CeeBee

The BIPOC Attention Tax fucks up all BIPOC, but it fucks up trans BIPOC in particular due to being multiply marginalized. It’s the penalty you pay in engagement for being non-white on social media, taken in less shares/visibility.

While the BIPOC Attention Tax affects most BIPOC, it affects SWers, content creators, and those who rely on mutual aid the most. You have to share our stuff more than you think. You have to reply to us more than you think. It’s in how we watch smaller white accounts double our size in no time at all but if our accounts show any sign of being BIPOC we lag behind.

We’re societally conditioned to pay more attention to the thin, white, conventionally attractive folks and amplify them. While this ain’t their fault, it does mean *you* need to put active effort into subverting that urge and be conscious of who/how you’re interacting with.

Don’t just like posts from BIPOC folks, stop worrying about your “profile aesthetic”, sharing a post literally takes 3 seconds and especially in the case of SW and MA can literally keep folks housed, fed, alive. Our content, our art, our lives and survival fucking matter.

White trans folks have more options to leverage their whiteness to escape the states criminalizing transition, medical care, existing in public while trans. Not only do TBIPOC suffer the effects of poverty more/worse, but the BIPOC Attention Tax makes crowdfunding/mutual aid much harder as well.

Even in terms of just bullshit discourse, TBIPOC will often get higher rates of harassment at lower follower counts than their white counterparts, without the “benefits” of easier/more successful SW or MA that come at the higher follower counts, increasing the toll for staying.

Many of the white folks I see on social media (including tumblr), especially white trans folks, will have one or two token BIPOC moots they keep around because they’re hot or funny, and otherwise have no BIPOCs in their groups, networks, etc.

Ask yourself, how many BIPOC folks would call YOU their friend?