BIPOC Representation in Knitting | A video essay
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- čas přidán 7. 12. 2023
- This video was originally written as an article for the website Roots and Stitches. The clips used here is an attempt to entertain and hopefully provide food for thought on the topic.
The article can be read here: allhomesteading.co.uk/2023/12... - Krátké a kreslené filmy
Honestly, I can't wait for when I don't have to write black, bipoc or other descriptors to try and find black people with the same hobbies or interests as me
I am a knitter, sewer and crocheter in Germany. We don't have nearly as much people of color as most other countries, especially not UK or US. There are 3 people of color in my area that I know of. It's the internet, social media and CZcams where I find BIPOC creators and learn about the challenges they have to face that I as a white woman would never know anything about. So thank you so much for this video that popped up on my recommendations. You are doing important and precious work.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I hope we can continue to learn from each other!
same, and it really works! finding and preferring bipoc creators online has made me inadvertently notice more all-white spaces and situations, that used to feel "normal" to me here in germany ^^
That’s funny because that’s a full lie
There’s a lot of Roma/Sinti in Germany, and there’s also quite a few refugees from other countries also, don’t act like you’ve also never seen black people in Germany either, it’s only uncommon if you live in the country
@@GG-ux8ii it changed a lot over the past decades. much as most western countries, growing up in suburbia means you never see any black or even brown people in your neighbourhood, the supermarket or in school. i moved downtown after school and immediately met and befriended many people with so called 'migration background', but that was a whole other world and it didn't change the fact there were no bipoc people around when i visited family and the places i grew up in. and because everybody around me had acted like this was normal when i was a child, my subconscious never registered it as weird. only when i started seeing bipoc people on my screen EVERY SINGLE DAY did this change. i distinctly remember the first time, which was when i watched a live classical concert and all the musicians were white (maybe one or two asian at best). i spent a lot of time in this space as a child because my dad was a conductor and pianist, so it was huge for me to finally get objective enough to notice this bias on my own. and it keeps getting more and more, not just irl but online too.
p. s. please don't call people liars
I recently got into knitting, and your video showed up on my home page. I’m a black woman too and I appreciate you so much for this video!Subscribed!
You're very welcome! I hope you enjoy your knitting journey! 💗
Your video showed up on my FYP here without any prompting! I hope this video continues to take off and educate more people in the knitting/crafting community.
Thank you! 🙏🏾
Hi Natalie, thank you for the thought provoking video today... I appreciate the points you make in this video and the encouragement for us all to consider then take action about Diversity in ways that each of us can in order to expand variety of creative people so that everyone can feel more welcome and comfortable on the knitting platforms. I am sharing this link with other podcasters encouraging them to also share this video with viewers and others... raising awareness is one of the first steps towards change I think, and you did a great job with that here.
Thank you too for your encouragement, I appreciate you. ❤️
this is so beyond timely, so beautiful, so thoughtful. a million thank you's for speaking up!
Thank you for speaking up about this systemic problem. I am a white woman, who did see the differences in how many white crafters I get recommended instead of bipoc crafters. I now better understand the issue and I will do what I can to support bipoc crafters more. Thank you for educating us! Well done.
Thanks so much for sharing your feelings on this topic as a new-ish knitter to social media. I love knitting and gardening too. Looking forward to hearing more of your ideas and I’ve subscribed to your podcast. Thanks so much for being vulnerable and open on this topic.
Such a lovely essay! This definitely made me think more intentionally about what content I'm looking at and engaging in. ❤
Thank you so much! I hope your viewing pleasure will be all the richer for it! Thanks again! 💓
Love this video. Representation is important. ❤️❤️❤️
Thank you for your message. It needs to be spread.
Yesss! I am SO HAPPY to find other Black women knitters. (Especially others with locs and glasses lol) Thank you for making this video
Thank you! Happy to have you. I have just subscribed to your channel as well!
Beautiful and poignant!!! Thank you for being brave and sharing!
Thank you! I’m glad you appreciate it ❤️
Thank you for sharing your essay. Your essay expose most of what I am thinking. Diverse knitters really show up without me doing all the extra research. ❤
You are so welcome!
it is def harder to find creators of colour when looking for new content, and even harder to find recommendations for regular content about crafting rather than videos like these, so thank you for linking so many ppl! gonna go check them all out and see if i find any new favs, and def gonna check out your other videos too, the few of your own projects you have shown in this video look so cool
Thank you for this excellent video and for the encouragement to be more supportive of diverse knitters.
You are doing good work. ❤️
I also love your jumper (sweater). You are kicking it!
