this isn't just about the streamer ignoring ray.Ā
yes, the conversation is focused around him, yes the catalyst for last night was because of a microaggression he experienced (again - it happens at least once a week), but this conversation is not simply about ray deserving recognition.Ā
this is about the broader context of how ray and every other person of color in this fan space are treated. last night was just one of the many catalysts for this conversation.
when poc on the dash discuss the visceral reactions we have whenever we notice ray being cut out of streams, you need to understand that we are operating under years of personal experience with microaggressions. we are operating with radars specifically tuned to covert racism because that is a survival tactic for us. when white people see ray being ignored or his value deprecated or his features insulted, they think 'that's so strange, he's so good at guitar and i like his hair! how could anyone possibly think this!' they think of it in the same vein as mikey getting ignored. when poc see this happening, we are aware within seconds that those little negs are surface-level symptoms of twenty years of violent and explicit bigotry ray had to experience as a man of color in the white public eye. he was cut out of posters, edited out of photoshoots, pushed aside in conversations about the band's musicality despite being their melodic/technical backbone, sliced from interviews, called ugly, bodyshamed, tone-policed, had his hair insulted, the list is endless. and that's just in the mass media. don't even get me started on online communities.
when poc see ray getting ignored, we see the entire iceberg. we see that these are simply the most visible oil slicks that rise to the top of the pot, and that there is so much more boiling underneath the surface. white people cannot, choose not to see that.Ā
people have completely blinded themselves to what ray went through for most of mcr's career. i think this is a mix of deliberate ignorance, time burying the worst of it, and new fans not knowing how the band's media experience traumatized them. new fans see ray being called a god,a king, a hunk with a rock legend certification, and other incredibly dehumanizing pseudo-worship phrases. new fans see ray being praised for his body only after he's lost weight, being praised for his hair only after it loosened in texture from the kinky coils it used to naturally be, being praised for his ethnic features that are only now starting to be fetishized instead of insulted. they see that, in the general fan consensus, ray is more popular than mikey. and they believe that means ray is being treated well. i cannot describe to you how glaring it is to every person of color on the dash that that is not true.
because ray is a celebrity, the way he's treated in a fan space is essentially the way an audience would treat a character in media. that's just how fame works. because of this, it is incredibly easy to identify the racial media tropes he's lashed with on the daily.
some of these include model minority, latin lover stereotypes, racial masculinization and de-feminization, heteronormativity, whitewashing, etc etc etc. look them up. ray's specific case also exposes unconscious bias almost unprecedently easily; because he's mixed, pale, and doesn't have a stereotypical accent, white people can hide under the guise of fucking somehow not knowing he's a man of color, despite the fact that he is very very identifiably and proudly nonwhite. remember that post about how bullies somehow always know what to bully you for even if they can't define it yet? the way white people talk about ray's hair, face, body, and entire being in general is not at all diluted when they pull the 'but i didn't know!' card.
it's not just ray, either. whenever i or any other ethnic person with big textured curls post a selfie, we get bombarded with white people saying 'wow, you look just like ray' or 'you could be toro's sibling' no matter how little we actually look like him. white people here are so underexposed to any scrap of nonwhite features that when they see people with a very common ethnic hair texture they immediately relate it to the one poc they can remember without looking him up. whenever i or any other ethnic person start this conversation for the third time in a month, we receive a barrage of defensive asks crying about how they don't know what to say because they're white, or just straight up being racist. we lose droves of followers. the entire dash, despite usually being bustling and wonderful, goes silent. it feels like a knife to the gut and we expect it every single fucking time.
so no, it's not just about the streamer. it's about the way ray and every other poc in this scene have been treated for decades. look shit up. donate to the poc taking hours out of their days and years off their lives trying to educate you. think before you post. and please god don't let this die. i don't know if we'll be able to handle another fucking cycle of nothing changing after the few poc on the dash rip themselves apart trying to get anyone to listen. keep talking about it. write a note if you have to. i am begging you to take last night and keep it close to your chest, because if you let the conversation be swept away just like every other time before, we are never going to heal from any of this. face it head on and relentlessly. and pay the people giving you education
