January 01, 2020

New Decade, Who Dis?

To be a visible Black women on social media is to be treated like a spectacle with an audience eagerly watching the performance.”—Wanna Thompson, The Fader (10/18/19). 


Happy New Year! It's 2020 and I was thinking of how I wanted to introduce myself to you—not reintroduce, but actually introduce because it occurred to me—as we've collectively sat in contemplation over the past couple of weeks about the most recently passed decade—that who I have been on social media, especially in the past few years, is increasingly untethered and unrecognizable from who I feel like I am at my center, as a person who desires to be and is rooted in community and collective responsibility. Some of it, I understand now, is because nearly all of my social media channels were inextricably bound to my library job and the career switch I embarked on 10 years ago. My first archives internship came from a secondhand Twitter connection. Maybe I never had a chance. How could I have ever been truly authentic with folx when I was essentially using social media to sell myself as someone capable of performing certain types of labor? On social media, I essentially became a unit of production—not a human being. Not an individual. While going through my Twitter archive last month, I could see where I struggled in my feed over the past three years with communicating authentically. Wanting to comment on things that moved/enthused/enraged me, but as a unit of production online, not feeling safe enough to always do so in the way that's truest or most organic to me, which is mostly using lots of profanity. It shouldn't be a big deal but it is.

It's not to say that I came to social media as a liar. Only that how I came to it meant that I was always engaging with it in this splintered way and not as my full self—with my humanity and vulnerability on full display instead of merely allowing it to occasionally peek out like a tacky slip. The content I encountered online rattled me further. Could I have really expected to keep an even keel while scrolling multiple times a day past live footage of contemporary lynchings, images of dead Syrian, Central American, and Black children; domestic white terrorists; sexual assault and harassment; newspaper headlines that insist my humanity is nonexistent; and of course, that ONE guy who is intent on expressing his full criminality, ignorance and hatred 280 characters at a time.  

There was also an extended period in the latter half of 2019 spent unlearning, resting, and reflecting. I did not write. I did not pitch. I mostly stayed off my public and unlocked social media apps, and only dropped in to retweet professional things or answer DMs. I had to unlearn so many things once I pushed through the initial rush it felt like my brain had been reprogrammed and I needed to sit with that for a minute to see what person would/could emerge on the other side of this newly gained information. Reading Sylvia Wynter, Barbara Smith, Saidiya Hartman, and Katherine McKittrick will do that to you. 

The newsletter format seems like a safer and less obtrusive way to reveal myself. In that spirit, I'll probably be pushing out content here more consistently, experimenting with what and how I share with the goal of being more fully myself in a digital space/platform, and also forcing myself to write more regularly and finish the novel I started last spring.

With the proliferation of various multimodal online platforms and social media identities, it feels like we're drifting further away from
 our ability to really *see* each other. We're flattened into avatars that constantly need refreshing, or become of the sum of a previous Tweet or post, whether it's good or bad. Secure the Bag and avoid becoming a trending topic. Black women and their labor are especially at risk online. In Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks argues that "the commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling" that can be packaged and sold under capitalism. The refusal of others to engage neither the complexities of Black and Indigenous working class people of color nor the systemic inequalities that keep folx invisible within the dominant culture means black women are always at risk of being eaten or consumed, with our remains unceremoniously discarded. Speaking to other BIWOC who work in academia as I do, I understand that our "remains" tend to be the shreds of our mental and physical health after we've burned ourselves out fighting with people or institutions who are supposed to be producing "new" knowledge but in reality are happily reproducing the same oppression and inequality that cause the problems in the first place. And in those shreds, we sometimes slip away.   
   
So hi, I'm Stacie Williams. I'm a daughter. A mother. A sister. A writer. I'm a black woman from the upper Midwest whose ancestors hail from Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and northeastern Mexico. I work in a library. I used to work in a newsroom. I wrote my first book last year about race and gentrification. I'm a supreme jerk if I don't get enough sleep at night (and also really forgetful). My dad is currently in the final stages of frontotemporal dementia and it takes a huge physical and emotional toll so I talk about it sometimes. I also talk about caregiving because I know we've been pretending that lady elves handled that work for so long I want it to be extremely visible in my writing and conversation so as to disabuse people of the notion. I like to cook, so I write about that sometimes. I live in a state where this is legal now, and sometimes I do that too. For me, writing isn't about having all of the answers or even all of the range. Writing has always been a way for me of talking out loud, teasing out ideas, concepts, theories, and emotions in order to make sense of them. This newsletter is me sharing that sometimes joyful sometimes painful process of learning and growing. I'm humbled by all of you who chose to subscribe over the years and I hope that in sharing maybe we can see each other more clearly.

Happy New Year and Happy new decade! 

It's nice to meet you.