To communicate on the Internet - to write about music, to do my research - I have to take extraordinary steps to protect myself from these voices. I have also seen, repeatedly and frequently, the ways in which Youtube amplifies voices of hatred and abuse. We have a voice on Twitter, on Youtube, and that has been a tremendous help and strength to me. We have platforms, and often these platforms are through social media. Over the past few years queer voices in general, and trans and GNC voices specifically, have increasingly worked to make ourselves heard. The history of queerness is, in large part, the history of the struggle against being made silent and invisible. It took me a while to understand it, but I understand it now. One of the things I was taught early on, as far back as the '80s, is the queer equation silence = death. This is as direct as I can be with you right now. As much as I would love to be able to explain to you in explicit, concrete, rational terms why precisely this was so difficult and painful to see, I have tried for a week to find the words, and I cannot, despite being white, despite my not being targeted personally by this video the way POC are. I struggle to express it myself, however. And then in the middle, he stops, he cuts himself off, and just says "Fuck the history lesson." I am inspired by the discipline and clarity of vision Diggs expresses in this moment. It's very much along the same lines as the Sedition Ensemble record I wrote about two weeks ago. Daveed Diggs starts going over the history of institutional racism in America, brilliantly and eloquently. Right now, I think my favorite part of it is in the first verse. A few days ago they released a new single, and I think it is an amazing single. I am a big fan of the hip-hop group clipping. I went looking for it in a private window, because while I still use Youtube a lot, I have found that over time I trust Youtube less and less with identifiable personal data.Īnd one of the sidebar video recommendations on this video was a video titled "How Anti Racism Hurts Black People". There's one particular song that's fairly well-known in certain circles in the West called Muziqawi Silt, by the Wallias Band. Because it's a topic I don't know much about, I started by doing a little basic research - looking up some of my favorite Ethiopian songs on Youtube. There are a lot of different reasons this can happen.Ībout a week ago, I started a post on the Police Orchestras of Ethiopia. Sometimes I start blog posts I don't finish.