#virtual worlds

"Are you black in real life?"

I naturally said yes. Yes, I am Black. Of course I am. Was that not obvious? To me it was an incredibly silly question. How could someone question my Blackness when I seemingly never made it secret? The only difference was that his avatar had dark brown skin and was styled in a red baseball cap with baggy pants, an oversized shirt, and sneakers.

As an adult this moment is hard to not look back on and cringe for a multitude of reasons. But the main one is the realization that I'd been performing an acceptable version of Black girlhood for my white online friends and that this Black boy saw it for what it was. I was white. Not in real life, no. But digitally. I was being perceived the way I wanted but the way I wanted to be perceived was white.

This pattern of creating in-game avatars that looked like white girls wouldn't stop here, though. It lasted me up until some time in middle school when I'd slowly begun watching videos and reading articles and hanging out on Tumblr and engaging more and more with Blackness beyond the surface-level understanding that it was a label thrust upon me based on my physical appearance and lineage meant to make life harder.

I'm 22 now and no longer in school. All my avatars now sport my skin tone and dark brown eyes and reflect my personality and real-life sense of style and whimsy and quirkiness more accurately. Even still, my existence within these virtual worlds feels conditional and incredibly lonely.

Gone are the days of being young and blissfully ignorant and unaware. Now when I see openly spewed anti-Black rhetoric, misogynoir, and lgbtphobia I'm able to see it for what it is. And it keeps me away from every chatroom, every Discord server, and every event that's been created for the majority non-Black playerbase. When I see Sowilo say that Black hairstyles are "just hair" I feel unwelcome. When new fashion games release without limited or broken skin tone options and a lack of Black hairstyles I feel unwelcome. When I go into servers meant for community only to find ableist staff and cruel community members looking for marginalized people to target I feel unwelcome.

And over time this unwelcomeness has become a problem.

I want to play these games. I want to have community in these games. I want to make friends and participate and feel like I belong. But everyone who does make me feel like I belong ends up feeling unwelcome as well. And so they either refuse to play or they leave entirely. It's a sick paradox, isn't it? Those that are kind and welcoming and diverse eventually all leave as a result of the unkind and unwelcoming community. And then all that's left is the unkindness, leading to more people taking their leave and creating a space that is, at its core, toxic.

The title of this article asks if I'm allowed to be Black in virtual worlds. The answer is complicated. While my racial self-esteem is being rebuilt consciously as an adult invested in Black liberation and my own self-actualization, I ironically feel the most isolated I ever have in a community built on fashion, fun, and self-expression. Finding community in these spaces is hard, and I no longer have the capacity or bandwidth I did when I was younger to create and maintain something like a Discord server to address this.

So, what's the solution? I'm not sure. A good first step would be for games (cough cough Woozworld especially) to spend more of their time moderating and taking hard clear stances on appropriate language and behavior towards marginalized people. As it stands, I limit my in-game interactions with players and only log in for rewards and to dress up these days.