So, yay for the Internet. In the past few years I’ve found big groups of Black and brown people online with whom to discuss cool stories and get recommendations for even better ones. When I make jokes in these spaces, they don’t flop because people actually understand the cultural references (Dear White People of Reddit…). I don’t have to convince them that having one of the only brown human characters in Dragon Age 1 and 2 be a randy pirate woman is problematic. It’s been nice.

It has also been a little disorienting. Even though I share interests and some race-based cultural knowledge with many of these people, it doesn’t seem that I have shared experiences when it comes to how my interests affected my perception of my racial self and my community membership.

When the conversation starts about how none of us ever really fit in with the other Black kids because books/comics/”talking White”/big words/tabletop gaming, I’m usually lurking and feeling some kind of way because I can’t figure out which side of the line I should be on. My friends teased, but they fully expected me to bring a book to the slumber party and invited me anyway. They tried out my dorky games just like I played MASH when they wanted, and never once did anybody question whether or not I belonged. Ma’fack, they defended me more than a few times from peers who were less appreciative of my charm 🙂

I don’t have stories about how my mother fussed at me for wasting time reading fantasy books or about how my Daddy, aunties, and uncles downed me for being “book smart”. They were regular Black people, doing regular Black people stuff (which is just regular people stuff performed and understood through certain lenses…I’m working on articulating it and will get back to you probably maybe…or link you to somebody who explains it intelligently…yes. That one. Wait for it.), and anything that I did that wasn’t self-destructive or harmful to others was validated as regular Black people stuff, too.

Nobody in my tribe of family and friends told me that I couldn’t be regular and write fan fic at the same time. Did I have teachers underestimate me because I didn’t speak “correctly”? ‘Course. Did shiny-eyed outsiders think they were gonna save me and make me the poster child of their movement and help me do great things ? Sure, but since I’d never learned that I couldn’t talk like I talk while still reading/gaming/dreaming, those experiences didn’t come to define for me what it meant to be a Black and a reader/gamer/whatever. So while I sympathize with people who were stifled and told that “We don’t cosplay. We Black,” I don’t have any specific empathy because nobody ever told me that. Now, does that mean that I had money for paint or that my Ma could spare sheets for my cape? No. Does not. But that’s a different issue (hint: POVERTY), so I digress.

This lack of empathy creates a problem for me. Real and virtual communities that have been created to empower Black nerds do that job, but I’ve found that behind all the glittering wit and happy Blackness, many of them push respectability as a goal. It’s infuriating. In these spaces designed for Black consumers of “nerd stuff” to be themselves, I have to be careful not to get too excited and say “You see Zaheer air slam Korra? That nigga ILL!” During the conversations about how anti-intellectual the black community is and how much it hurt to be counted out by the regular niggas, I have to either bite my tongue to ribbons or risk my relationships defending regular niggas against these broad generalizations…which is exactly what I have to do in the White groups…?

I respect these spaces. I’m glad they are here and want them to be safe and enjoyable for all of us especially considering that Black people are only relatively recently finding HUGE, welcoming spaces to discuss the stories and characters and games they love through a cultural lens. But I want a safe space too.

“So, Kimber, you mean you want a space where you can say ‘Nigga’?”

Not exactly. I mean a space in which all of my cultural identity, including the way I talk, is understood and appreciated even if it isn’t everybody’s cup of tea; where I can use habitual be and people who share an understanding of my vernacular even if they choose not to use it acknowledge that my usage was purposeful and not indicative of any deficiency on my part. And, ok, fine. Yes, I want a place where I can count on people who share some of my cultural experience to understand that ‘Nigga’ means more than just what White people make of it, that we make and shape it, too, and that it can be what we choose even if they choose not to act on that choice themselves.

More than anything I want us to move closer toward understanding and acceptance of one another despite our different experiences of Blackness. I want to feel confident that I can be truthful about the lenses that color my perception of stories and characters and be welcomed among people who understand even if they don’t agree. I’d like to see more Black people admit that we’ve drunk down the mainstream idea that certain kinds of Black are dichotomous with high fantasy and RPGs (and retch it up). I want us to widely and boldly acknowledge what being welcomed into these web spaces has meant to us and let empathy make us kinder when noobs come along.