Crafting Confidence
By Mone Moore
If there’s one thing that full-time students can all relate to, it’s being broke. With classes, exams, projects, study sessions, and extracurricular activities, the life of a college student is hectic. This leaves little time for even just a part-time job that pays well enough to be worth a student’s valuable time. The life of a full-time student is one of sacrifice: eating ramen noodles three times a day, forfeiting sleep in favor of completing an assignment, and especially penny-pinching in order to save what little money one has garnered from odd jobs during semester breaks or from the pity of relatives. This leaves very little money for necessities that a student may need, let alone entertainment. I know this struggle all too well as a Black woman with natural, coiled hair. Products marketing towards my hair type are insanely expensive, and I simply don’t have the money for that, which leaves me with two options: beg my mother to buy these products for me or DIY. Most people in my situation would choose the latter, and set about scrolling through the internet in search for DIY recipes to create less expensive hair products that they need.
However, the DIY community isn’t just for finding, creating, and sharing hair product recipes. It’s also a place to learn how to become more independent and money-conscious. DIY projects can be used to replace expensive household items that are necessities: toothpaste, deodorant, sunscreen, lotion, and even clothes if you’re willing to learn some basic sewing techniques. The DIY online community is a community of learning, sharing, and most importantly, empowerment. There is a certain satisfaction and pride that comes from taking inexpensive items and turning them into usable, convenient items like this mini desk organizer or even deodorant that you end up using every day. The DIY community tells people that, hey, you don’t need to rely on other people to make the things you need—you are capable of creating the same products at home for a fraction of the cost of buying brand name items!
This kind of empowerment and creativity is something that everyone can benefit from, and yet there seems to be a stark lack of Black female representation in the online DIY community. As a Black female DIY-er, I feel as if the DIY community values white female DIY-ers more than people such as myself. When I want to take on a new DIY project, the first place I go is YouTube, and more often than not the YouTubers with the most subscribers are White women in their early twenties, while their Black counterparts, who are taking on the same DIY projects, are significantly less recognized by the DIY community. Here is a screenshot of the YouTubers that came up when I searched “DIY” into the YouTube search bar.
This is a screenshot of the very first page of search results YouTube gave me, which means that these projects and channels are the most popular. Clearly, if the thumbnails are any indication, there are no Black DIY-ers on the first page, so I scrolled through the search results until I found one.
I finally found one Black DIY-er, but I had to scroll all the way to page six, which, to be honest, hardly anyone searching YouTube ever looks that far. But the fact that I could only find one Black DIY-er with just the broad keyword “DIY” in the search bar shows how lacking Black female representation is in the DIY online community. Why are almost all the other channel results are white women or white men? How does this lack of representation affect how we subconsciously view Black creativity?
But first, we should talk about why representation is so important. Olivia Heusinkveld wrote an article titled “Why Does Media Representation Matter?” for the online student magazine the Wake where she expresses the importance of diversity and representation of ethnicities, races, and sexualities in the media. While her argument is geared towards media such as films, it is applicable to every other media outlet such as the DIY crafting community. She says “without representation of all races, genders, sexes, sexualities, body types, etc., there are stories that we are missing. Without equal representation, there are people who are not feeling heard or seen. In a nation and world as diverse and complex as ours, the last thing we want is to lose the stories of a large portion of our people” (Heusinkveld). The same can be said for representation in the DIY community; the lack of diversity in popular crafting channels means that we are missing out on other people’s stories, creativity, and opinions, which for a community that is supposed to be inclusive and all about sharing is a huge problem.
Furthermore, this lack of representation is especially harmful for young people who are just becoming aware of and interacting with popular members of the DIY community. As Rebecca Brand says in her article “‘If she can’t see it, she can’t be it’ Why Media Representation Matters” for the Guardian,
My own professional attention has since shifted to younger viewers. Their developing minds are that little bit more unquestioning about what they see and hear on their screens. Or, of equal import, what they don't see and hear...What message are we giving those impressionable minds about women? And how might we be cutting the ambitions of little girls short before they've even had the chance to develop properly? (Brand).
If a young Black woman were to suddenly immerse herself in the DIY community, she would quickly realize, most likely on a subconscious level, how there is little, if any, Black female presence in this community, which would lead her to believe that in order for her creativity to matter to the masses she would have to be a “pretty” White woman in her early twenties. This subconscious conditioning could impact that young girl for the rest of her life, and she grows up thinking that white women’s ideas, imagination, and creativity matter more than anyone else's, and she would probably never contribute to the DIY community by, say, uploading videos of her projects on YouTube, sharing pictures of her work on Pinterest, or any other social media outlet because she would think “who cares about my opinion?.”
Diversity is quickly becoming an increasingly important issue to discuss as society becomes more aware and empathetic to the plight of underrepresented groups. Fixing the lack of diversity in the DIY community is not something that will happen overnight; it will take a conscious, collective effort of the DIY community as a whole to work together to solve this problem by first openly discussing the issue of representation in the DIY community. Popular DIY channels and websites should promote and support smaller, less popular crafting channels and websites that are run by people of color. The key to solving the problem of representation is mutual support, understanding, and respect for everyone’s creativity.
Works Cited
Huesinkveld, Olivia. "Why Does Media Representation Matter? - The Wake Magazine." The Wake Magazine. 23 Mar. 2015. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
Brand, Rebecca. "'If She Can't See It, She Can't Be It': Why Media Representation Matters." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 Nov. 2013. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
“YouTube Search Results for ‘DIY’ Page One” YouTube, 2016. Screenshot