the importance of representation

Currently Listening to: Girl Like Me - Pink Pantheress

    I was on the phone with my friend last night when I told him about the making of this blog and what I wanted from it. So I thought it would be fun to set my intention here as well. 

    I want this blog to be a time capsule for me to continue and look back on when I am well into my 40s and 50s and want to take a small peek into my mind outside of the very personal lens of my journals and the not-as-personal lens of my Instagram. It's a way for me to see what stories I wanted to tell and why I felt the need to share them, even if many people won't see them.

    This being my main goal comes with a bit of a catch, though - I wanted to make my page as black as possible. When on the phone with my friend, I mentioned to him how I am mainly trying to find black inspiration for this page because black people and people of color are highly underrepresented in our niches. I want more weird black girls everywhere! We are not a monolith; we are not just ghettofab and Instagram baddies; some of us wear our interests on our sleeves (literally!). And because some people lack media literacy, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the aforementioned demographics. The ig baddies and ghettofab baddies can be normal, and they can be weird too, and a lot of them are! I consider myself a weird baddie, but there also needs to be space for black girls out there to be different because not all of us resonate with certain titles. 

    I love shitposting. I save so many, and I repost even more, whether that's on TikTok or on Instagram - my main doomscrolling portals. But the more I reposted, the more I noticed a trend of these shitposts being very... white, no matter the topic.

@didijournal women in humanities appreciation!! #literature #history #art #philosophy #fyp ♬ original sound - ridgeclub 

@sagsez a little bit of everything 😭 || #astrologytiktok #venusruled #astrologyfyp #aestheticvibes #fypシ゚ @Ruru 🪷 @ash @jama ♬ original sound - ìv

    While these videos are very fun and interesting to watch,  even for a topic that, seemingly, has nothing to do with race, I couldn't help but notice the lack of color in both of them; and there are many more where that came from. 

    Before, I had no problem reposting and moving on simply because I liked the content, but in recent months, I realised that I had to start being much more intentional with the way that I interact with media. Even if it wasn't on purpose, it shows the exclusion that people of color go through at the hands of "I didn't notice" or "I didn't even think about it". Since I've started putting black people at the forefront of the content I consume and share, it has honestly been harder to see and find more white than colored people in the pictures and videos I come across. 

    And it really made me think: for a women in humanities video, you couldn't find a single picture of a person of color reading a book? (And not just people of color who pass for white). And for a video about Venus, you have Jake the dog from Adventure Time for some reason but couldn't find any POC representation? And the answer to these questions is honestly probably not, because all of the pictures and videos these creators look at feature one type of person. 

    Even on Instagram, people post funny little pictures of girls journalling and frolicking with cute captions on them - popularized by justgirlythings and the I'm just a girl meme cycle - but I noticed that outside of black creators centering black images, all the other popular creators cycle the same 3 - 5 white women to put in these post and don't go outside of that comfort zone even if there is an equivalent of the same picutre a scroll away. 

    Even if not perfect, I managed to find equivalents to any of the girl posts made by users among the platforms. 
(And honestly, could production of 10 Things I Hate About You not have found a more believable book? Why is Kat reading a Bell Jar textbook?)

    This blog is for everybody, but as a black woman, I want to center black women and other people of color in my aesthetic and in my writing. It's always nice to see yourself in someone, and we deserve to be here and have that experience. We deserve to be quirky and awkward and fun and hate our job but wear pink to make the day a little brighter. We didn't survive generations of trauma just to be told that we can't be awkward and fun, and then just excluded from a niche we help make fun. If I wanna equally listen to rap music and my 90s rock in my pink and purple room, that is what is simply going to happen. We don't have to be the token that conforms enough to simply be lucky to be there. 

☆ stay cool, cool girls! and stay weird!☆

xoxo,

eternalcoolgirl ☆