Most writers on this site have a few social networking sites they call home, though the amount of time and energy they dedicate to each one varies from person to person, according to their interests. Like most people in my generation, I have a Facebook account, but Facebook is not a social networking site I'd call "home," because I can't really be myself there.
The people on my Facebook, while they are friends or people I otherwise want to keep in contact with, they are not like me in many significant ways, even though we might share interests. What I care about, and what matters to me is not the same as what they care about, and what is important to them. In general, this is fine, and I leave them alone, but I am not really content or myself there.
This would be less important if I had an offline social network to rely on when trying times happened, one I could realistically expect to bolster and support me, to grab me by the metaphorical arm to point out something terrible, or something unexpected and fantastic. Being an introvert with anxiety, and a poor one at that, I don't really have that. So I rely heavily on the internet.
My "home" networking site is Tumblr, because on Tumblr, I've been able to craft a safe space for myself and my numerous identities. I've been able to create an environment where it is always assumed that the issues I care most for are important, and then it moves from there, rather than the discussions on Facebook of "Is this issue even important at all?"
It was absolutely devastating to me when, a year ago, I got locked out of my account by a hacker, and was, for some reason, unable to receive password reset emails. I tried everything I could to restore my social network, even making a new account, and none of it worked. I simply could not get my account back. I couldn't even create a new one. The only thing that really saved me, at the time, was the fact that I was working full time, so even though the social interaction I was getting wasn't enough, it was adequate to sustain me.
Two weeks ago, I made another attempt to get into Tumblr, get my password reset, because I didn't want to go to another site and try to recreate my entire social network, with everything I wanted and needed in it. I was almost brought to tears when I was able to reopen my account. I had my social support network back, as well as my source of news and information.
I got a lot about Ferguson, as I'd filled my circles with people who would care about Ferguson. Because I'd been working on making my Facebook account a bearable place to be, I'd heard about many of the things that I saw, but there was plenty I hadn't, and I sucked that information in like the sponge I am, basked in people who were just as fed up about tone policing and derailing CNN videos as I was.
But, to my shame, I am forced to admit that the thing that I saw, upon my return to Tumblr, that made me angriest was not the very important things happening in Ferguson. To be honest, this article was originally going to be about a disrespectful interview of Nicki Minaj conducted by James Franco, that interview's connection to "pranks in the hood" type videos where white men insult black ones and then yell that it's a prank when those black men get angry, and I will write about that later in this article, but I realized, as I wrote, that I had things to say about Ferguson, and my experiences of it.
There is a revolution happening there that I can only be peripherally a part of, which frustrates me more than I know how to express.
Ferguson will go down in my generation's history along with Occupy Wall Street and 9/11, and it will go down in black history along with Martin Luther King, The March on Washington, the Black Panthers, Jim Crow, and many other events I haven't bothered to mention, or have simply never heard of.
As I mentioned, I'm poor right now, so I can't go down to Ferguson to help those people, to be part of the civil unrest and revolution that makes America look like Greece did some time ago. I can't donate money, because I have none, though I can contribute my time, learn what's happening, and pass that information on.
Due to the shaming of internet activism, I feel like I'm not doing enough with my work, writing articles and reblogging the newest information about what's happening, and more than that, I am ashamed for being grateful that I don't have to go through what the protesters in Ferguson are going through. Noone is macing me in the face or menacing my friends, brothers, or cousins. I am safe in the northern United States, far from the Missouri police, far from where school has been disrupted and lives ruined and people arrested, over and over again.
I want to feel ashamed of myself, because a very rich and successful rapper whom I look up to being disrespected affects me more deeply than unarmed people being shot and tear gassed by police officers, but I know myself and racism well enough to understand that they are connected parts of the same problem, that the events of Ferguson, and this trend I'm noticing of white men insulting and disrespecting black people as a "joke," are symptoms of the same illness that will not, can not be cured until our society is ripped up from the roots and properly replanted.
I also know that there is nothing wrong with how I feel about Ferguson, versus how I feel about Nicki Minaj and "pranks in the hood." There are no words I know to describe how I feel about Ferguson, because even though it matters to me, it is, in some ways, distant, both geographically and event-wise, as I've been fortunate enough that my brother is white-passing, most of the time, and has never been attacked by the police, as far as I know.
I want Ferguson to spark a national revolution, but I feel an attendant sick certainty that, like Occupy Wall Street and 9/11, the fervor will die out, the government, through the media, will find a way to divert our attention, keep progress from being made, and things will get worse, rather than going back to what they were, so I honestly don't want to emotionally overinvest in this, because our inevitable defeat will deal an even more crushing blow to my already-trampled spirit.
I know that such hopelessness contributes to where we are now, but the events of Ferguson are simply not close enough to me to work up the angered fervor that I would need to find out what more I could do, besides what I already am, unlike Nicki Minaj and "pranks in the hood."
I look up to Nicki because she's a well-known black woman performing, and she does femininity the way I do, with brightly-colored hair, beautiful dresses, even wearing one outfit I dreamed of having made for myself in some hypothetical future where I could afford to have outfits made for me. I mean no disrespect to Beyonce, who came up the way she knew how to make it work, or Oprah, Janelle Monae, Lauryn Hill, those women are all incredible bastions of themselves, black womanhood, idols to be looked up to and admired for their own work.
But Nicki Minaj is black and aggressively feminine in the middle of a bunch of rappers. I have no problem with strong black women in the media, Beyonce and Oprah being fierce, Janelle Monae with her androgynous deconstruction of what a black female singer can look like, Lauryn Hill with her eclectic underground look, those are important. But so are feminine black female performers, because they simply don't exist in our media.
There is a struggle, as a black woman, a dicing up of priorities that tries to force us to be black people, who happen to be women, or women, who happen to be black, completely ignoring the fact that there is an experience in this country unique to being black AND a woman that is completely separate from being black OR a woman.
Nicki Minaj is a conscious rejection of that dichotomy, a successful black woman who is, for lack of a better word, girly. She wears cutely-curled, brightly-colored wigs while informing listeners that she is their leader and anyone who isn't a believer can suck a dick. She raps for Willow Smith's Fireball in a dress made of stuffed animals, and she leads pink-haired troops to battle in her own video.
So to watch James Franco ask her if her ass is natural, to watch him hound her about her ass in a mockery of an interview for a prank that was meant to somehow be a movie tie-in? It's unbearable for me, and closer to my heart, because the only girly black woman visible in the media, one who really did work her way up from the bottom on skill and determination, deserves better than to be treated like that, especially keeping in mind the fact that it's not just a white man on TV doing this to her, it's white men all over doing this to black people throughout this country.
The logic that lets someone think that mocking a person for a prank is not only fine, but a great thing to do, is the same kind of dehumanizing logic that lets someone think a black man deserved to be shot and killed by a cop, left to rot in the street for hours to be mocked by his murderers while his family watched, all because he stole $50 worth of cigars, and that sort of logic must be eradicated from our society before we can productively move forward.
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