The Pros and Cons of Using Clubhouse as a Black Disabled Person
I’m Autistic, Hard of Hearing, and sometimes my auditory processing is slow, so those are just some of the reasons I don’t really care for listening to podcasts. I love music, but I get tired of listening to people just talk. A person’s voice can also just rub me the wrong way, and certain accents require me to concentrate more. And nothing is worse to me than when people don’t get to the point. I’ve tried speeding up videos and podcasts, sometimes as fast as 1.5x, and still, I’d often rather read the transcript. So when I heard about Clubhouse, I didn’t immediately think it was for me. An audio-only platform? No captions? I wasn’t sure at all, but I heard good things, so I jumped on as soon as I was able to and I don’t regret it.
Here are some of the pros and cons for me.
Pros:
- People can’t really judge me by my appearance.
Yes, they can see my profile picture, but they can’t judge me by the way I move when I speak (which gives off cues that I’m not neurotypical, and there is a lot of stigma around that), or if I have something in my teeth. I can have a bad hair day and be perceived just fine on Clubhouse. It’s the great equalizer. - There are so many Black people!
This is probably the first social media platform where it seems to me that Black people are in…
