I Can't Keep Doing This

Sometimes I start blog posts I don't finish.  There are a lot of different reasons this can happen.

About a week ago, I started a post on the Police Orchestras of Ethiopia.  Because it's a topic I don't know much about, I started by doing a little basic research - looking up some of my favorite Ethiopian songs on Youtube.  There's one particular song that's fairly well-known in certain circles in the West called Muziqawi Silt, by the Wallias Band.  I went looking for it in a private window, because while I still use Youtube a lot, I have found that over time I trust Youtube less and less with identifiable personal data.

And one of the sidebar video recommendations on this video was a video titled "How Anti Racism Hurts Black People".

And that's where I stopped writing.

I am a big fan of the hip-hop group clipping.  A few days ago they released a new single, and I think it is an amazing single.  Right now, I think my favorite part of it is in the first verse.  Daveed Diggs starts going over the history of institutional racism in America, brilliantly and eloquently.  It's very much along the same lines as the Sedition Ensemble record I wrote about two weeks ago.  And then in the middle, he stops, he cuts himself off, and just says "Fuck the history lesson."  I am inspired by the discipline and clarity of vision Diggs expresses in this moment.

I struggle to express it myself, however.  As much as I would love to be able to explain to you in explicit, concrete, rational terms why precisely this was so difficult and painful to see, I have tried for a week to find the words, and I cannot, despite being white, despite my not being targeted personally by this video the way POC are.  This is as direct as I can be with you right now.

One of the things I was taught early on, as far back as the '80s, is the queer equation silence = death.  It took me a while to understand it, but I understand it now.  The history of queerness is, in large part, the history of the struggle against being made silent and invisible.  It is the struggle to exist.

Over the past few years queer voices in general, and trans and GNC voices specifically, have increasingly worked to make ourselves heard.  We have platforms, and often these platforms are through social media.  We have a voice on Twitter, on Youtube, and that has been a tremendous help and strength to me.

I have also seen, repeatedly and frequently, the ways in which Youtube amplifies voices of hatred and abuse.  To communicate on the Internet - to write about music, to do my research - I have to take extraordinary steps to protect myself from these voices.  I have seen the effect of these repeated, incessant amplified voices on other people, on people I care about, people who are important to me.

Knowing that this is what Google does - knowing that this is what Google profits from, that this is their business model - I just don't think I can trust them to amplify my voice.  This saddens me.  We have worked so hard to be heard, and yet we still have so, so much farther to go.  And Google?  Google will not take us there.