White silence on social media: Why not saying anything is actually saying a lot.
“It’s incredibly hurtful,” said Broadway star Jelani Alladin. “And you’re telling me that you have no hesitation posting a selfie of yourself… or what you’re eating for dinner, and yet you’re telling me that you’re afraid to say something because you might hurt other people’s feelings? Or you don’t know what to say? Or you don’t have an audience to reach? Were you thinking those things when you posted the other photos? I don’t think you were.”
Social media silence is nuanced. There are people whose feeds have simply gone dark. There are people who, as Alladin notes, have continued posting selfies and pictures of their food as if nothing is wrong. And, as fitness influencer Trammell Logan tells CBS News, it can even be hurtful when white people post messages about #blacklivesmatter side-by-side with more frivolous content.
“In your natural state of being distraught or sadness, if something extremely personal happens to you, I can’t see how you can be in that state and post about it or be about it and then five minutes later like post a cocktail mix, or like you dancing. Our emotions don’t necessarily work like that,” Logan said.
Curiously though, at least based on their Website, CBS hasn’t stopped broadcasting its sitcoms and cop shows in a show of support.
The Tweet promoting the above article is currently getting a huge ratio, driven largely by people posting photos of food in response:
Meanwhile, the New York Times, which described the article they ran by Sen. Tom Cotton as “fascist,” runs an article with this headline: How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror.
Related: Language, Memory, & Soft Totalitarianism.
h/t ED