Thoughts - On Space and Community and Race

Thoughts - On Space and Community and Race

I was thinking about a conversation I had like two weeks ago.

With an old friend, I hadn't talked to in a month or two.

We were talking about the internet and space, and how people form communities and communicate.

It came from a conversation about d&d, having to learn the skills to communicate and express oneself online and to form communities with other people having those skills.

And how there are no hard rules around things like that, they are all learned social interactions.

And she said something about that, about how she doesn't like those spaces because she doesn't want to interact in them, and doesn't need to. So she doesn't have that skill set. She doesn't like communicating that way. She doesn't need to if it isn't part of work.

And I talked about how with a two-year pandemic if I didn't have them, these spaces, this way of communicating, I wouldn't have any friends or anyone to talk to.

And I think I just realized tonight how angry that made me.

Angry in the sense that others have such a tremendous privilege about not needing supportive groups or communities.

About not needing to find like-minded space or safety because the western world seems predisposed to already BE supportive.

I was thinking about a teenage conversation I had with a schoolmate. Where he asked why there had to be Chinese Christian Churches. At the time, I said it was probably because they gave their sermons in Mandarin and Cantonese. And that's partially true. But did this 'welcoming' envisionment of Christianity from the West also discriminate in their way against a visible minority such that they needed to form their entirely different and separate arm of religion? Because they didn't have safe community?

Probably.

Is that the same for me?

Turning to online communities, and skills, and expertise in all these other areas because I didn't feel like I had the support or safety in the 'real world'?

Do I still feel that way?

I made music in my young adult years, and performing that music was never part of the creative process for me. I just liked sharing it online with like-minded people on the internet. I made post-rock. There was no local community for it. There certainly wasn't a community that would've accepted a geeky, heavy, Chinese Canadian kid. I wasn't white. I didn't have the 'roots' of rock and roll. There were no rock and roll idols in the west like me, no one to look towards and say "I want to be like them". All the rockstars were white. And thin. With sunken eyes on cocaine and heroin, obsessed with sex and money. It wasn't a space for my musings in an instrumental rock about celestial memories.

I found that space online to share with.

Very few of the people I formed that community bond with were White. They were Arabic, or African, their skin Brown, or Black, or Asian, like me. They were forced out of physical space communities by not having the acceptance of peers.

How many artists died starving for camaraderie before the internet? Starving for someone to talk to, long before any of us thought to actually make money, but just to sit and listen to one another. And share?

A week ago, a friend, who plays D&D with me exclaimed how excited she was to be playing. That she got to see the creative work I put into my creations, the passion I had for them, and storytelling, and the depth of the world I saw.

I was elated at the time. She's a peer, and someone I love dearly. It has taken years to reconnect this way, and to get her to share in it.

"I'm just getting to know this side of you, so its wonderful to see you shining this way" she said.

Then tonight, I realized I didn't know how she saw me for the decade we had been friends before this.

Who was I to her before? Because I have always been creating this way. Perhaps before with not as much skill, or as much ability to define my creations. Or to take the space that these creations needed. But this dear friend whom I did love...was she perhaps not safe for me to show this creativity to? Or did she not consider me creative?

Was I without dimension? Flat, and boring? Was I not an artist? Or creative? Was I an instrument for her art alone, turning a wrench to secure a light to bring her art form to the fore? In her eyes, was I a tool of use within a box constrained and simple? Without personal expression or meaning?

Am I that to all the white artists I have been supportive of and elevated? Who now that I am no longer as interested in spending unpaid hours and labour elevating, I, like so many others are discarded?

Are these people my friends?

How many late nights have there been, supportive, listening, critiquing, communicating?

All in service of their expression? And now, late at night, with only my thoughts for company, it's hard not to notice their resounding silence.