I have never watched a single episode of Love Island, but the point Jameela and Valerie are making is that women of color are silenced from speaking because our mouths are prematurely labeled as angry, aggressive, or threatening. Plain and Simple. I have experienced this hundreds of times in my life whether I am writing an email or in verbal conversation. Often times, my voice is imitated by white women with botched Ebonics to paint a picture that I am an angry stereotype. Social media is not always my cup of tea, but these women are using their platform to hold a conversation that is not possible to carry out in real life.
Have a Pleasant Day
-Rae Pleasant
Below is my own experience with stereotyping from a well known gallery in Texas for simply expressing my mind back when I had social media. A white woman owned gallery exhibits a racially ambiguous man’s paintings that exclusively feature anonymous Black women in oversized portraiture. At the time, the gallery did not regularly exhibit Black women artists. Black artists being disregarded while white people profit from inanimate Black bodies for sale is an issue in the artworld and other industries. This issue is similar to women being traditionally used as nude ‘muses’ by male artists while female artists where disenfranchised. However, the gallery owner failed to use a pinch of intersectional feminism to see this point.
I am entitled to my opinion about artwork made to financially benefit white people featuring Black bodies for sale and displayed on social media for the whole wide world to consume…while my Black womanhood was demeaned working in the arts for years. However, my conversation was quickly derailed by the gallery owner with accusations of abuse and hate speech (I said #whitefragility and #whitefeminism). See the full conversation, and others like it, when the Spellbooks debut in 2020 featuring a decade worth of emails, social media posts, letters, forms, and solo activism in the arts.