Thank you for your kind words and observations! 😍🥰
thank you so much for this beautiful video essay. As a black knitter myself, I go out of my wat to search for black knitters on CZcams. My hope is that one day I won’t have to go out of my way to find them. ❤
So happy to have found your channel 😊
Happy to have you here!
So eloquently presented and expressed, thank you for taking the time to turn your article into this video essay and giving steps we can all make to make a diverse and thriving community with a seat for everyone 🫶
Edited: I always want to say that Roots and Stitches was a lovely partnership with MeridittleMakes it was a collaborative project (but we simply didnt have the time to give it the energy it really deserved) ✨️
Hi Katt, thanks so much again for the encouragement and opportunity for the collaboration/publication. Yes, my bad, I definitely should have mentioned @meridittlemakes as well! It's a shame Roots and Stitches is no longer but I am sure you'll have lots of similar fun and worthwhile projects and ventures in your future!
Thanks for this video! It popped up on my home page so the algorithm is doing some work. I’m always on the lookout for fellow POC (especially Black) knitters
Cackled out loud at the university challenge clip. Genius comic timing. I didn’t actually know the organiser of Wool and Folk was Black. I’d seemingly just ignored how white the knitting world seems to be because I’ve sought out Black creators and like you, am used to my hobbies leading to predominantly white spaces. I’m thankful I’ve only experienced racism in a FB knitting group and no other knitting groups offline.
Thanks for your comments! I’m glad you appreciated the “Snow White” clip LMAO. My sense of humour is sometimes an acquired taste 🤭😆
This just showed up on my feed (I'm a crocheter) and thank you for recording it. I've tailored my YT feed for crochet and it's full of bipoc/disabled/lgbtqai+/neurospicy people. I'm now stepping through your video, following the people you mentioned, as I want to get into knitting and want a feed that isn't just white women knitting! (Also I didn't realise Gardener's World had changed so much, you're making me consider getting a TV licence!)
Thank you for watching and for your thoughtful comment!
Hello, this is very thought provoking. I am a white woman, a painter and crocheter. Your video essay showed up on my main page (good news 😊). I follow people of all different ethnicities, genders, etc because I like their content. However, your video brought up points I had not thought about, and I will try to bring more diverse content into the forefront through my consumption of videos. ☮️
You're right, black knitters don't come up on the search feature and I find that so odd because they come up on my suggested videos reasonably often and I always make sure to watch at least one of their videos to support. Perhaps it's the ineffectiveness of the search function but to see black knitters only when you type that in specifically is disheartening
The truth!!! I am not sure why the algorithm popped your video into my feed but I am so happy that it did. Thank you! I will re-watch, write down some of the CZcamsrs you highlight and go from there. I follow a few non-white knitters here on You Tube and am always looking for more. We can switch the narrative by actively following them and changing the algorithm !! I am curious about why the Roots and Stitches website got taken down. No worries - I scrolled through some of the comments and found what I was looking for. I do follow Katt Weaver and am pleased that I was not disappointed.
I love this! Thank you for your comment and wholeheartedly agree with you! There’s room for everyone! ❤️
Yes!! Thank you for this beautiful thoughtful and necessary piece ⭐️✨⚡️
I am doing what I can. Over 50 years of knitting and crocheting under my belt. I’m out there, just doing my thing. Waving the Old Black Sheep flag.
Pioneer 😍😎
Excellent video and thanks for the recommendations. Just coming to your channel from a recommendation by Breathing Yarn in her latest video.
Hi! Thank you for being here and letting me know about the Breathing Yarn video: I will check it out! ❤️
“Emma in the Moment”’s Fybrefest video (esp the thumbnail) didn’t sit quite right with me and I wasn’t sure why - thank you 💖
Say less, I know exactly what you mean…
I adore finding other fiber artists who aren’t white, especially BIPOC, wish I could see more Romany fiber artists represented
❤
You have an interesting perspective, one which is slightly different than mine. I am in CA, USA, and grew up in an all white town where my family was the only Black family for miles and miles. I was the first Black person my classmates had ever met. I believe my fair skin made me approachable but the decade (70's) also made my childhood experiences reasonably good. Never once did I feel that I did not fit in anywhere I went (including most of my adult life). My mother (dark skinned) taught me how to crochet, then my father taught me how to knit. I was 8 years old. I have been knitting ever since. I now live in a very diverse county (capital of California). Prior to the pandemic, my office asked me to teach knitting at work. After the pandemic, I joined a Sunday knittng group. As an adult, I have been surrounded by BIPOC knitters. The algorithms here and other Social Media continuously provide me with BIPOC creators. So in my small world, BIPOC are represented equally with all people and I am not unique as I was when I was a child in an all white town.
Thank you for sharing your experience. You are so fortunate to have lifetime of knitting and to have had a diverse community/crafting influences and I am happy to hear such a positive perspective. And so cool your father taught you how to knit as well! Neither of my parents knitted but I get a love of plants and gardening from my father.
