s probably more of a placebo than anything. No amount of deeply neurotic attempts at self-defence can stop the mighty force of the broader violences at play - lynchings aren’t exactly known for their reliance on hard evidence.
In pseudo-progressive spaces I have to worry about ‘radical hate’ being cynically weaponized, using carceral logic to reinforce the violent hierarchies they are supposedly free from. These spaces aren't the original source of these hierachies but they are fantastic at dressing them up in nicer language but continuing to uphold them. It’s by no means just me - if anything I've been relatively lucky on that front. I see this happen to the people around me over and over (to varying degrees of violence) and I am fucking sick of it. What hope is there for a better world when so many of the people with platforms who claim to want to bring that about are insistent on turning their ire on the most vulnerable?
In the end, what this means is that marginalised writers and critics like myself end up sanding down our edges. The prose has to become clunkier so we can add in a (suitable) caveat. Our points have to be less incisive and direct. Aside from showing the fraught economics of a broken media landscape the resurgence of the newsletter also shows how much people (myself included) have real things to say which cannot be expressed in these public platforms which repeatedly fail to protect their marginalised writers when they push the boat out. I know that for many people (esp MA/TMA people) there are specific topics that they simply will not write about in a public forum because the shit they would get from the people who should be in solidarity with them would be too much to deal with. Specific spaces (e.g. games writing) are worse for this than others but these broader forces are relatively universal in the Anglosphere (which is what I can speak to). This deep toxicity chokes out creativity and instead leaves us with shallow pieces which aren’t bad but do retread the same tired ground long after the soil has been exhausted.
Even if the possibility of these violences disappeared tomorrow I don’t think it would exorcise that vague nagging feeling that somehow everything could get pulled out from under me in an instance. A lifetime of conditioning has that shit engrained real deep. But who knows.
Maybe tomorrow I can try to be braver. I’ll still bite my tongue, but stop before it bleeds.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.