This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
I’m Black Now
On February 16, 2022, I woke up with the idea that I could change my race which was inspired by Black History Month and the transgender community. Since I had started streaming shirtless, thousands of viewers had asked if I was gay or trans which led to be being very supportive of both and frequently arguing with viewers that I had every right to wear women’s clothing on stream despite identifying as a man.
While changing your race might be a new idea for you, it is 100% supported by law. Legally, race in the USA is primarily a self-defined characteristic. Federal law rejects the concept of race as a distinct biological or genetic category, instead viewing it as a social and political construct. Most of the time, race data is only officially used and gathered in a self-reported context like the US Census. The only rare exceptions are when race becomes part of a court case, like in a hate crime or an affirmative action situation.
The thought that I could change my race the same way others changed their gender felt like an explosively exciting idea that I could not wait to move forward with. I was in the middle of what some people called “woke euphoria” which was logical given my family, my friends, my Facebook audience, and everything else around me was steeped in wokeism.
I thought about how much Black creators had inspired me and how, for much of my life, I had even wished I could be Black. In college, listening to Tupac, I often felt like a young Black thug. I identified deeply with so many Black comedians and artists. When this idea hit me, it didn’t feel like just another random thought. It felt like an absolute bomb of inspiration, like something special was in the air that day.
I dropped my daughter off at school that morning, and I had the strong intuition that if I told anyone else about it, they would try to talk me out of it. They’d say, “That’s too sensitive, stay away from that, you’re going to offend people.” I felt that changing my race was important enough that I needed to do it without telling anyone and the biggest risk was that I wouldn’t do it out of fear.
Over the months preceding this change, I had been offering myself up to humanity like this: “Use me however you want to advance human consciousness, to help people be free on this planet, so we can move toward a Star Trek future.” Out of that openness, this was the idea that landed in me. I also believe ideas have a life of their own. If I hadn’t been the first to be very public in changing my race, somebody else would have. The idea came to me because it saw that I could bring it into reality right away. And that’s exactly what I did.
Just hours after the thought came, after dropping my daughter off at school, I went live like I always did on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and TikTok. I wrote a description for the stream to explain in detail why I was changing my race which included celebrating Black History Month. I said I no longer wanted to identify as white or Caucasian based on my appearance, but instead I wanted to identify as Black and African American, based on how I felt and what felt true to me.
At the time, I was absolutely sure I would be supported in changing my race. I believed that if I had made the same statement about changing from being a man to a woman, the policies would have supported me completely, and Facebook would have automatically censored hateful comments against me. I figured race and gender had a lot in common. I said so directly in my post: that the transgender community had inspired me to change my race. If people could be courageous enough to change their gender, then I could be courageous enough to change my race.
I went live with my race change stream playing Call of Duty: Warzone, and I’m still proud that I even won a game in the middle of what became my most viral and chaotic chat ever. I knew this idea had serious life to it and I imagined myself as a modern-day civil rights hero, the 2020s version of Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. I suspected some people wouldn’t like an obvious looking white guy identifying as Black, but I was shocked at the tidal wave of hate that came my way. I had endured a lot of hate before. People hated my camping play style in Warzone and told me I needed to play aggressive. They hated my shirtless live streams, my women’s tube tops, my costumes, and my refusal to just give them the exact content they wanted every day. They hated that I turned my chat into supporter-only mode so that people couldn’t spam for free. I had gone through tens of thousands of hateful comments on Facebook already, but none of it compared to the storm that came when I changed my race.
The comments on my race change stream horrified me. It seemed like nobody paid attention to what I was actually saying. They weren’t even listening or reading what I wrote. The main theme that immediately emerged was that I must be a racist and I couldn’t possibly be serious about changing my race. Here I was, one of the top 20 Facebook Gaming partners, and people thought I was just joking or pulling some cheap publicity stunt. That was never the case given I had not once considered changing my race as satire. I knew this was a serious subject and I was very serious about it. Unfortunately, what other people said about me carried more weight than what I was saying myself.
It all felt like déjà vu. I had made a lot of the other partners jealous months before when I did presentations showing how I was making more than $10,000 a month on Facebook Gaming. A lot of people were friendly to my face—sending me money, asking for co-streams, sharing my posts—but behind my back, I often suspected they were gossiping and waiting for a chance to bring me down. When I changed my race, it seemed they all saw their opening. They twisted my story from “I love Black and trans so much that I’m changing my race” to “Jerry is racist, hates transgender, and is making fun of Black History Month.” I did not understand how the stories others made up were overriding what I was saying in my own live stream. I started to feel like most of the comments were bots.
The energy got so intense during the stream that the internet went out completely. That was unusual—I had everything hardwired, and it rarely went down. The way it happened felt supernatural. I had been steeped in conspiracy books and metaphysical thinking, and the only explanation that made sense to me was that the sheer energy from my reaction to the chat knocked it offline. It felt like a scene from Harry Potter when Harry gets so upset in the first movie that he accidentally makes the glass vanish and the snake escapes. The hate and energy in the chat were so extreme that my mind itself disrupted the connection. Even though it seemed like my spirit was screaming for everything to stop immediately, I refused to quit. I rebooted the router and continued. From that point forward, the stream only went out on Facebook.
Changing my race had a surprising impact on my mind. Whole areas of thought opened that I had never touched when I identified as White. I had told myself in the morning that I wanted to know what it felt like to be Black and I got a taste of it right away. The first thing I realized was how manipulated many people were by the narratives and slogans being pushed in the media.
From my new perspective, those slogans looked like calls to action, but in practice they appeared to be dividing people further, encouraging more racism and hatred rather than less. It felt like those saying they were helping us were harming the very communities they claimed to support. I was more specific about this at the time, but I’ll avoid spelling it out here to minimize unnecessary triggering.
What mattered was that, for the first time, I felt free to speak about certain subjects in ways I hadn’t before. Identifying as White had always put me in a kind of prison in my own mind, shutting down whole trains of thought. Now, stepping outside that identity, I felt like I had liberated a part of my brain. It felt good. It felt like freedom. I could see the world through a different lens in just a few hours.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.