Influenced™

Rebranding to Avoid Responsibility

One of the most interesting things that always happens during Black History Month (happy Black History Month by the way!) is the conversation around what it means to be an influencer always flares up: most typically when a white influencer gets called out for something covertly or overtly racist and the blowback is always the same.

• I love black people, I have black friends and they said this was fine
• I’ve donated thousands to black charities, you can’t say I don’t help
• it’s not my job to police everyone who walks through my community

To be honest, I’m impressed that any POC at this point are still talking to white people about this, myself included. But this year I saw the wildest take of them all: “I don’t like the term influencer, it’s too broad, too much of a catch all, and really fogs up who belongs under that blanket. People like Ninja aren’t influencers: they’re just people with really large channels and platforms who focus on video games. Their intent was never to really influence anyone.”

Oh baby, no.

White people never cease to amaze me with the ways in which they will casually redefine, re-establish, rewrite, and re-calibrate how language and information work. The truth is: we all know that this is hogwash. Of course Ninja is an influencer. The fact that his reach hits hundreds of thousands of people hourly is the reason people want to work with him and be associated with him. They aren’t particularly interested in his values (which we’ve seen time and again aren’t exactly great), but they are 100% invested in him mentioning their products/organizations one time and getting clicks and views from it. They rely on people grabbing that link. They yearn for viewers to watch his channel(s), only to retreat to their purses and wallets and drop money (or ask for money, given that he’s an All Ages audiences) on his latest skin, his latest flavor, his new shoes, all of it. You don’t get to redefine what it means to be an influencer because it makes you uncomfortable that he is incapable of escaping what amounts to week two of ongoing (rightful) criticism. Also, it’s Ninja. He, and many other white content creators (especially if they’re men), will be fine. You don’t have to run up and defend him-and trust me when I say if you yourself aren’t popular (and I’m talking 400K+ followers deep, baseline), he isn’t going to notice you.

But yes, boo, he is an influencer. No amount of saying ‘but that’s not what he signed up for’ will change that.

Let me put it like this: I never signed up to have 7800 followers. I never signed up for people stepping up and vouching for me, saying that I deserve activations, or sponsors, or writing opportunities or partnerships. I never signed up for the affiliates who think I don’t know they spend half of their time subtweeting me praying for my downfall, and I definitely didn’t sign up for a small swatch of black women to shun me for not being ‘pro-black’ enough for their liking. I can make a laundry list of things I never intended to sign up for when I turned on my camera with Darkest Dungeon running three years ago. When I saw that number going on a steady incline, and I saw that people following me were writers, educators, community managers, influencer marketers, game designers, game developers, and the like, I didn’t go “ope, that’s no big deal”-that was my sign that things were serious now. I had a platform. I am a ‘notable’ influencer. In turn: that means my words carry more weight, will be leaned on more heavily, will be watched more closely, and my actions will always be under a lens. No, I’m not the biggest fan of it, but this is what comes with the territory. I can then make a choice:

• do nothing, curate nothing, go about my merry way and afford no whims to how my actions can-and will, inevitably-be emulated by others
• wield that platform I’ve been given to make a stand for things I care about, am interested in, and try to steer conversations in a productive direction

When I choose anything but the second one, I don’t get to be shook and surprised that people aren’t a big fan of the things I do (or don’t do, or frankly REFUSE to do), regardless of how many people show up to my channel to throw money at me and watch my reviews. I don’t get to guffaw when I find out that something I said was problematic, harmful, or considered performative. The conscious decision was made to not care. As a queer black woman, if I choose anything BUT the second one, it will be my damnation. Which is why we need to talk about how no, white people, you don’t get to rewrite what words mean (again) specifically to protect someone who isn’t even thinking about you, or going to be considerate enough to acknowledge you. You don’t get to classify all of us as influencers, content creators, or plainly ‘people you want to work with’ then decide when the giants of the industry are under fire that ‘actually, that word doesn’t mean what you think it means’.

You especially don’t get to when it’s loud and evident that this Updated Version™ won’t be applied to everyone. As I mentioned on my Twitter: if I, as a black queer woman, got on my timeline and said ‘you know I just can’t game with men, it’ll jeopardize my relationship with my partner of 5 years’, few people are going to show up to defend me. To explain in my defense. To rationalize that ‘I’m allowed to do what I want’-and this would hold true even if I had 780K followers-which makes sense, because that’s a clownish and purposely antagonistic stance. As a “bonus”, I would be the laughing stock of the gaming world, I would be in articles for the next two weeks as ‘black streamer goes on sexist tirade on Twitter’, where people would screencap my tweet and share it en masse across Reddit, across Twitter itself. I would receive endless calls to k*ll myself, to stop streaming, told to shut up as no one was speaking to me, all of it.

We know this because even when we DON’T do anything, and we get an ounce of praise or a single nice thing, these people will gladly scour our entire past and general Twitter history to find anything they can to prove why we shouldn’t be afforded anything but vitriol. These people saying the term ‘influencer’ is ‘too broad’ for their liking sure did miss all of the hate, bullying, dogpiling, and general ire marginalized creators catch 24/7. No one was worried about denouncing the term ‘influencer’ when women were being mass harrassed and doxxed for saying a lot of the gaming community is sexist (it is), that gaming has a white supremacy problem (it does), that Black creators are disproportionately impacted by marketing firms, agencies, and their own platforms because our platforms don’t support us and in turn agencies don’t want to work with us (which is getting better but still pretty widespread an issue). We (minorities) get lambasted for saying something sounds corny, but white people magically want to reestablish language after white men constantly show their ass on main, loudly and swiftly reinforcing the very things many marginalized people fight tooth and nail to reverse. Their cries of ‘can’t control everyone’, ‘I didn’t sign up for this’, and ‘respect my money’ undo months if not years of work upon hitting Send. We have targets on our back for breathing, sis. We got targeted for getting a free console.

But we’re still influencers. And not hiding from that, ever.

When we gain these platforms, when we turn on our cams, when we Go Live, we write, we create content, we’re influencers, full stop. How we carry ourselves speaks to the community we create and foster, and literally how we grow. Our communities are extensions of US because WE set the tone and expectation. You’re right: we can’t control every single person who follows us, subs, what have you.

But we can absolutely make it clear not just that ‘racism is bad’ or ‘you should be nice to non-men’-we can be ANTI-bigotry. There’s a difference between ‘racism is bad, don’t be racist’ and ‘racism absolutely will not be tolerated in my spaces, this is a loudly blaring PSA.’ Words mean things.

Where were these people wanting to recode “influencer” to protect us? Or is this the part where we want to start admitting safety coding, per usual, is only for white people? That ‘reexamining’ oftentimes only occurs when white people still, in the year 2021, would rather provide backdoor scapegoats than hold anyone they like even a minuscule amount accountable?