Hairbruh - Hair Bruh

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Back in the day I would have already ripped Monkey55Boy four assholes, but I don't argue on the internets anymore, you never actually accomplish anything, and more important minds aren't ever really changed in web-based arguments.

Attention broad statement follows, queer whyte mens take little to no thought about the things they say on others post. #FullStop They have been indoctrinated like the rest of us to believe whiteness is the norm, and all the rest of us are aberrations, albeit science and history make it very clear the first humans on the Earth were very melanated and located in the part of the world that is now known as Africa.

Whyte men will other you in less than a nanosecond of seeing you. I wanted to give this dude the benefit of the doubt, so I took a look through his profile, where there was no clear evidence of how he actually looked or his ethnic origins. But there was something telling in his favourites, they spoke to his clear affection for white skin, notwithstanding I did find a couple of brown men and one Black man amongst the favs, but predominantly his favs were other whyte mens.

There is one other consideration I can give Monkey55Boy this particular platform has moderated most people of colour right off of it. With out overt knowledge the creators and moderators of the platform have placed a higher value on European aesthetics and on heteromantic norms, anything that deviates from that baseline is more or less written off as pornographic no matter how high the artistic value. I had left for about ten years or so for this same issue because it made it very hard to present any kind of intimate work that was scrutinized through a different lens then like-work that center whyte-female beauty and aesthetics.

But I was black on the platform, and generally speaking my position on comments is non-response and disregard. I don't generally block anyone or engage at all, allowing them to baste in their own ignorance. Why should it be my roll to enlighten folks who have drank the white supremacy Kool-Aid and never questioned the hierarchy and value system of our very Puritanical Christian society? America has a clear caste system whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, and those of us who do not fit into the "in-group" are automatically delegated to the "other" category, which is essence means they are less than.

This is why we can’t have nice things. The experiment called the internet has failed because the people who created it infused all their very human values and biases into its development. Even after so much time has passed, they have never considered the existence of other perspectives and stories that are told from a different understanding of the world. As long as these issues are at the core of the internet, things will not change, women will not be safe, Black and people of color will be exoticized and othered, and any people who are neuroatypical to differently-abled, or perform gender in a non-traditional way, will not be giving their full personhood just treated like ornaments in a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

[Photo by Brown Estate]

Paris, 2022.

Paris, 2023.

You don't have to be mixed to be beautiful.