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Should Writers Use Pseudonyms?
If I could only give one piece of advice to anyone who goes online, it would be to use a pseudonym. For most of my life, I thought using our common names made us more accountable and more effective — who can imagine King or Malcolm X in masks? I thought pseudonyms were for artists whose legal names were boring and for freedom fighters who would suffer if bad governments caught them. While I knew firsthand how conformists treat heretics — when my family was part of the civil rights movement, racists terrorized my parents with anonymous death threats and I was bullied in school —when segregation ended and legal support for free speech grew, I thought Americans were losing their tolerance for censorship and blacklists. I thought dividing us all by social identities like race and gender would end and King’s most famous dream would come true and people of all beliefs would be free to say what they thought without fear of losing their jobs.
In every way, I was an idealistic fool.
And I am still one, though I’m now a wiser, more pragmatic idealistic fool.
I adopted a pseudonym after I got frustrated with identitarians who thought calling me a white man was meaningful, as though there are no differences between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders or Adam Sandler and Stephen Hawking or any male Boston Brahmin and any dirt-poor son of the Ozarks. Inspired by The Person Behind The Penguin, I became Comrade Morlock.
