Week 3: Que-erying Digital Blackness
I get the inspiration for a lot of lectures whenever I am near water. Generally, when sitting near, in, or by baths, steam, rivers, ocean, and even fountains there will be an influx of knowledge. Many times this influx of information is inconvenient, during my time spent with water I am usually setting an intention for meditation, visioning, reflection, and release. Instead, I get a deluge of thoughts, exercises, and ideas about all of the many things I want to say in the coming weeks which make connections to our current moment. There is something interesting about how those moments when you seek to quiet your mind, the mind becomes the most active. It’s as if one’s brain is just waiting for a moment to be heard. To be unplugged and then plugged back in again, a quick restart or factory reset to get things back into working order.
This particular week’s meditation began with some fountain time. I like to sit near the various fountains on and off campus, feeling the spray of water on my face and beneath my feet. On Friday I sat near the fountain and contemplated the discussion posts for Week 2. These posts focused on the topic of “What it means to be Black in the digital age”. The responses were deep and quite powerful. The digital legacy of slavery rang through in the students concerns about state sanctioned violence, culture vultures and cultural appropriation, as well as the infiltration and surveillance of Black communities both online and offline. At the same time, in their responses, they transmuted the theft of intellectual property and creative products by positioning Black culture and identity as unique, innovative, and influential. Always ahead of the game it only made sense that others would recognize this ingenuity and want a piece of it for themselves, another residue of the past as we remember how enslaved people were brought to this country because of their unique skills and talents.
As we worked through multiple discussions that were so generative and thoughtful, I que-eryed the class on the topic of world building. For many students, when we uncover the oppressive programming and paradigms of digital tools and technologies the first question is “How can we get rid of racism and all of the systems that oppress us?” While understandable, I wonder if the only question we should be exploring is that of eradicating the oppressive codes and programming embedded within this digital world? Or, Is there power in simply recognizing, being cognizant (woke if you will), about how the world around us works i.e. being able to see the Matrix and imagine something beyond it?
This was confirmed two days later in the Mobile Homecoming Sunday Service with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Sangodare. Through proverbs from “A Course in Miracles” and an oracle reading of Audre Lorde, we explored the role of perception in shaping our reality. Specifically, Sangodare read from “A Course in Miracles” something that resonated so profoundly with what it is I am teaching which is that “everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy” because “the world you see is what you gave it, nothing more”. Speculative Futures allows us to envision and create the world that we want to live in. Which is not to say that we ignore racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression, etc but we do the work of looking into this world and ourselves to lay a foundation for lasting change i.e. Me Work before, during, and after We Work.
In the lectures for Week 3 we focused on Shaka McGlotten’s “Black Data” essay and Kara Keeling’s “Queer OS” with an opening quote from Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight “The black femme sets to work on questions concerning the creation of the common under circumstances of domination, exploitation, and oppression” (Keeling 7). This week’s readings are offered as a response or building upon the Introduction to Black Code Studies, which was described as “queer, femme, fugitive, and radical”. Through the work of Mcglotten and Keeling we unpacked the creation of common sense in society and the ways that intersectionally marginalized communities push back against “domination, exploitation, and oppression” through art and media.
In keeping with my own research, the weekly workshop was titled “All Tea, All Shade: Reading as Black Queer Digital Praxis”. In the essay “Black Data” McGlotten utilizes the “interpretive and performative black queer practices - reading and throwing shade - to cultivate a notion of black data tied to defacement, opacity, and encryption” (McGlotten 279). Not a course goes by where I can’t find a reason to teach students about reading and throwing shade both within and outside of academia. Within Black queer communities, the act of reading is it’s own form of signifyin’ which can be playful but also painful, depending on the relationship between the readers. In contrast, throwing shade ups the game on reading. As Dorian Corey states in the problematically iconic documentary film Paris is Burning, reading is to throwing shade as “Shade comes from reading, reading came first, and reading is the real artform of insult”.
While reading can be an intra-communal practice between friends or sworn enemies, reading can also be used as a digital praxis that involves standing up for community members in the face of cisheteropatriarchy i.e. Digital Dragging, Reading the Receipts, etc. In addition, throwing shade can be viewed as the practice of critiquing the corporate norms of digital media platforms. A Black Queer Digital Praxis understands that we can not keep quiet about what we know and see about the corporate logic and hidden nature of algorithms and recommendation systems. We must call out, we must call in, we must read digital platforms in our analyses and usage. We ended the week with a discussion of the recent lawsuit between YouTube and LGBTQIA+ content creators and Akila Hughes’ call to promote Black content creators on the platform as examples of this type of praxis.
Our weekly discussion then focused on the following questions: What do the practices of reading and throwing shade contribute to a Black Queer Digital Praxis? How do we call out and counter the harmful practices of technology companies and social media platforms? And, are there other examples of problematic digital practices that you recognize from your own experiences online?
Through discussions of the queer aspects of Black culture and technology students were able to interrogate the common and their own sociocultural programming when it comes to the representation and identification of Black community i.e. Me Work. By introducing my conceptualization of a Black queer and femme digital praxis, the class can now move onto Weeks 4-5 on surveillance and algorithms i.e. where the We Work begins!
Readings
Keeling, Kara. "Queer OS." Cinema Journal 53.2 (2014): 152-157.
Keeling, Kara. The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Duke University Press, 2007.
