“Thank you for your valuable contribution”
About who is considered valuable, and for what.
As of the time of writing, Child of A Jackal, my story looking at the representation of Egypt in the popular videogame, Overwatch, has reached over 2,000 people. Alongside Heritage in Subtitles, this has been by far my most popular piece of writing, far outstripping anything I’ve done before. The response has been overwhelming, at least by the standards I’m used to, and I’ve received a myriad of replies I’ve not had the time to address.
At the same time, I feel a sense of deflation around it. I find it difficult to be proud of what I put into it, and there were several times I even considered taking it down. A lot of this has to do with those aforementioned responses. As a brief refresher, the article in question dealt with a modern day preoccupation with Ancient Egyptian aesthetics, and the ways it limited the image of what Egypt looks like today. While there were plenty of thoughtful, encouraging responses, there were some that either defended the use of Ancient Egyptian imagery, or immediately jumped on to agree. In both cases it was clear that the person hadn’t engaged with any of the actual arguments I had made, nor had any idea of my perspective. Their reactions were not to what I had written, but what I represented.
While part of that is definitely par for writing in general, there’s this pattern I see repeated for anyone who writes anything even adjacent to social issues. It’s something that’s been nagging me since I saw a writer share Heritage in Subtitles while framing it as an exploration of how media has turned Arabic into a language of hate. This is the same piece from which the follow excerpt comes:
Playing Tomb Raider, I wanted so bad for Lara to be Arab. “She could pass, right?” I told myself. I tried to convince myself that if I squinted and pretended, Lara could be an Arab heroine I could identify with. Maybe she was mixed like me? I’m sure there are plenty of mixed race Arabs with European ancestry. In the end these are nothing but rationalizations. Nothing but me using the flexibility of mixed race appearances to mentally reposition a character who was created, and always intended to be, white.
Later, that same writer would insist that the “bigger issue” I was getting at was the ways in which Arabic has been villainized. Looking back on it, it feels as if the humanity I attempted to interject into it, my personal struggle, had been glossed over entirely for this greater point.
I point this out, not to single this person out, but to point at a “bigger issue”. In this trend of greater visibility of social issues, and the popularization of diversity initiatives, the people who put in the work seem to have their selves erased from it.
It’s not uncommon for writers tackling issues of identity and inequality to find themselves worried about being subsumed into those identities. The problem with visibly representing an identity is that there is a danger that you’ll be seen only through that lens. This applies not only in the highly public campaigns of targeted vitriol, but in the way that people show support. This is how we get people of color only known for writing about race issues, queer people talking only about queer representation, or any manner of other social issues. These same writers may also be invested heavily in plenty of other subjects, but they’ll never get attention for the same way they do when writing about these social ills.
All of this contributes to a feeling that you’re only valued when you’re being oppressed. You’re only worthwhile when your pain causes you to speak out, to add an argument that others can build on, and do so with the legitimacy that comes from speaking from a marginalized position. At some point it makes your work feel like a tool that more privileged people can use to legitimize their own arguments. Even as I write this I worry that it will become my next most popular piece, shared in tweets attached to some phrase like “this is so important” and followed by several threaded replies.
It’s not that I don’t care about the social issues that I write about, nor would I prefer that my writing about them go unread. But it’s depressing to see it so frequently overshadow my other deeply personal writing and experiences that I’d like to share with the world. It’s been a hundred times more fulfilling to talk to a single person about the Chicago neighborhood I grew up in, experiencing old games only through emulators, or the political context of the Modern Warfare games, than to talk yet again about the experience of being oppressed. These are all deeply human experiences that are as important and formative for me as the pain that living with oppression.
If anything, it can be just as dehumanizing to only be seen as an object of oppression, as it is to be directly oppressed. It’s something I’m wary to point out, since I’ve seen plenty of my own friends get talked down to and dismissed for pointing this out. When you support someone only when they’re in pain, and only take interest in them when they speak about that pain, you send the message that only their pain is valuable. When you neglect all the other work marginalized people put in, you are neglecting the other aspects of them that make them human. That’s why I find it so exhausting when people find my work through my writing on social issues. I’d rather they not care than only care about my thoughts on those issues.
I’m not trying to shame others who try to help or talk about these greater social issues. Rather, I want others to understand that real support requires a willingness to learn about the full humanity of others, to appreciate them for more than the fire of their anger. To see the work they put in everyday, as another human being.
FURTHER READING:
*any story on my Medium page that isn’t Child of Jackal
*For the Old Neighborhoods, Both Physical and Digital
*Digital Secondhand: A Personal History of Emulation
*Shock and Awe: The Political Influence of Modern Warfare
*deorbital.media
*clickbliss.net
