Watch the Eggs

The io9 team was there for me from the jump—helping me cultivate my voice, giving me the time and space to figure out how I wanted to fit into the site’s larger legacy, and if it were not for them, I’m beyond certain that I would have left much much earlier. I want to be exceedingly clear about this next bit: as much as I have cherished my colleagues and my time writing for this site, I will never forget the consistent level of animosity and hostility that a lot of my writing—particularly my writing about race—elicited from people who considered themselves a part of io9’s core audience.

Angry commenters aren’t the reason that I’ve decided to leave, but as I’ve looked back at my time here, I’ve been reminded of how often I found myself being told to leave by various people fixated on truly deranged idea that, simply by writing about Black people, Black experiences, and Black stories within genre media, I was somehow “ruining” io9 or working against the site’s ethos. I’ve long since made my peace with the reality that there are just some people who take the kinds of stories I write—stories about marginalized people, stories about laborers fighting for better working conditions, stories that try to pose difficult questions about who we are as people—as personal attacks. In that peace I found strength and a sureness that I was doing the right thing here, but also a confidence in my ability to determine when the time would be right to tap out.

That time has finally come, and while I will miss hanging out with some of the best damn people in this business, I’m excited to see what the future brings—not just for myself, but for everyone who’s had a hand in making io9 the place that it is.

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