The current environment has caused me to reevaluate those I follow and what I want and need on my dash. As mentioned in a recent post, watching certain Black people spend their day calling out other Black people for being anti-Black but never spending any time uplifting Black folks who are doing right by our community, has caused me to go through a sort of cleansing.
Yes, technically I am still on hiatus but I want to make a small suggestion to those who may be in my same boat. Why not start off the new year with a dashboard you can live with?
This is about life balance.
There are two types of bloggers that I’ve been purging from my follow list over the last three weeks. First, the PoC that I spoke about above. Second, PoC who spend their day doing nothing but talking about how much they hate white people.
Here’s the thing, the call out, for many of us, is not just something we do, it’s something that is necessary. It’s therapy. It’s life affirming. We often find ourselves in places where we can’t fight. When we can though, we must. Writing angry posts about things that have upset us, pointing to injustice, standing up and screaming when we need to, this is all important.
The problem I was and still am having is that, there MUST be more. I need pro-Black in my life. I need pro-unity in my life. I need there to be a yin to this yang. When your blog is only the evils of the world, and by “World” I mean white people, I can’t allow myself to be involved in the suction of your universe.
When I’m watching you fall down that rabbit hole, I feel myself leaning forward, ready to jump in behind you. This is not conducive to my being. The reason I am putting this into words is because I fear that it is equally not conducive to yours.
There is no “Correct reaction to anti-Blackness.” Your reaction, whatever it is, is right. It’s not your anger, frustration or reaction that I am worried about. It’s what happens when you’ve said all that you need to say. Can you then, set your sites on a positive Black image? For some that I once followed, I saw clearly, the answer was no. Not only was the answer no, but the answer was also ALWAYS “White people.”
Frankly, I love me to much to be engulfed in them.
I don’t think there is a magical happy place that a person would find were they to only post positive things on their blog. However, I found that with those who were in a place were the evils were the entirety of their conversations, they stopped reacting to things that happened across their dash and instead, started seeking them out. This is a slippery place to be.
The fact is, certain people are toxic. Being a Person of Color who loves People of Color doesn’t mean that I will continue to allow toxicity to infiltrate my layer just because you’re brown.
The worst of it all is this, when discussing who I would unfollow with a fellow Tumblrite, this phrase was uttered, “I would have unfollowed them a long time ago if I thought I could do it without them getting mad at me and starting shit.” If you follow someone and this is how you feel about them, take a deep breath, hit the unfollow button and let the chips fall where they may. I know this is a daunting suggestion but I can say with certainty that if this is how you feel about someone you follow, they are, without a shadow of a doubt, toxic.
The very first person I unfollowed was the most toxic. They were the most difficult to unfollow and they were the biggest difference on my dash once I did. It was like night and day. Rather, it was like being suffocated versus breathing clean air. It’s hard but it’s worth it.
In the end, the thing to remember came from both blackamazon and super-eklectic1, “Being anti-antiBlack doesn’t automatically make you Pro-Black.”
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Anti-Anti Black/Pro-Black/No White Speak
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