Creating Safe Black Spaces: 9 Virtual Communities Where Black People Can Connect
By: Kwana Adams
I am my best self when other black people surround me. I’m just more comfortable when the room is full of us. With Covid and all its restrictions, it hasn’t been safe to gather in groups. Before all of the limits, my favorite places to be were black hair salons and around the kitchen table at my aunty’s houses. The latter feels like family, and the former is family. Both feel like home.
Hair is important to the black community. It’s a cultural thing that ascends invisible lines. Am I the only one who remembers sitting between my mom’s legs, the cup of water with the brush in it next to me, wincing as she braided my hair, or pampering myself with a salon visit to get my hair blown out? I just know I’m not the only one who misses being packed into grandma or aunty’s house, gossiping and laughing in the kitchen, or listening to the tv being yelled at by our sports fan uncles and cousins. These are the communities that covid has made me miss being a part of.
Although I haven’t physically surrounded myself with blackness lately, I’ve found a way to still feel comfortable and secure in specific communities. Social media has made it easy to connect with people all over the world and create virtual communities. In my teen years, I was a huge ‘fangirl.’ I joined Twitter and immersed myself in my favorite celebrities’ lives. My top favorite was Justin Bieber. I spent hours on the internet listening to his music, reading his tweets, and trying in vain to get him to notice me. I had never experienced going to one of his concerts and meeting other fans, so I looked for them online.
It was hard to find communities where I fit in as a black fan girl. Most people think of white girls when they think of fans of Justin Bieber, so when I found a community of black Justin Bieber fans, I immediately immersed myself in it. This was my first virtual black community. This was a place I could feel safe as a black fangirl in a world that liked to pretend we didn’t exist or were a rarity. The one thing I love about black people is that when we don’t fit into a community, we just make our own. This is an occurrence I have noticed becoming more popular, and I’m living for it.
As an adult, I’ve decided the fangirl life isn’t for me anymore, and my fellow black girls must have agreed because our community fizzled out. I’ll always be grateful for it because I’ve made lifelong friends I’ve known for years. However, with the community dead and gone, I started to feel empty again. I loved being part of a community where black people can just be themselves and relate to each other on levels that no one else would understand. So I went looking for more and found a ton on Facebook. Despite the faults that Facebook has, there are communities for everything black that you can think of. For instance, I’ve immersed myself in the following communities:
Most of the groups I listed are spaces for black women specifically, but there are communities where we all fit in. Not only am I learning valuable life skills, but I’m explicitly learning them from other black people who have expertise in the area. I’m learning how to manage my finances better by black women, I’m learning how to build and buy stocks from black women, and I’m immersing myself in a community of black business owners.
It’s beautiful to me that we’re thriving in communities that have excluded us for years. I look to the black elders who came before me and made the mistakes that I don’t have to learn from. They answer my questions and offer advice to my generation and the one after me so we can all come up together. Safe black spaces are so very dear to my heart because it’s about time we start building as one.
YOU MAY ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:
