Why This Femme of Color Won’t Watch The News

By Sasha Lamprea

At least twice a week, I have the same conversation with several different people. It starts with them trying to talk to me about something they saw on the news, followed by me letting them know that I don’t follow the news. At this point, they try to react in a neutral manner but fail, letting just the slightest bit of judgement peek through, which puts me in the position to explain: “For self-care reasons, I don’t follow the news.”

Because this conversation happens so often in my life, I have been forced to sit with my thoughts and reflect on the matter in-depth. I have come to realize that not following the news is not the personal and unimportant decision I thought it was. In reality, actively choosing to not consume mainstream media is a deeply political act.

Let me preface by clarifying that watching the news has never been a positive experience for me, so don’t think this decision is solely in response to the current political climate. For me, being a femme of color has a lot to do with both the emotional labor that is constantly expected of me and the unbearable depth of my empathetic nature. That being said, watching—or reading—the news has always held a sense of overwhelming doom for me. It is impossible for me to follow news pieces about violence or natural disasters without becoming overwhelmed by thinking of all the trauma of the world. Following the news breeds a sense of powerlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness in me, and it has always done so. It doesn’t matter how many articles filled with hope, ideas of ways to help, or ways to resist I come across, the sensation of being overwhelmed remains.

This feeling sits festering in my body, undetected and unnamed, until one day, out of the blue, I am sobbing over an episode of The Office or a soup commercial. My reaction is so emotional, completely unequal to its trigger. My wife, concerned, will ask me what is wrong and I will tell her that I am crying became Pam missed Jim so much while he worked in a different city. While that may be true, I’m also crying because children are being ripped from their parents, people have no access to mental health, there are too many transient individuals in Austin, the people of Venezuela have no food, queer folks and people of color continue to get killed worldwide, and on and on and on.

It’s exhausting to hold on to so much for so long. So, I avoid what I can. I’m aware of the immense privilege that comes with being able to make this decision and I understand that not everyone can choose what to consume. But I am humbled and grateful that I can.  It has not been easy, and I do not live without the guilt that comes with exercising my privilege.

In fact, let’s talk about that guilt.

Like I previously stated, being a femme is connected to emotional labor and empathy. This is especially true for femmes of color (see: the history of Black and Brown nannies or mammies, housekeepers, sidekicks, the Cool [Token] Black Friend in movies, etc.). This expectation of helping, healing, and empathizing is so ingrained, internalized, and linked to so many of my identities, that I feel guilt when I choose to remind myself that I do not actually owe anybody that emotional labor. When I first chose to not keep up with the news, and received the judgment that people pass, I felt the need to rush in with excuses about how busy I was with school or work, or to quickly provide examples of how I was doing my part to help the world. It has taken me quite some time to understand that I’m under no obligation to provide such emotional labor to anyone, and that these roles, which are thrust upon us femmes of color, are not permanent or unchangeable.

I continue to work to undo this social conditioning, as well as to recognize that staying informed, when it’s at my own expense, is not actually beneficial to those I want to help. Sacrificing my own mental health for my communities does more harm than good. I am learning that, in prioritizing myself and my mental health, I am doing much better work for my communities. I am learning that, while healing is femme labor, that healing does not begin with self-sacrifice, it begins at home, in our own communities, and with ourselves.

Not following the news is one of the many ways I choose to take care of myself and one of the ways I am putting myself, and my communities, first. It is a political decision to reject the idea that women like me must hold the pain of the world, that we are responsible for fixing all of society’s problems. Taking care of myself is a political decision to tell the world that I, with all my Blackness, Latinidad, femininity, and queerness, matter. It is my political decision to remove the oppression of the world’s current events from my shoulders so that I can find the resilience to carry on and keep thriving in a world that does not expect me to.