Emuna Zamani, a warm and chatty virtual world YouTuber, recently posted this moving video where she starts by talking about her anxiety and anger over recent real life events -- first the pandemic, and then the international uprising over the killing of George Floyd and other Black people, along with the systematic racism which contributed to their deaths.
African-American in real life, she expresses her unvarnished opinions on all this through her Second Life avatar, who is also Black. In real life, as she explains, she is under pressure to keep those opinions to herself:
"I'm very angry," as she puts it. "I'm glad I'm working from home because if someone [in the office] said the wrong thing... man, lemme just tell you, I don't know. That's how fed up I am."
One day, she tells me, her YouTube channel may emerge from behind her avatar.
"After I leave corporate America," as Emuna puts it, "I want to record my Being Black in Second Life videos as myself. My current career doesn’t give me that freedom."
The video is devoted to the Virtual Black History Museum in SL, a place she just discovered and explored by happenstance. Her tour was so powerful, she records this video in near tears:
"Black is all that we have to identify with... our history [before slavery] was wiped out," she says.
As it happens, the Virtual Black History Museum was featured on SL's official YouTube channel back in February, which somehow seems like a far more innocent and safe time. (Though for most if not all of us, that retrospective feeling is a lie.)
Click here to visit the museum yourself. Emuna recommends you come without any preconceptions or expectations, but shared with me the most powerful part of the tour for her:
"The display on Emmett Till was when I was overwhelmed by emotions," Emuna Zamani tells me. "After all of that time, we are STILL fighting for the right to live."
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