Weekly Wrap-up: To Substack or not to Substack? That is the question

By the end of this week, I felt a little like Shakespeare: to Substack or not to Substack? That really is the question. This is the very real and messy moral terrain of independent media today.

This is my Friday wrap-up, and the irony of the week is hard to ignore. On Monday, I wrote a newsletter about Andreessen Horowitz, the powerful venture capital firm whose co-founder, Marc Andreessen, was exposed by The Washington Post for comments made in a private group chat. In that chat, Andreessen lamented the last 60 years of civil rights advancement, criticizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and suggesting that his “people” (one can reasonably assume he meant white people) were now being shut out of opportunity.

That rhetoric is not only offensive, it’s historically illiterate. I was born in 1968, in a United States still reeling from the formal end of Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Act had passed just four years earlier, and while the laws were changing, the lived reality of Black Americans remained deeply segregated and suppressed. When Andreessen criticizes the last 60 years of “advancement,” he’s targeting the only sustained period of Black freedom this country has ever allowed.

By Thursday, I discovered that Andreessen Horowitz had not only been an early investor in Substack but is now injecting even more money into the platform.

So here I am, building a community on a platform whose financial backing includes a man actively hostile to the very liberation my work is rooted in. That revelation has raised deep moral questions for me. Where can we go? If I leave, I don't have the kind of massive audience that would follow me elsewhere. I would be writing into the void. And yet, staying feels complicated, too.

I wasn’t here for what some have called the "Great Nazi Debate" on Substack, a wave of criticism over the platforming of white supremacist voices. But I have to say, so far, I’ve had to block far fewer trolls on Substack than I ever did on LinkedIn. Twitter/X was a hard line for me. Its format was never constructive, and when Elon Musk took over and turned it into a megaphone for fascism, that exit was easy.

But if Trump finds a buyer for TikTok that’s connected to him, and with right-wing billionaires already buying up other independent platforms, it raises the question: have they run the table on alternative media?

There’s no question that my intellectual labor is being extracted here. But I’m also extracting value from the community of people who are here for the truth, who are paying for this work, who are supporting me. There’s a tension, a kind of spy vs. spy dynamic. Who’s using whom?

My father used to say something harsh but insightful: Black folks couldn’t even wipe without toilet paper from the white man. Crude, yes. But the point was: where, exactly, can we exist with full sovereignty? Where can we go where we aren’t feeding a system that doesn’t support us?

Even platforms that seemed independent, like Clubhouse, reveal themselves in time. One of its key investors? Felicia Horowitz, the wife of Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz. Yes, the same couple once embraced by the Black elite, hosting parties with Van Jones, Gayle King, and Tina Knowles, and quoting rap lyrics in every chapter of a book. And now? All in on MAGA thought and as donors.

So what do I do?

For now, I’m staying. I’m staying on Substack and LinkedIn. I have a decent TikTok following but rarely use it. I’m here not because I support the backers behind the curtain but because there are people here who support me, who want to engage, learn, and build something better.

I’ve submitted writing to publications I’ve contributed to before. I’m still doing this daily newsletter. I’m still building my platform. My book, Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work, continues to gain traction, and I started this Substack in part to expand its reach. This work matters.

And I won’t be silent. I will talk about Andreessen Horowitz, Substack’s investors, and how power and capital shape the platforms we use, and I will keep pushing for transparency and truth.

I’m not ready to abandon the space, just yet. But I’m not naïve about the power dynamics at play either. To some extent, every job, every company that a Black person works for is not for them.

Next week, I’ll explore a social media trend targeting young women and what it’s really about. For now, I’m here. You can find me on Substack and LinkedIn.

For now …