We Need More Tony Weaver Jrs

Growing up in the late 70s early 80s there were no Black nerds that I knew of.

There was no Internet, there were no personal computers in everyone’s home.

There were no smart phones, not even portable ones.

You only knew the people in your neighborhood and who you went to school with. If there were other people out in the world they may not have even existed. You learned about faraway places from actual encyclopedias.

There were very few people in my neighborhood that were Black and the ones that were … well … they weren’t nerds and they weren’t geeks. Growing up in the 80s if you were a nerd or a geek you got beat up. You got bullied. If you played D&D you were accused of being in a satanic cult – if you think I’m joking look up the Satanic Panic in the 80s or watch the Tom Hanks movie Mazes and Monsters to see what people thought about D&D back then.

There were no “safe spaces” except in the basements of your friends place like you see in Stranger Things … everything was hidden … every joy, every love, every secret RPG … There was no Critical Role, no Matt Mercers, no celebrities that played D&D. Geeks weren’t cool. Period. Geeks were people you beat up for being different. Geeks were losers.

I was a loser who got bullied by BLACK PEOPLE more than white people simply for being a geek.

The only friends I had who liked what I liked were white and they never made me feel not welcome back then the geek spaces were filled with ACTUAL GEEKS and they welcomed everyone. There was no “Girls Don’t Like Star Wars” bullshit and woman hating and gatekeeping back then.

Being a geek or a nerd where and when I grew up was a white thing … for white people. Not even white MALES just white people. Black people weren’t geeks. I never met one in my life … not even in college … not even after college. I didn’t know there even were Black people that cared about geeky things or liked anime or read comics until social media became a thing and it was like a revelation opened up.

By the time social media became I thing I was a full grown adult and needing to find “my people” was something I’d simply grown out of needing.

But social media did show me that Black nerds exist and they are amazing and they experience much more worse things than I did growing up. Fandom these days is not only toxic AF it’s dangerous and racist and misogynist and I would NEVER want to be a part of any club that has brutal conditions and gatekeeping and rules about who can and can’t be in it … kind of like the Black community.

Fandom and the Black community share a lot of the same problematic aspects … and it’s sad because all it does is keep people fighting their own instead of the real problems and oppressors out there. The people in marginalized communities are out there creating division, sowing hatred, and separating the community while the real oppressors just sit back and laugh at everyone in the Global Majority and call us fools and puppets while we dance to the tune of hatred that they taught us to feel towards each other.

I wish someone like Tony Weaver existed when I was a kid … I wish his book existed … I wish the Internet existed if only so I could know that other people like me existed in the world outside of my neighborhood and my school. My world was so small … and I felt like I was so alone in it most of the time. I could never have imagined there were people like me out there in the wider world. There was no wider world.

I don’t need Tony’s book … I wanted Tony’s book.

I wanted to support everything Tony does to make a difference in the lives of ALL nerds and geeks out there.

We need more Tonys.

We need solidarity amongst each other. The world is doomed otherwise.