[Just over a year ago, Vaughn finalized and we launched this new public scholarly website, Black & White & Read All Over. There’s a lot about the site and what it has brought out of and added to our work that I believe is worth highlighting, so this week I’ll do just that in a series of reflections. Leading up to a weekend post of requests for y’all!]
On one more critical and one more hopeful reason we started this site, and a key follow-up.
As of last August, both Vaughn and I had accumulated significant numbers of subscribers and followers on our respective Substacks (hers for her weekly Review Roulette newsletters, mine for my weekly #ScholarSunday threads). The thought of rebuilding those communities from scratch was a daunting one to say the least, and one we talked about for a good while before taking the step. But at the end of the day, the more we learned about some of the shadier sides of Substack, the less comfortable we felt staying on that platform. I’m not talking about the fact that there are profoundly problematic voices in that space, because this is the internet in the 2020s and there are problematic voices in every damn space. I’m talking about Substack going out of their way to promote and subsidize (and profit from) such voices, to make them symbolic spokespeople for the community as a whole. I believe the last straw for us was when we learned that Substack was allowing push alerts for neo-Nazi newsletters to go out with literal swastika header images. That was that for Substack for us.
Likely such revelations would have driven us from Substack no matter what. But the reason we created a new site of our own rather than simply migrating to another parallel newsletter platform like Ghost or Beehiv—the reason, more exactly, why Vaughn was willing to put in the intense amount of work it took and continues to take to create and maintain such a site—was a more hopeful one. We both believe that the best spaces and conversations are both grassroots and communal, are built from the ground up and designed to encourage solidarity and collective spirit. Those other platforms and sites, even if they don’t have the problems Substack does (and of course there’s no guarantee of that, nor that it would continue even if it’s the case now), are both top-down (as any company is to at least a significant degree) and designed more for individual voices to express themselves. While we both continue to do the latter on this site, I hope the rest of my reflections this week will make a clear case for how communal we’ve intended and designed this site to be. That’s what I’m proudest of, and it was purposeful and pointed.
But to circle back to the challenge of rebuilding community from scratch, I need to add this (and it’s why I’m going to share this post on my defunct Substack as well): if you’re reading this, I’d really, really appreciate it if you’d subscribe to one or more of the newsletters on our site. It’s free and always will be, and it helps both psychologically and practically for us to have those numbers. If you are a subscriber or follower to my Substack, I promise you’ll get everything you would have gotten there, and so, so much more. If you’re reading this through our having shared it on Bluesky (to which we migrated when we left Twitter, for all the reasons in paragraph one above and then some), I hope you’ll express solidarity by subscribing to one or more of those free newsletters as well. Thanks so much!
Next reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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