S4E53 Why does creating community require creating negativity?

🎀Show your support by subscribing to the channel 👉https://www.youtube.com/@iamabowalways?sub_confirmation=1

Regular episodes drops every Tuesday and when the spirit hits.

tiktok: @iamabowalways

Transcript

Speaker 1 (0s): Okay, didn didn't realize I was muted. So this, start this all over. What I said was yesterday I wrote down a football, a few bullets about being in community, about negativity, you know, attacking groups of people and it wasn't like a whole bunch of stuff. And then I was going to do a quick live while I was waiting for one of my children to complete their practice.

And I didn't 'cause I was tired. So I was sitting in my car and I took a nap and now I'm in route to work. It's shy of six o'clock in the morning and I wasn't gonna do it, but because I'm feeling a little groggy today and I don't know, I'm looking at this weather out here, I was like, I should do it 'cause it'll keep me like entertained. So I just wanna talk about when you're being in community negativity and this isn't well thought out, okay? That's why this is the opinionated channel, not the fact channel.

This is the factual channel where we go out to the peer research or the NIH or any of those other locations to have facts. These are just my opinions. So I wanted to talk about when people are trying to be in community, well, in my opinion, in recent times, I hate that I gotta qualify everything. A lot of times what I'm seeing is like in order to be a community with somebody, you have to create some form of division.

You have to separate yourself, right? And so much like what you're seeing out here between the men and women, the whole gender war thing. And then when you got these subcategories within each gender, like the women are going psycho and you know, promoting hyper feminism basically. I mean they may not call it that, but that's what it is. They're promoting this hyper feminist ideal. Then you got the trad wives who are trying to run away from it.

you know what happens is when they're trying to be in community with people, one of the things that they're doing is instead of just finding a way to bring people together, they're finding a way to show separation. That's what I'm seeing. They're causing division, they're causing separation. And so instead of saying, Hey, let me show you why being a community with us is great, they, what they'll do is they'll attack another group. They don't really talk about their greatness.

Well, let me rephrase that. And I don't wanna say they don't ever talk about their greatness, but I guess in order to show some sort of how they're so amazing, you have to draw some sort of comparison. but I feel like there is this relishing of the negativity. There's this relishing in. It's not even so much as showing the differences. I think more so along the lines of showing like the downfalls or, or, or dragging somebody, you know?

So that is what I am noticing. And so much like anything else, you know, I think there will always be like a pendulum shift once things be critical mass on one end and people are are tired of hearing a certain message or branding of the message or whatever. And then the, the group of people who are being disparage or whatever will create some sort of alternate community.

I see it in YouTube. Let me tell you what I've seen. And you guys are probably gonna be like, either I live under a rock or you're gonna like heehaw at my expense. So years ago, and I usually don't call out channels, okay, there, but I'll just say this, there were channels out there. I stumbled upon channels several years back and there were created by black women who I guess wanted to dedicate cycles to talking about colorism.

Now trying to have those conversations in and of themselves, I don't think it's a bad thing. It's not a bad thing at all. But what it turned into was these massive ba bashing sessions. So I think I mentioned in one of my previous channels that oftentimes I will subscribe to a channel for a period of time just to figure out like, what is it that people are saying about this, right?

It doesn't necessarily mean I believe in it. It's more like, well what is the messaging? What are we branding the message behind? Like what, what is really undergirding this, this channel. And when you listen to what people are talking about and you get an idea, and sometimes I may or may not remember to unsubscribe after a while 'cause I already know it's gonna be in my feed anyway, whether I'm a subscriber or not. You listen and you're like, okay, but over time, now let me just say this, the, the downfall of myself is, but I subscribed some of these channels.

Like I am like feast or famine. Like I can't listen to the same thing all the time. So I would take these long periods of time away from listening to anything on the channel or several channels, right? So I'm sure there was something that I missed in some of the messaging, but I think I had gotten enough of it to listen to these women who seemed to really take umbrage with people with lighter skin. And you're gonna have to forgive me. Well, I'm not gonna say names because some of these things I don't remember.

I'm, I probably know who they are. 'cause you know, if you listen to one, you get recommended other ones. And I would just click on, but I never know who I listened to. I'm like, what the, I just listen to. And then I would get tired of listening to them and just click outta the messages altogether. And then I forgot who it was. Yeah, I wasn't like, why is this lane so slow right now? Like, come on. Anyway. So with that being said, years ago there were black women who created these colorism channels and or that talked about colorism, but what they did was they slandered light-skinned women.

Now, if they were just purely talking about the messaging of what was harmful or you know, how to we move past this or something like that, if they had a real purpose and, and an agenda as far as how do we fix it, I could get down with that. but I never saw the agenda for how to fix it. It was how do we create this community and how do we slander them so that we could say, see, they don't like you, they don't want to be like you.

They think they're better than you. Whatever, whatever, whatever. Where am I going with this the other day? No. What's today? Thursday? I don't remember if it was like Monday or I don't know what it was, but I, something popped into my, my timeline out of nowhere. I don't even know who I was listening to I. think the lady called herself Gigi. I don't know, I don't like to call out names. There is a whole community now that has been created from what I can tell that was sent on this channel and related relation to those color channels, the channels that talk about colorism from a Dar women's perspective.

Now there is a community of light skinned women talking about the dark skinned women who talked about the light-skinned women. So these are my thoughts on that. I think they people should be in community wherever, you know they wanna be, but I don't know why I didn't see this coming. Where women are like, I'm sick and tired of you bashing light-skinned women calling us all these names, et and the other.

So now there are channels out there dedicated to like you skin or your mixed status. I'm like, wow. It, it's, it's, it's, now let me just say this. There were a few points that were made in what, what portions of his particular video. I heard there were some good points from the light woman, light-skinned women crew point of view.

