Read on Twitter
So I usually keep this to accounts that aren't this one but it's been bugging me. We all know the perceived distance between Black experiences and the "mainstream." Give a movie a Black cast and many people think that makes it a Black movie, whilst a white cast is just a movie.
Twitter is like that, Black Twitter drives the mainstream humor here and yet it lives in its own corner. And we love that bc in this instance it's a space we made. Similarly, Black queer men have a corner of this place separate from the very white mainstream Gay Twitter ™.
As an astrophysicist I'm also adjacent to science twitter. Science twitter can only really reflect the demographics of science as a discipline, so if that tends white (it does, especially in fields like mine) science twitter probably will too.
There is not some enormous Black Science Twitter world in the way there is the Black Twitter world. I'd love that, but we need more people. We all know that, we're working on it, I've said nothing new. But here's the thing.
When you intersect these two very white communities you get Mainstream Gay Science Twitter ™, one of the whitest online spaces I've ever been adjacent to. I'm not saying there aren't more Black queer folks out there, I'm saying they're obscured from my vision by a white wall.
This wall makes it harder generally for me to reach out and find Black queer camaraderie, STEM or not, as well as Black community more broadly. Let me say it another way. There is a room with 1000 scientists. 40% of those people, proportional between ethnic groups, are queer.
20% of those people are Black. This is generous, in my field that's several times too high. I'm in the room. I have 399 queer colleagues, 199 Black colleagues, but only 79 Black and queer colleagues in this room. 40% of 20%. I'm getting lonely in here.
There are many more Black and queer folks outside this room, but man is it hard to get out of here when I'm surrounded by folks trying, allegedly, to "listen and learn." So today I wanna help you do just that!
There's nothing I can do to fix demographics overnight. But one thing that doesn't make it any easier is the white gay bullshit. I don't just mean the low hanging fruit like thirsting over neo Nazis. I mean tacitly reinforcing racist and gender normative beauty standards.
Centering yourselves in narratives where you aren't the center. Cultivating blindingly white friendship circles and doing very little work to change. Offering up ice cold takes that add nothing new to any conversation. Many of you say incredibly useless things.
It is ok to be neither seen nor heard sometimes, I promise! Look up intersectionality and stay on the page longer than five seconds! There are plenty of people who hold more marginalized identities than you who should be talking over you, not the other way around.
Let's zoom out! White gays take up too much space in the gay community, but ALL gays take up too much space in the LGBTQ+ community at large!! This is me too! We reify harmful tropes as they relate to body type and obsession with physical appearance.
We fail to check our misogyny, transphobia, etc. So you can see this isn't just me railing against other people, this is a call out/in for me as well. But here's what you're not gonna do.
Retweet this and reply "YAAAAS" or dm your white little friend group talking about "I think KeShawn is shading so and so" and then make no substantial changes. I'm not letting you reduce me to sassy Black gay, I won't let it happen.
I love people learning from my posts but if I'm gonna be here, you're gonna do something for me. Shut up sometimes. When you want to speak, don't. I'll do it too. Uplift someone Black, someone Indigenous, someone disabled, someone trans. Look, really look, at your friends here.
Is this representative? Is this what you want your circle to look like? Can you learn anything new and better yourself in that group or is this just a white gay pretty boy echo chamber? Like I said, I can't change anything overnight.
But let's not get so used to these cultivated spaces, like Black twitter, that we don't let people in when they actually want to share the space. Don't listen selectively. No tokenizing. No performativity. Just show up.
Black and brown queer folks, especially in STEM, reply and tell me a little about yourself!
