Bret Easton Ellis thinks he gets the same abuse as black women? So, let me take you on a tour of my Twitter mentions

Bret Easton Ellis has been embroiled in controversy for the last 34 years. His cocaine-heavy debut novel, Less Than Zero was dismissed by a then senior Simon & Schuster editor as a novel about “c**k-sucking, coke-snorting zombies”. His gory 1991 novel American Psycho created the impression that he was “disgusting, a misogynist, a sadist”, according to Ellis himself, in a 2016 Rolling Stone interview.

He has proudly courted and flaunted all that is obscene and shocking for decades, yet now, it seems his whiteness – not his larger-than-life profile – is to blame for a perceived lack of action against the online abuse he receives these days.

Speaking during a promotional segment for his new social-commentary book, White, on Channel 4 News, the author and slightly-less-successful screenwriter aired his concerns about the nature of social media trolling, from his own personal experience.

“I get so much crap on Twitter, so much crap on Twitter. Probably much more than a black woman gets”, he said in response to Cathy Newman, claiming that bigoted trolls are swiftly and universally barred from platforms when they target marginalised groups like black women.

“You can’t be that racist on Twitter without people calling you out and having your things cancelled and having your account blocked. I don’t think that is happening, that’s not happening anymore”, he continued.

Except, it is.

But this is a common argument among (usually) white people who find themselves rightly or wrongly exasperated with the way that people engage with them online.

“You’d never do this if I was a black woman!” they suggest, as if protecting black people has ever been something the world has collectively rallied around. As if hordes of anonymous, over-zealous people have ever swarmed his mentions simply because of his whiteness.

They’ve swarmed mine, though. And not because I’m a well-known controversialist flogging a non-fiction whinge-fest by saying things like: “To suggest that because I am white and male that I have some kind of free pass on social media is not the case. It is actually the opposite.” Instead, and quite literally, it is because I am a black woman.

I have essays sitting in my Twitter DM requests telling me black people are, as a collective, rapists. Practically every article I write (whether or not it’s about race) is followed by almost laughably prejudiced comments. I’ve even had prospective freelancers question my ability to do my job because of a perceived lack of intelligence on my part because of my blackness. I have been sent racist rape threats, been told to lose weight and to stop “telling people” that I’m black by random men called Mike from San Francisco; I’ve been told that I have a sense of “black superiority” about me because I dare to call racism out. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Compared to other, considerably better known black women I know in a number of industries, the regular abuse I receive is minimal. I know people who have to ask for help from friends and colleagues because Twitter’s approach to dealing with racist abuse is so famously lax.

In fact, as highlighted in Rachelle Hampton’s piece for Slate “The black feminists who saw the alt-right threat coming”, black women – many with much smaller followings than Ellis – have been so exposed to regular online abuse from trolls, that they’ve often had to take it upon themselves to directly tackle the issue, because “Twitter basically [does] nothing”.

Ellis has sold millions of books around the world, had those books turned into films and television shows, and enjoyed years of being affectionately dubbed part of the “literary brat pack”. As much as he claims to occupy the role of the misunderstood revolutionary who simply tells it like it is, he remains a literary darling. A darling whose vitriol has afforded him more opportunities than it has denied him. Sounds like white privilege to me.