Propósito

Of the three quarters of participants that said they attach importance to audiences knowing their racial and/or ethnic identity, less than one fifth conveyed authenticity as the principle cause for divulgence. This includes Grace (35, creative writing): ‘It’s important that people understand that it’s written by a black woman…I think it’s quite important in general when it comes to Black writing that it needs to come from us.’ This statement speaks firstly to the perception of the existence of a body of literature known as ‘Black writing’ and the belief that such literature should be written only by those racialised as black. She attaches huge importance to the issue of authenticity in her additional comments: ‘I want to be quite authentic, it has to be authentic.’ This is the blogger introduced in the previous chapter for whom voice is a major form of gratification specifically linked to content about the black British experience expressed through humour. Her knowledge is drawn from lived experience and it is important to her that her audiences understand her view of the world, her construction of her subjective reality. Her gratification is amplified by positive feedback and arguably there is an expectation that sharing this knowledge and experience with other members of the in-group will generate positive feedback, reinforcing the sense of community. The importance of divulging her racial identity is also linked to her cultivated audiencesthe people whom she hopes and expects to read her blog, members of the in-group:

I visualize people like me; my age, maybe between 20-35, black women and men, but I think that because I’m writing from the eyes of a woman I’m assuming it’s women. I kind of bounce between women and men; I visualize black people my age living in resistance in Britain going through the same old problems.

This statement speaks to a sense of both the public and private, whereby through visualizing her audience of black men and women, she assumes a common experience of racism by African Caribbean people in British society that she expects other members of the in-group to relate to, but especially black women. She constructs her subjective reality not purely on the basis of race, but also gender, creating an imagined audience that is a mirror of herself. In writing from the perspective of a black woman and visualizing a mostly black female

audience, Grace (35, creative writing) assumes a collective, black female consciousness. Her narrative provides an important geographical context in alluding to everyday experiences of African Caribbean people that define an ongoing struggle against racism. The end of the 20th century signaled the emergence of ‘a distinctive and simultaneous blackness and Britishness’ as an expression of a unique identity (Young, 2010:46), rendering greater importance for African Caribbean women in locating their experiences as black women within a British context (Amos and Parmar; 2005:46).

Lisa (33, social issues) gains gratification though knowledge sharing of a professional nature and also makes reference, though in less explicit terms, to authenticity as an important factor around the divulgence of racial identity:

I am a black woman who happens to write. I am also a writer who’s a woman who happens to be black. Whatever way you put it, I cannot in my way of how I view life eradicate the fact that I’m black and that may have an effect on how I view things.

Both women demonstrate how Black women’s lived experience as members of raced, gendered and classed groups greatly influence their world view (Collins, 1990). Lisa (33, social issues) offers a reason for the importance of blogging openly as a black woman that alludes to authenticity: ‘I think it’s really important because if I’m writing so honestly and transparently why would I not be transparent with who I am?’ The first part of the statement implies awareness both of multiple identities in terms of race, gender and her vocation as a writer but also an acceptance that race is the most dominant facet of identity that shapes her world view. According to Nazroo & Karlsen (2003), two dimensions of identity exist: external racialised categories imposed by dominant, political, economic and cultural hegemonies onto minority groups signified as the ‘other’ and internally defined identities that reflect individual agency. Self-defined identities are to a degree influenced by external labels. However, her acceptance that as a black woman in Britain, her self-defined identity is in part influenced by her position in relation to dominant, white British society, does not mean that she sees herself through the lens of the dominant culture. The second part of her statement suggests that authenticity is important to her not solely in the sense of speaking with authority on issues concerning African Caribbean people but in the sense of speaking from a position of openness and transparency equated with honesty, which is clearly an important personal value. The significance attached to this authenticity is also linked to her cultivated audience

which although she describes as ‘cross[ing] racial boundaries’ later states that ‘some posts have become more tailored to black people’. She goes on to say: ‘Obviously I’ll be speaking to black people who it resonates with but if a white person happens to read it or an Asian person or whoever reads it and gets something from it, fine.’ In accepting that many of her posts constructed from the perspective of a black British woman will appeal largely to African Caribbean audiences, in common with Grace (35, creative writing), there is an assumption of shared perspectives and experiences. But whilst accepting this as a basis for inclusion and a sense of community, does not see this as a basis for the exclusion of other racial groups: ‘Just because I’m talking about my hair I’m not rejecting other people. It’s open for everyone.’

