The Flaw with Social Media Activism
In the past few weeks, there has been a tremendous uptick in “activist” posts on social media—part of a mass awakening by the American public to the injustices inflicted upon the Black community by systemic racism.
Since the release of the footage of George Floyd’s murder online, the public outcry condemning the police and the officers involved has touched every corner of the planet and completely overtaken the United States. Social media has undoubtedly played a positive role helping activists and allies obtain information related to protests or simply to educate themselves further regarding systemic racism in the United States and how to actively be anti-racist.
However, the way in which information currently spreads on social media does a disservice to the Black Lives Matter movement and reduces issues to insultingly simple ten slide posts, or performative trends. For example, the #blackouttuesday tag on Instagram has over 23.5 million posts, while the “Justice for Breonna Taylor” petition on change.org has fewer than 9.5 million signatures. While #blackouttuesday was meant to show solidarity and support with the BLM movement, many people took it as an opportunity to engage in performative activism by only doing the bare minimum while also refusing to do anything beyond this (such as signing petitions, becoming educated on BLM and racism in the United States, donating to BLM related organizations, or protesting). Performative activism is extremely detrimental to the entire movement and makes it easier for disingenuous allies to proclaim their commitment to helping the Black community, while not taking the necessary steps to do so.
Unfortunately, social media distracts users from agitating for policy change, instead pushing them to focus more on individual events, rather than the causation.
Aside from mere acts of performative activism, many social media users have been posting a number of educational resources and petitions related to the BLM movement. While these resources are amazing ways to educate the community and spread awareness related to systemic racism and racial inequality in the United States, too much of this content loses its effectiveness and over-saturates the platform. Race is an extremely complex issue in the United States; attempting to tackle all of its factors and consequences on social media is impossible and unrealistic. By oversaturating social media platforms with mostly aesthetic posts, most allies are forced to focus only on the main issues, while non-allies simply become desensitized towards the entire movement. For example, names like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd are spread far and wide, but there is far less knowledge about what policies and training methods let the Minneapolis Police Department breed officers who act in such a way, or the no knock policy in Louisville that was the driving force behind Breonna Taylor’s murder,
Although many of the issues related to Black communities right now are racially fueled, social media obscures the macro policy roots of the problem that permit racist incidents to take place. For example, Breonna Taylor, who absolutely deserves justice and for her killers to be incarcerated, was not only the victim of racist violence, but was more importantly a victim of a policy that made it legal for officers to enter her home without knocking and kill her. While it is extremely important for Breonna to get justice, the only way to ensure that more “Breonnas” don’t suffer the same fate and that past “Breonnas” get justice is by changing the actual policy that let this happen. Pushing for policy reform, instead of only advocating for the incarceration of the cops who killed her, is what led to real change by way of “Breonna’s Law,” which bans no-knock warrants in Louisville, KY.
It is only by actively researching and educating ourselves about the policy that drives racial injustice in the United States today,
Unfortunately, social media distracts users from agitating for policy change, instead pushing them to focus more on individual events, rather than the causation. Often, longer posts discussing specific policies or laws don’t get as much attention because they aren’t as easy to repost as another big headline. Although these policies do impact both White and Black people, it is important to look into them because the outcomes of police-related policies disproportionately impact Black people, leading to tragic deaths such as those of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Michael Brown, and Elijah McClain. While all of these angels deserve justice, we need to also think about every other Black person who has been a victim of systemic racism but hasn’t had a trending hashtag to bring them justice.
I’m by no means saying that individual events shouldn’t be acknowledged, and justice should not be served, but it’s important that we all look beyond the aesthetic posts we see on accounts and stories and take the time to wonder why certain events happened. It is only by actively researching and educating ourselves about the policy that drives racial injustice in the United States today that we will be able to target the root causes of systemic racism and hopefully prevent the need for more hashtags that begin with #justicefor.