What it's like: Coming Out Colored™ in Cyberspace

Within the virtual social networks of cyberspace the meaning & practice of sharing one's identity has become a distinctly new thing. For people of colour - in this case for me as a Black person - person of African descent- and as a Black woman - claiming who we are in cyberspace is frequently a daunting experience that draws on resources like courage and will. 

So I've named this project Coming Out Colored™. "Coming out" takes the daily experiences of a person of colour trying to use/participate in cyber social networks & the Web and deliberately likens them to the voluntary act of self-acknowledgment. The "coming out" often occurs when and because - even in cyberspace- others around us erroneously assume that we look exactly like themselves. This is sometimes when the real adventure begins. And often not.

My term "Cotton Curtain"™  combines imagery of the Cold War with an experience of many Blacks in the Americas. In the 20th century the term "Iron Curtain" described the separation of communist societies from the West. In a similar way an invisible 'cotton curtain' has surrounded the lives & communities of people of African descent of the Americas. In many parts of the Americas cotton has been one of the staple agricultural crops which Africans and African Americans were pressed into cultivating. In "Coming out Colored" the cotton curtain is those experiential barriers in social computing and networking that often separate or isolate Blacks of the U.S. & the Americas from others.

This journal is a chronicle of personal & mass communication experiences of "coming out" colo(u)red within the Web's virtual reality - in electronic communities/social networks, while at the same time negotiating the well-documented Digital Divide. Focus here is on this author's discoveries, contacts & experience however COC includes research and accounts from other interested observers.

COC is also a response to research that regularly addresses gender but not ethnicity or race. This trend raises a 'coming out colored' question: Is everyone in a network assumed to be white? The question and the answers do matter.

Thank you for visiting Coming Out Colored.™