Why Racism Has Made Me Quit Writing

This will be the last post made to this blog, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time going into the details of it.

My name has been in the news as of late, and not in a good way. I’m not going to spend the time telling you about the story; all you need to do is google “Oliver Campbell” and “The Stanley Parable” and you’ll get all the details of the story.

I’ve decided to quit writing fiction altogether because of this incident. Why? Because my name has ultimately been dragged through the mud, devalued, and I live in fear. Any work that I put out now is ultimately going to be discounted and won’t be able to stand on its own two feet. I’ve been viciously attacked for going on for a couple of weeks now, and that’s not the kind of life that I want to live. I was afraid to leave my own home for two weeks, because the media has plastered my name and face all over the place (by linking to my twitter account).  There’s no sense in continuing to write when at this point, my name and race are now working against me in all forms possible.

It’s pretty crappy when you can google your own name, and any references to any of the work that you’ve written are completely tossed aside and are no longer relevant. I’ve seen and dealt with some pretty fucked up shit in the past few weeks because of this. I have been called pretty much every name under the sun, plus a few new ones that I haven’t even heard of before. I didn’t realize I lived in a time and a place where being black and speaking up for yourself was a crime, yet that’s exactly how this whole thing has gone down.

The only thing I’ve been able to be thankful for is that none of our books have gotten “review bombed” on Amazon with 1 stars, because of the vindictive nature of people. It doesn’t matter what I’ve said, how amicable the exchange was, or any of that. People don’t care, and they’ll make any assumptions that they want that will justify their beliefs.  That in and of itself, is a tragedy.

I’m just going to end it on this: What kind of world do we live in, where the message that we’re sending to people is “if you didn’t want trouble, you shouldn’t have spoke up?” I didn’t speak up for attention, because that’s not the kind of attention that I want.   I spoke up because it was wrong.

Keep writing and be good to yourselves.

-Oliver