Typing While Black

orginal pring: 2/19/08

Are the rumors true…are you really … BLACK?"
This was an IM that my brother received from one of his fellow World of WarCraft guild members.

It had never crossed that young man's mind that the people that he spent his time with online did not look like him. I've had many a similar experience.

I cannot try to speak for all women of the African Diaspora, but I can recall how my ethnicity and gender has influenced my internet experience.

Growing up an engineer's daughter, I always embraced anything tech and everything electronic. I can remember helping my father build the family's first frankenputer out of parts he salvaged from other machines at his job. It didn't have a CD-ROM drive and it ran on Windows 3.1, but it was my first gateway to this crazy internet thing.

My parents being ever so overprotective made sure that I was forbidden from ever sharing any of my pictures with my new-found AOL chat buddies.

My first taste of internet anonymity. It amazed me what freedom I had with a black profile and no picture.

I learned pretty quickly that online, I wasn't a little West Indian girl; I was assumed a white male child, unless I typed differently.

Even then half of the people I encountered thought I was joking. It was the first time in my life that I realized that there were people with dramatically different views of the world.

When I was older and finally had a PC of my own to dabble with, I noticed just how differently people would treat me once the dreaded "post your picture" topic came up in whatever message board I was on. No matter what the topic of the board, be it a board about dating, gardening or videogames, suddenly I wasn't just FoxyChoklatRobot: I was "the black girl".

This usually entailed being walleyed by all sorts of questions from curious non-black internet users. Some would ask ridiculous things like "What kind of black are you?" or "Do you speak that click language in Trinidad?" and my favorite" Can you teach me how to talk ghetto?"

It always put me in an awkward situation; by revealing that I was not a white woman, I instantly became the spokesperson for every black person who ever lived. If any situation would arise that involved any black man woman or child, I was now supposed to be the expert.

This was troubling to me because as a West Indian, I listened to mostly dance hall reggae and soca, so I can't name every Tupac song ever recorded, nor did I feel that instant mental bond that some of these posters believed all people of color had with others.

It seemed to me more often than not that I was usually forced to lose my individuality to my race. I found myself constantly being categorized; annoyingly I saw that most felt that it would be insane to categorize others in the same fashion.

I have never asked a random white person on any message board, "Hey, so I hear you people kiss your dogs on the mouth, yes or no?" So it boggled my mind as to why someone would feel the need to ask me, "Do black women want to be white?"

How on earth can I answer that question? I don't know all black women...

If I refused to answer the questions; I was labeled a "coconut" or a stereotypical black b-tch. After about a year of this, I found myself gravating to sites like BlackPlanet.com, LipstickAlley.com and other sites that were designed to cater to black women. It was a feeling of guilty relief.

As much as I wanted too, I had a hard time shaking off the feelings of alienation that I felt in many other communities despite having joined with the intent of sharing a common interest.

I hated the fact that my ethnicity made my thoughts become fringe opinions rather than just another voice in the myriad of voices that makes up any community.

I don't think that most of the people that I came across even realized how they were making me feel. Some people where from parts of the country and world where they never saw a black person with their bare eyes, let alone talked with one.

I felt guilty retreating, but it's an awful burden to expect any one person or small group of people to be a mouthpiece for their entire culture, class or race.

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