Speaking in similar terms, Julia (21, fashion) whose motivation and gratification is linked to a love of writing and journalism, still sees an importance in speaking authentically to a black audience from the position of the in-group, when writing about issues deemed to be of concern to African Caribbean communities:

If I’m writing about something that affects our community then I’ll want people to know that look, I’m not just a random person…I know what I’m saying, kind of. But then in other situations I don’t think it’s a big deal.

Central to her perception is the notion that being a member of the in-group, the African Caribbean community, denotes shared understanding and perspectives. In order to enact this sense of community and demonstrate a qualification to speak on black issues, revealing one’s racial and ethnic identity is central to this process as she further explains:

It shouldn’t really matter but in some situations it would matter whereby you need to validate your point, like what does she know about us? And it’s like yeah, I’m one of you so I really do think I know.

Whilst she visualizes her cultivated audience as ‘just anybody really’ suggesting an ethnically diverse readership, there is still a perception that many of her posts will attract readers like herself from the black British community and revealing her racial and ethnic identity as a member of the in-group validates her knowledge acquired through her lived experience as a African Caribbean woman in British society.

Adrian (30, social commentary) has carved out a niche as a social commentator and has motivations and gratification linked to an interest in writing and journalism, in common with Julia (21, fashion). He expresses similar views in terms of authenticity as a discretionary strategy employed only when writing posts that are targeted at African Caribbean communities:

I don’t think it’s important on every post. There are some posts where I feel it probably is important because I feel people should know that I’m speaking. If I’m speaking about something particularly in relation to the African Diaspora then I think it’s important that people realise that I’m speaking about this from an informed standpoint…a standpoint where I’m kind of an authority on this because I’m living it, it’s my life. These are posts where I wouldn’t want people to be dismissive of what I’ve got to say because I know what I’m talking about.

Counterhegemonic discourse through the articulation of a self-defined black woman’s standpoint is a strategy used by black women to resist race, class and gendered oppression and represents spaces that black women create to construct their own self-definitions and oppose dominant constructions of black female identity (Collins, 1990). Black British women have always sought out spaces from which to speak (Young, 2010) and blogs have been appropriated by black women as a platform ‘to articulate their vision of black womanhood’ (Brock et al, 2010:1056). The authenticity of black identity and the black experience is highly contested. Efforts to challenge negative representations of African Caribbean people in Britain through cultural projects in the seventies seeking to reject objectification, presenting ‘authentic’ images of blackness have been critiqued as a means of reproducing essentialist notions of black identity:

Although black people become active agents because they are now the subject rather than the object of representational practices, the cultural politics of the black movement implies that it is only by allowing the other to speak that an authentic depiction of the black experience is possible. This mimic approach to representation assumes that a real black experience is out there in the world and that this experience is distorted and misrepresented when it originates from a privileged white position. (Marotta, 2001:542)

In the conceptualisation of new ethnicities as argued by Hall (1996), authenticity is not guaranteed as black identity is contested through new discourses in which history, language and culture play key roles in the construction of identities. However, online ethnicities, defined as ‘new’ in the context of their construction through computer mediated communication, according to Marotta, (2001) do have the potential to renegotiate, reconfigure and re-represent ethnicities, in the same way that Hall’s (1996) conception of new ethnicities have the potential either to reinforce essentialist notions of black identity or to disrupt them. For the bloggers in this study, authenticity as a dimension of blogging practice is about imparting knowledge based on their unique perspectives that serve as counter- narratives to dominant discourses. It functions as a tool against raced and gendered oppression that does not necessarily reflect the belief of a homogenous black identity but represents a standpoint from which they explore, negotiate and define their own subjective reality.