If you’re white, you really really shouldn’t have your pfp on a platform be a Black or brown character. If you absolutely must, PLEASE indicate you white in your bio for that platform even if you put absolutely no other personal info, especially if you don’t post photos of yourself otherwise.
Why?
Because I just had to have this conversation with a moot ive followed for months recently that I thought was Black or brown because their pfp was a face shot of a brown character. So because I never had a reason to DM them like “Hey comrade, you’re Black right?” given they was visually publicly portraying themselves as someone brown, I was casually acting to others as if they was as well and considering them among non-white community members. Which led to awkwardness when I brought them up as that publicly only to receive a DM profusely apologizing to me for accidentally misleading me because they were white and European lol.
If your only visual representation is a person of color and you don’t expressly state you aint one somewhere, a lot of people will assume on first inspection that you’re a person of color as well and aint gonna go like searching your personal tag to find a picture you posted where your hand is petting your cat to confirm your racialization.
This doesn’t mean don’t like/post Black or brown characters but just. I promise you can pin that artwork or put link to it just the same, you aint gotta be out here wearing it as your only face 😭
If you can't tell someone's in your in-group without looking at their skin colour, then you don't have an in-group
1. People on the internet are not always anglophones or from the US so do not always have the same speech patterns, language usage, dialects, etc. that may make them otherwise identifiable to other Black folks regardless of seeing them visually. I do not expect a Black person from “French” Africa, for example, to speak fluent fuckin AAVE when English is their second, third, fifth language.
2. On the flip side, there are non-Black ESL folks who primarily learned English through consumption of Black American culture and their ability to speak English at all hinges entirely on using AAVE vs. SAE, which depending on proficiency or cultural competence can lead to false positives when there’s no other indicators.
3. Theres a separate person who replied “OP didnt explain why this is bad though” and my answer is “well why is Blackface and other forms of racial impersonation bad headass”. I don’t consider this intentional/fully Blackface most of the time but I do think its often merrily on the road to it.
4. When it comes to antiblackness, racism, and white supremacy there is often usefulness on multiple levels of an in-group of the racially oppressed even/especially if it is not culturally homogenous. Antiblackness is global.
5. Shovel out a litterbox with your teeth you smarmy shits.