Well stated 🧶🤎
💙
I'm so glad I clicked on this one. I've pretty much given up on social media crafters at this point. Naturally, I am still constantly making things but I'm just not interested in the drama, name calling and total lack of humanity by so many people when I share publicly.
I'm Indigenous (Illini), queer, and chronically ill and I just don't have time for peoples cruelty.
Thank you for drawing in so many thoughtful people ❤
Hi Nico, glad to have you here! We’re all here to learn and yep it’s lovely to create community, especially when the real and online worlds can seem so exclusive and cold. You are welcome here. ❤️
I very much want to be more intentional about increasing the diversity in my algorithm (on CZcams and social media in general)- I’d like to see more BIPOC makers, LGBTQ+ creatives, and artsy folk with disabilities who are sharing their crafts online. My algorithm tends to look allot like me (white, millennial, middle class), but that seems like such a limited view. Could you suggest creators that I could follow for knitting/sewing/crafting content? You mentioned some hashtags to search - any other ones that could help me find a more inclusive crafting community?
Hi Kristy! Thanks for taking the time to message, I appreciate it. There is a BIPOC directory called BIPOC in fiber that could be a good place to start. This comment section and this video has helped me to connect with fellow BIPOC creators but yeh I guess being intentional means seeking different creators out, and not relying on what is pushed by the algorithm because it can also be trained because the algorithm’s job is to keep us on the platform for as long as possible!
Really interesting dude
Thank you, sweetie!
Thank you so much for this video. I can’t agree more. As a knitter, spinner, and craftsperson the knitting side of CZcams has always felt very one sided and underrepresented with ppl of color. The algorithm certainly seems to favor white people and it can feel very alienating not seeing folks who look like you. I recently started my channel in the hopes of being another diverse face on the platform. Looking forward to your future videos, I immediately subscribed.
Yep to all of this! Happy to have you here! Your channel looks fire so you have a new sub in me too! I will be checking out your vids. The algo gone learn today! 🤭
@@AllHomesteading thank you 🙏🏽 haha it better learn!!
Would it be an idea to give bipoc creators an algorhythmic leg up? A newsletter that people could sign up for and creators could submit new releases to, a list of that week's links. Lots of eyeballs in the first day should get the yt algorhythm to bump that person to more strangers, increasing the chances of further diversity in everyone's home page. I'd sign up for that and click through. (Mind, i wouldnt run it cause no one would end up with a newsletter, but there are I'm sure actually organized people who'd be willing to spare an hour or two a week to change the world)
hey, I was thinking and talking about this with my boyfriend the other day.... I'm Brazilian, not black but brown and I rarely meet any content creator in which I can genuinely identify so much with the production of the pieces that I would say have more styles and more colors than white people who normally make white/black clothes and lighter colors... I think in this sense I didn't find many Brazilian and colored crochet content creators but I found you and Ikoxun and a few other creators. ...
creation of content about crochet and knitting is still massively produced by white people.... In this sense, I'm trying to find the courage to create a CZcams channel and a TikTok to encourage girls of color to crochet, paint, sew and maybe even be about languages as someone who speaks 4 languages I think it would be a cool incentive
I love this! Please find the courage to start a channel and share! There is room for everyone and the more of us there are, together in our differences, the more we can encourage the next generation of creatives! ❤️
it really feels off to me, because knitting is not a privileged hobby but one i definitely associate with working class notions of frugality and 'useful' leisure. but then that's just my personal perspective, the way i was taught to see it in my family. when i look at (period) movies or scroll through crafting content on social media, there is a lot of elitist attitudes in there. reminds me of how i've been wondering for a while how come rich people always seem to go hunting all the time, through all of recorded history, taking pains and sinking huge amounts of money to conserve private shooting grounds and game keepers and such - and at tge same time defaming and slandering the actual hunter-gatherer subsistence cultures as 'savages'. i guess that's prime cognitive dissonance for you...
coming back here to find some sanity, after listening to people argue against representation in (pride month) advertisements "because it's shallow". like so what, of course it is. doesn't mean it doesn't matter. just wanted to let you know how proud i am of you, standing up for your cause (which is really all one cause in the end) and dealing with annoying, cringey apologetic white women, like myself 🤗 you're a hero 💖
argh i just realised that i should have worded that way more carefully 😣 it's NOT shallow. at least not when it's more than one greeting card a year or whatever. what inclusion definitely can be, is awkward. and i think that's a good sign. it means we're leaving our respective comfort zones and actually changing things. sorry for being annoying, again 😅 please feel free to completely ignore me, seriously.
@theblackknitter
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