As a member of Generation X, I am old enough to remember a time when almost all of us had an air of mystery about us—unless you were the kind to attract the gaze of the paparazzi. Unless someone was your close friend or a cousin you grew up with, you didn’t know their intimate details—and perhaps not even then were you really aware of nearly as much as you thought you were. There were always a ton of things you didn’t know about even those people with whom you spent hours of your day working and then complaining about the boss during your lunch break. You might speculate about some of their beliefs or views; their interests or kinks. But speculate though you might, you generally didn’t ask and they generally didn’t offer. Those were the kinds of things you might not ever begin to probe into for years, or on a fifth date maybe, but even then you would usually only scratch the surface.
Now, though, social media and the power of online searching mean that we don’t have as many secrets. And, in so many cases, this culture of social transparency means that we also don’t try as hard to keep any secrets. We’re sharing photos of ourselves and our children with a slew of people we’ve never met and never will. We’re arguing questionable or volatile (or both) political views in forums where our employers could easily read our words. We’re daring to send naked pics of ourselves via text when our Aunt Susie’s text stream is right next to the one of the person we’re lusting after and all it would take is one wrong tap...
We aren’t trying to be private.
I want to make privacy hip again.
Mind you, it’s not easy for me to be private and keep my personal life personal—or at least within tightly controlled social boundaries. I’ve been interviewed via Skype on MSNBC. I have a well-read blog on which I talk about some pretty heady—and for some, inflammatory—topics like systemic racism and racial injustice. I head up one of the oldest continuously operating anti-racism organizations around. My job and my marketability depend on me being visible and vocal, from in-person speaking engagements to Twitter rants, especially as one of the very few Black people in one of the whitest U.S. states. I and my family became a viral story when some teens shouted a racial epithet at us from a car when a local television journalist was walking down the street—and a U.K.-based media outlet that picked up that story even ran photos of myself, my husband and my kids, including private-folder Facebook photos of my preteen daughter that I still don’t know how they grabbed.
Now, though, social media and the power of online searching mean that we don’t have as many secrets. And, in so many cases, this culture of social transparency means that we also don’t try as hard to keep any secrets.
On top of that, I have an adult son who is a growing musical name in independent art-rap circles—having made top-whatever-random-number-the-publication-thinks-is-cool lists in Rolling Stone and numerous other publications online and on newsstands—so it may seem an insurmountable task to keep my personal life locked down.
And to a certain extent, it is too herculean a task in which to succeed. But my goal isn’t to put everything under wraps; it’s to keep enough out of the public eye that I’m not an open book. I’d much rather that most of you only see the cover, book jacket and maybe the foreword.
How much I’ve increasingly committed myself to maintaining privacy and protecting my family from public exposure over the years became very clear to me when my rising-star musician son was preparing to get married very recently.
As his popularity has grown, he’s found it harder to remain anonymous when getting a coffee or veggie taco or groceries. He’s seen no small number of fans make demands on his online time and on his artistic choices as if they individually owned him. But he is still far enough from the limelight that he can mostly blend in, and that’s the way he’d like to keep it—he may be part of the generation that seems most willing to give away its privacy online but in this respect, his apple doesn’t fall far from my tree.
He did not want anyone but family, close friends and maybe a few other stray souls to know he was getting married until, ideally, days or even weeks after the deed was done and honeymoon over. I admit that even my privacy-loving self found it hard not to tweet about the upcoming nuptials or post about my daughter-in-law-to-be on Facebook. But I knew how important it was for my son not to have the pressure of strangers—be they fans or detractors—smothering him online and distracting him from wedding and work, much less risk fans showing up at the service or reception.
So I simply made him promise I could be the first to break the news online when the wedding was done, and I worked hard to restrain my father—who still doesn’t seem to fully understand his grandson is a bit of a celebrity—from telling most of our extended family about the upcoming wedding. Sure, I tweeted a vague daily countdown starting weeks before the event because, hey, while I don’t want my whole life and family’s life on display, I like building some suspense and excitement. Even when the vows were spoken and the kiss between husband and wife complete, I was restrained in how much I shared details and how many photos I posted.
It is possible to keep some secrets, or at least make them really hard to ferret out. It is possible to keep a lid on things that should not yet be public and be patient until you can share them more sanely or safely.
I could say that the wedding of my son was a revelatory experience or a breakthrough. But in fact, I’d been trying to recapture some privacy already for years, and I don’t mean simply that I keep an eye on the settings for my Facebook photos or refrain from giving out too many specifics of where I am or where I live at any given time. My “Black Girl in Maine” blog has been around since 2008 but years ago I made a decision to almost completely stop posting topics about my children. I have been in the process of separating my personal self from my work self on Twitter and Facebook for a couple years now.
I know that, in the end, I cannot be completely private, any more than my son can. To retreat into ourselves and our metaphorical caves would harm our careers and cut us off. It would also silence our voices, and we are both too invested in calling out injustice and making people aware—whether they want to be woke up or not—to be quiet and demure online.
But it is possible to keep some secrets, or at least make them really hard to ferret out. It is possible to keep a lid on things that should not yet be public and be patient until you can share them more sanely or safely. It is possible to be mindful of what I post and what people can see so that personal stuff doesn’t leak out much and, when it does, the damage can be more easily contained or repaired.
I truly believe I am the better for doing so. People still know where I stand on many issues, but they don’t need to know how I feel about all the issues. I still post pictures of meals on Instagram, but they don’t need to know where and when I am eating at any given time. I still crack jokes online but I’m also reading my posts a few extra times and deleting a lot more of them before I actually put them on social media because I know how easily things can be misread or re-posted out of context.
To do this requires restraint, and it requires buy-in and co-signing by the people close to you at times. But it’s worth it to me. It’s worth the increase to my safety (I’m no stranger to death threats in my line of work) and worth the reduction in unknown people online trying to be my friend or trying to pick me apart—or both at the same time.
There are enough people who think I’m cool that I like to believe I have some influence in making this approach seem attractive to others—in perhaps making it the new trend. The new normal. And I think privacy, or at least as much as we can have in this over-connected world, is cool. I hope I can be one of the people to make it hip to keep a few secrets in our hip pockets.
So that we meet offline, if ever we do, you’ll still have stuff to wonder about, speculate about and—dare I say it—ask about if you see me often enough and earn my trust.
photo credit: "That holiday feeling" via photopin (license)