The West terms us “Unheard” but it isn’t listening

We saw this tweet (embedded below) by Jonny Geller who is a UK based literary agent and the conversation it catalyzed. This is our stance.

Perhaps the most problematic thing about White people like Geller categorizing African and Black voices in stories, media, and even Academia as “unheard” is that it attempts to exonerate the West and White people like Geller of the role they play in “unhearing.”

It is even more problematic because it suggests that a voice is only being “heard” when it is being listened to by the West, suggests that “mainstream” equates “whiteness” and that the audience we as Africans and Black people give to our work and our stories is not and will never be enough if it is not endorsed by the “superior” stamp of whiteness, when in fact we have always been listening to each other.

In the UK, Black people make up only 2.6% of the entire publishing workforce and it is about 86% White. In the US, only 1% of the editorial workforce is Black. How can a majority White editing workforce properly and adequately edit Black voices without white-splaining our stories?

Tweets like Geller’s stem from a system that centers whiteness and makes it the norm othering all else and demanding whatever point of view that intends to matter to gravitate towards it and then be tagged “mainstream.”

There is a redundant expectation by the West for Black and African creators to strive to go “mainstream,” to labour for white approval and in the event we get it to then be tagged as “emerging,” “unheard,” when on the contrary, we’ve always existed and we’ve always crafted and we’ve always listened to each other as Caine Prize chair, Ellah Wakatama expresses in her tweet.

We are cognizant of the ways in which language can be used as a tool to oppress and exclude and terms like “mainstream” “emerging” fall right into this class.

Mainstream is where we are. It is this editorial you read, it is you creative who reads it and who will go on to create for Black people, for African people, we are your audience, we are mainstream, and we have always been listening.

Toni Morrison once said: It is inconceivable that where I already am is the mainstream…I stood at the border, stood at the edge, and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.

It becomes even more necessary for us to create our own spaces and to tell our own stories outside of the White gaze and its approval.

Should the need ever arise to describe the attitude of the West to African and Black voices, a much more accurate language would be ignored, dismissed, gaslighted, and, victim-blamed.

Not unheard, not emerging. We cannot emerge if we have always been here. You just weren’t looking.