Once upon a time, a younger more naïve Shemonti decided it would be a good idea to make an account on IMVU. She had no idea what it was about, but the pictures looked cool – bad idea – So there she was, creating her account, getting way too excited over decorating her Avatar (honestly, this is just a glorified, boring version of The Sims – without the fun building part) and putting in a lot of care on her appearance. Cue an excited Shemonti:
So while I was choosing my appearance I chose a darker skin tone for my avatar for reality’s sake, thought it would make everything a little more authentic. I thought, the more honest I was about my appearance the better it would be. Oh how wrong was I.
While exploring the website I discovered that I was able to go to different ‘rooms’ and walk around to socialise – because God knows I don’t socialise enough in the real world, I thought it would be better to do it virtually – so there I was in a pixelated, swanky little room, looking around, and the first thing that showed up in the chat box was “get the fuck away from here chocolate bitch”. Cue a sad Shemonti:
The first thing that came into mind was – chocolate bitch? Really? You’re being a racist tool, and you’re comparing me to something that’s really delicious? I – as you can obviously tell- was pretty confused. And to be perfectly honest I didn’t find it as insulting as I probably should have. Like I said – naïve. Add idiot to that list too.
TLDR – [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303874206″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
As I have touched on the topic of websites doing better to stop online racism, I genuinely believe that more should be done. When I received this abuse – admittedly EXTREMELY mild compared to what many others go through – it was never made clear anywhere on the website what I should do to get help from this abuse – and that in itself is heart breaking.
My only hope for the future of online racism is that websites will take better care of their users and take stronger actions against those who are being racially abused – because so far not enough is being done.
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