Dear Black Medium Writers: Discretion Advised
We give too much away on here
I have found ancestral healing here on Medium, and I am thankful to the Black brothers and sisters who crafted the words that helped me remember, accept and honour parts of my Black identity that I had lost touch with, or never touched in the first place. Your words helped me come into the blessing of a self-loving Black identity, a process that has been bittersweet as the self-esteem rooted in my Blackness attracts way more racism than my previous self-esteem, which was rooted in the false idea that I am not Black but “mixed race”.
One thing Black Medium writers helped me get clearer on is that regardless of how you identify, if you are born to one non-mixed Black and one White parent you are Black with mixed heritage, not mixed race. The White Supremacist world will mirror this reality back at mixed heritage Blackfolk through chronic antiblack racism. Over years that racist mirroring pushed me to accept that the boy, and then man, in the reflection does not have skin dark enough to be called black, but he does belong to the race of African descendants who due to our high melanin levels are known as Blacks. And he belongs to no other race, despite my skin tone being much lighter and my nose and lips less full and rounded than Blackfolk with more exclusively Black heritage than I.
I admittedly may have chuckled while reading the sister who took a course on racism and, despite knowing the content well enough to be retraumatised by the whole thing, failed. Irony aside, it’s hard to pass a course that is constantly triggering you while surrounded by course mates and hosts who are unequipped and unwilling to show sensitivity to your racial trauma, and my heart went out to her. Her cautionary tale reminded me I can harm myself in the process of studying racism and should therefore make sure I’m learning at the right pace using the right methods for me.
Few would see that a trip to a woodland sauna tells a thousand tales of one man’s life experience with interpersonal racism, but the skillfulness of one brother’s storytelling revealed exactly that. He wrote of the emotional catharsis he experienced as the heat summoned a surge of memories of his body being brutalised because of its Blackness. His tactile, cathartic words affirmed to me that as long as Black bodies are brutalised for being Black, any form of physically caring for our flesh is a radical act of resistance.
One particular word pounced at me as I read a brother’s intimate and gritty article on his personal journey through trials and tribulations related to racism: ‘indignities’. This precisely picked word galvanised the thoughts I’d been having about racism, showing me a common factor amongst it is the indignity that racists inflict.
This brother went on to outline the creative mission he has embarked on in response to the indignities of being Black in an antiblack world, teaching and improving at his chosen craft in an act of self-reclamation. I watched one of his vlogs and heard it all there in his sigh, my entire story of Black struggle mirrored in that big lungful and slow, emphatic exhale he did before getting started on a new piece. My body rang in resonance with the wordless expression of a Black stranger on the other side of the Atlantic, leaving me to wonder how much of a stranger he really is.
I was introduced to the term “mining your Blackness” by another brother as used to describe what I called “reaching in” to my Blackness. By reaching in I meant consciously choosing Black culture instead of “reaching out” to the alternatives, turning culturally inwards in search of identity, community, knowledge, wisdom and history to act as shield against a society which strives to strip us of the grit, savvy and humble swagger that comes from knowing our own good Black culture.
The same brother also introduced me to the idea of demystifying Black suffering in his critique of the use of analogies to these ends, writing that analogies, specifically white analogies, further mystify Black suffering. This made me realise how my attempts to communicate Black suffering using analogy can create the illusion of providing a clear window onto our suffering while doing not much other than invoking the stereotype that says our suffering is mysterious and therefore has no solutions.
I was healed, awakened and affirmed by the demystifying words of the brothers and sisters whose stories I’ve mentioned here. I mention none of them by name and omit much of the details of their stories because some of what I read, I feel, is too personal and intimate for this platform. This is not to say the writing is self-absorbed or irrelevant, rather that it deserves and requires a more intimate platform for its intimate value. Medium is a dizzy rush of off-white pages and shouty headlines and I don’t think the pace or atmosphere does these stories justice, nor do I think it is a safe space for us to share all of them because most people reading us don’t have our best interests at heart.
I think an open mic night with a majority Black audience would be a right place to share, but our community is so fragmented we have to turn to impersonal and literally whitewashed platforms like Medium to give and receive the highly personal stories we need in order to heal and awaken. It would be different if it was Black Medium because our personal details would be shared mainly or exclusively within our own people. But it isn’t, it’s off-white Medium.
I realise we are trying to make money on here and our rich personal stories and histories give us a shot at doing that, but we need to stay vigilant to an insidiously oppressive dynamic of the partner program. It encourages us to forgo our privacy and discretion by disclosing intimate and often unhealed traumatised parts of ourselves and our stories to supply the online reading public’s demand for raw racially awakened writing in exchange for amounts, usually small, of money. When we do this it makes Medium look woke, can line our pockets and even be healing for us, but we can end up becoming emotionally drained or even retraumatised from overly engaging with traumatic memories, facts and media content, and the shame, guilt and anxiety triggers and conscience pangs resulting from over sharing can be brutal. As a recovering Medium oversharer I know this self-inflicted brutality too well and recognise within it an element of intended martyrdom.
I don’t mean to discourage anyone from sharing or invalidate what you’ve already shared, but rather to inspire some contemplation on what is discretion, what is oversharing and whether this is the right platform to serve our intimate pieces, especially those about race aimed mainly at other Blackfolk. And please don’t get me wrong, I know online oversharing and indiscretion isn’t a specifically Black thing, but as Blacks the incentives for our indiscretion are particularly nasty and insidious. We know our people need personal stories for healing, we know it’s possible to heal ourselves by sharing them, and we know they’re in high demand from other peoples, but our goodhearted desire to heal our people and ourselves and to educate other peoples alongside our money-making interests get manipulated by writing platforms, often to their benefit and our loss.
Let’s use our most intimate words to nourish each other in more personal, more Black spaces than this off-white Medium. Let’s keep our discretion, even if that means keeping some words to ourselves because we haven’t yet found or invented their home platform. Let’s continue to demystify Black suffering for each other while at least considering how we can keep it mystified to those who don’t deserve our vulnerability nor a clear window onto our suffering. Please keep up the good work. Shalom.
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