learning to notice an absence of people of color is crazy. you start seeing it everywhere. ill see a random pic of characters or people or whatever and be like "these are all white people. why"
all the babies in those baby youtube video memes. humanized character posts. like. its the little innocent shit. and like, the people making those baby memes probably arent seeking out white babies. maybe theyre just easier to find. but why are they easier to find? a complicated question, surely... but you know what it probably comes down to. someone, somewhere, maybe a lot of someones in a lot of places, made a choice. maybe knowingly, maybe not. but they made a choice. it starts to make you feel like a conspiracy theorist!!
It's also interesting seeing photosets of images here of various illustrations, and all of them are white
"I notice you have a very specific art style."
"oh that doesn't mean anything"
"Like I said."
The thing is that it IS a conspiracy, its literally just the conspiracy of White Supremacy. Its just right there, proven. Shit, they didn't let Black people be in commercials until what, the 50s? And we surprised when shows and ads and culture in White Supremacy Land (that wasn't ripped straight out of Black folks hands anyway) are all-white, all the time?
Shit, look at how many popular memes with Black folks either depict us negatively, or the Black origin gets completely erased if not (think tik-tok dances, etc.). Half the time we ain't even looking at the absence of us, we're looking at them dancing in the skin off the corpse of what we made.
Wanna really put yourself into hell? Start counting how many BIPOC are showing up to your "community events". Start figuring out what the demographic ratios for your events are. Its one thing to think "oh we had a 120+ person event with a dozen people of color" its another to think "our event was only 10% people of color, where did WE fuck up here?" (If you think I'm exaggerating know that gods I am not, just ask DC and the DC Klans Picnic, 5% Black in a 50% Black city)
You HAVE to start noticing this. You have to start thinking about this in your online spaces too because of the BIPOC Attention Tax. This shit actively holds us back. This shit actively kills us - look at Tinu and Fiqah (sassycrass) who died despite being well known, well loved Black women and disability activists, because they couldn't make enough mutual aid to pay for medical needs.
Start noticing who's not in the room with you. Start noticing who you ain't seeing.
