She’s coming up snake eyes.
A Brooklyn midwife looking to make new friends has been branded a “colonizer” for attempting to organize a dice game night in her neighborhood.
Online trolls have accused Ellen Christy, 30, of gentrification and appropriating black culture after the Jamaica Hospital worker posted online about her monthly “Bunco Club” dice game in the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Community Facebook group.
“Hi all – seeking women living in Bedford-Stuyvesant to join a Bunco Club!” Christy, who is white, wrote in the post. “Bunco is a game of rolling dice (think Yahtzee!), no skills required.”
She included with the post a selfie with a group of other women sitting on the floor, most of whom appeared to be white.
But rather than being met with enthusiastic neighbors, Christy faced frothing wrath with a pile-on of angry responders who immediately accused her of running a “Colonizer Cee-Lo Club,” referring to a dice game associated with historically black neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy.
“Yall playing gentrified cee lo?!” one poster wrote. Another wrote, “colonizers be colonizing.”
However, Bunco draws its origins from working-class England in the 18th century, while Cee-Lo itself is even believed to have been brought to the Americas by Chinese laborers before gaining popularity and associations with inner-city black neighborhoods.
Dice have been used for gaming at least as far back as 3,000 BCE, with historians finding them used in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and China.
It’s unclear when Christy posted her allegedly offensive request on the neighborhood page, but after it amassed over 100 heated responses, it was taken down.
That spurred even more vicious responses after someone posted a screenshot of her original post.
“deleting your post, and all of the labor that we did to educate, is colonial violence. so that tracks,” wrote Janessa Wilson, who attracted another 100 comments from nasty netizens.
“The dice game is literally genocide,” someone commented.
Others pushing their outrage implied her motivations were dangerously nefarious.
“Posting that in this group was already an act of violence. I would have not a trace of reason to believe that a whites-only club in Bed-Stuy would be a safe and welcoming space to anyone not white,” one poster wrote.
But Christy never indicated there were any requirements to join her club, with her post linking to an online form with questions like, “Do you live in Bedstuy? If no, what neighborhood do you live in?” “How did you hear about this club?” and “Why do you want to join this club?”
And though the form asked for social media links, Christy even added that it was only required “if you’re comfortable.”
Christy posted about her Bunco Club in the Bed-Stuy Facebook group in May and was met with no issue.
Wilson — who dedicates her personal Facebook page to calling out white people supposedly behaving badly in her neighborhood — declined to comment.
“No one who isn’t ‘them’ is safe,” she commented on her reposting of Christy’s post.
Christy, meanwhile, serves as a midwife at a medical center serving the traditionally black neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens. She could not be reached for comment Monday.
“In the years following my graduation from nursing school, advocating for birthing people and reproductive and sexual health became increasingly important to me,” she told a student paper while in school for midwifery.
“I started to read more about the positive impact nurse-midwives can have on perinatal outcomes and experiences of pregnancy, and I became inspired to begin the process of becoming a nurse-midwife myself.”
Read the full article here
