A Place of Whiteness

You're looking at the front page of AVEN. Here, an issue of AVENues is displayed, bearing a photo from one of our San Francisco meetups. Everyone in the picture is white. Maybe this is accurate to the demographic of some areas (Ely, Minnesota perhaps), but not in the Bay Area, where stats on Wikipedia claim that white people are 58.1% of the population. Siggy's post made a similar observation. While making her documentary on asexuality, Angela asked me something along the lines of, "where are the asexuals of color?" Granted, our meetups are rarely 100% white. However, they are probably 80-90% white, which doesn't match up with the actual demographic of the Bay Area.

I was/am worried that this round of the blog carnival wouldn't contain many posts by asexuals of color. But if you consider the fact that only a tiny proportion of the ace community will participate in this blog carnival...and then think about the fact that most of the people who are currently active in the asexual community are white...that result becomes highly likely. I wasn't sure how to get around this. It's a conundrum, because while I would like to see the asexual movement become less white (by the addition of POCs, not by kicking out white people), I am coming from a place of whiteness, as are most of the people who are visible in our community. I don't want to tokenize people or try to speak to experiences that I can't understand. If certain asexuals of color don't feel comfortable with aspects of the ace community, or like it isn't speaking to them, I would probably not be the one to discern those aspects.

Maybe we need some kind of "asexual diversity task force", but of course it would be ridiculous if the group was full of white people. I strongly believe in "nothing about us, without us", a slogan from the disability rights movement. So I don't want to talk about people without them, which I feel like I'm already approaching too closely here. But, I think it's important to make this community a place where everyone can feel included and where intersectionality is widely understood. Can the asexual community more accurately reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the actual world?

One possible issue is that our reliance on the internet medium probably leads to the increased invisibility of POCs in our community. Since whiteness is seen as the "default" race (this is a crucial aspect of hegemony), people online are probably assumed to be white until stated otherwise. This is a problem since out asexuals of color are a small enough group as it is. Also, look at the characters and celebrities that are described as asexual. They're all white, aren't they? (Although an exception might be on the horizon-- some people are saying that Patterson Joseph, a black actor, might be playing the next incarnation of the Doctor on Doctor Who.) And last, but importantly, asexuals of color in media appearances are few, if they appear at all.