But I was like, does a whole community need to be centered around it? I'm like, how can we ever move forward if we create these channels and communities centered around this type of thing? So anyway, the point I'm making is I feel like nowadays when we make these, when we, when we wanna be a community with people, it's almost as if like, in order to do so, you need to create, you have to create division first almost in order to show this community, right?

like you have to show not just showing the differences. It's like you need to create a divide Anyway. So what I'm seeing also is in terms of wanting to, I feel like many of these communities now they're going like out of their way to validate the community, right? Like they are, they're look at that right here.

They basically wanna show how different they are. It's basically I think that they want to make sure that they are creating the right kinds of echo chambers. you know, they want to, They're going out of their way to validate their existence. They're validating their community, they're validating them. Like so earlier I was talking about showing their differences, but what they're doing is I think by when, when you're creating this divide, it's like you're going out of your way.

It's like you want to, I'm doing a part-time expressing myself here. Ultimately, great I think what they're trying to do is find a way to like create this level of comradery. all right? So it's almost as if like in order to show and validate themselves first, they have to have this camaraderie through in might be almost like some sort of trauma bond. That is what I'm seeing.

You see it in the, the dark skinned women videos and the, the light skinned women mixed videos. You see it in the single woman setting it off video videos on everything. And everybody, instead of just being mad at this, this particular system they're going after, I don't know everybody. They're going after married women. They're going after they're, they're just, they're setting it off on, on men, on everybody. And, and now what they're doing is, you know, to promote this comradery, you know, I mean in order to promote, to like validate themselves, they gotta create this comradery, but they got a trauma bond sort of way.

That's just my opinion. That's what they're doing. I know I'm having a hard time expressing myself. Like I said, I just found these bullets. I didn't give him like tons of thought, but these, this is how I was feeling. So now it's like, even though this isn't eloquently said I think you get the point where it's like, okay, not only am I trying to create the division, I definitely feel like they are like in order to have meeting with somebody, you gotta have some sort of trauma bond, even if it's to rally behind each other.

To, to create that camaraderie. Look at what the blacked out weird old men are doing. It's so embarrassing. I I was like, I'm so embarrassed for them. I think they think they're flexing and all it's doing is just making them look just really bad. I feel like a lot of times when people are in community I think it's like a backlash to society. So I look at, you know, the, the whole I think the argument against being a trad wife or whatever.

So like on the one hand you got these trad lives who are like trying to counter all these, these society things. Like when you listen to all these women talk about all these crazy movements and carrying on and they're like, well wait a second, I want to be taken care of by my husband. Like I, I feel like wherever you wanna go, fine, go work where you feel best. Do what you wanna do. But you don't have to bring down people, you don't have to. Marriage people think about what the single women are doing. They go out of their way to find statistics to try to tear down married women, women with children, women who are in relationships, whatever.

They tell you how unhappy you are. This is what they're doing. Not even understanding statistics. They tell you how it's better to be by yourself and tell you all these things. They tell you not to have children. They tell you not to be around men. They tell you. And then what they do is they try this shaming tactic of like any, you do any of those things, you're pick me. And, and so they want, they try to make it so that you feel guilty about wanting to be in community with men.

Now I do believe women need to have spaces on their own. I don't think women should have to go and disparaged men. They're doing a good job of bringing themselves down. Let me tell you, all you gotta do is pay attention. They look stupid. But what you don't need to do is get into these weirdo echo chambers when all you do is sit there and talk about men all the time. They're doing it to themselves. They're doing a wonderful job of making a fool of themselves just like some of these women are.

So anyway, what did I put? Oh I think my biggest thing was, oh I wrote down that I think a lot of people just don't wanna be seen as lesser than. So I think where I see that the most, where people don't want to be seen as lesser than, so they attack into the community. I think there's two communities. One, the dark skinned women community, like with it follow certain channels. They don't wanna be seen as lesser than white skinned women.

And they shouldn't be. But to what you'll see them do is they will aton constantly, but they also have some really good points. you know, but they bring up some really valid points. But then the messaging can get lost. you know, you can, you can lose the message when you engage in other behaviors. And the other area where I see where this type of attacking happens the most is a single women community attacking everybody.

You know, instead of just promoting what you like about your community, what they're doing is they're attacking other communities. So that's why, circling back to this, when I was thinking about just being in community in general, I think that many of the ways, the way it's done now, many communities like I, I feel like the way they're functioning is you have to disparage the other, another community in order to assault your own. You have to snap out the fire of one in order to promote the fire of your own.

It's really sad. It's sad, but that's basically where I'm going with it. you know, it's just, in order to be in community, you have to really just attack other people. So look, I might that back. I dunno, what is that about? Maybe I do it like this. Maybe this is better. Anyway, these are my thoughts. I mean they're not great.

I just feel like you know, it is what it is. If you go listen to some of these people out there here, these whacked out weirdos, I feel like I should draw a a Venn diagram and see like, do these communities overlap? you know? Like are these just like people who are just miserable people all the time? And, they exist in multiple communities. I don't know. but nevertheless, I just wanted to like point that out. I feel like many of these groups, in order to be in community, they have to attack other people.

They have to trauma bond first. They wanna basically exploit everyone's trauma so that you can say you're just like us. And that's how you gain the numbers. That's like gain the strength. They want to validate themselves by invalidating other groups of people. It's crazy. These are just my thoughts. I mean, I'm curious if, see what many of you think, but that's where I'm at with it. Now look, I don't want anybody judging me right now because I am tired.

I'm tired red. That's one of the reasons why I actually did this video because he was able to get me to come like wake up. Because when you're talking, he used to take breaths, he breaks oxygen into your body, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I know my energy is low, but I'm getting ready to get off here because that's all I've got. all right, bye.

...