Like many white Americans who grew up with a distanced awareness of the discrimination, physical dangers, and blunt racism launched at Black Americans every day, I've felt new horror in the past few years as social media has allowed the true scope, details, and real-time impacts of such behavior — our behavior — to become ever more glaringly apparent.
Thanks to the work and patience of many communities of color, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have helped to promote Black voices, positivity, and strength and distribute the real data on discrimination across the web in recent years, driving (inching) white awareness, too.
All the while, these tools have also been empowering legions of dedicated and 'everyday' racists to wage war against visible Black women with all the fresh hell and tired tropes they can muster — effecting a digital siege on Black women and girls, and, ultimately, on everything our big, unwieldy country as a whole holds dear.
To be clear, that's not an accusation, or a confession; it's just the facts.
For these relentless attacks are part of a greater culture in the U.S. that research shows is literally killing Black women and families from inside and out, as well as keeping their wages down, among many other things.
It's a blood relative of the cultural biases whereby all women, but especially women of color, are given fewer opportunities to advance, less pay, and less medical attention than men are in the same situations; it's tied to Black and Hispanic men's disproportionate rates of arrest and imprisonment for crimes everyone is committing (and to their lower pay and level of medical care, too).
In some ways, this underlying culture that permits continuous abuse of Black women is even linked to the stereotypes and built-in hurdles that keep poor and middle-class Americans of all genders and races from getting real chances to get ahead — chances that only very few of us receive in abundance from birth, while the vast majority are encouraged to divide and clash over what's left.
Because if someone wants to keep you down and avoid a fair fight by suggesting that you're 'less than,' they'll find a way, no matter who you are or what you've accomplished — nor whether you helped target others along the line.
Whats w bedazzled red cowboy hat Maxine Watters is wearing criticizing T party? Easier 2 take u seriously when u dont look like a stripper;)
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 24, 2011
In the past year or so, I've been particularly disturbed to see members and allies of the current administration lob such undermining and vitriolic slurs at Black women leaders on Twitter and elsewhere (often following cable news' example) with virtually no backlash, including repeated attacks on two sitting U.S. congresswomen.
Surely a lifetime of undoubtedly backbreaking work and overcoming fierce adversity to become a prominent politician would earn both Representatives Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Frederica Wilson (D-FL) more respect from anyone, as well as an equally fierce outcry and defense from their white colleagues — even despite the various biases and (at best) blind spots in both parties.
After all, when film, stand-up, and Saturday Night Live! comedian Leslie Jones suddenly found her Twitter feed overwhelmed with racist and sexist abuse and extremely violent threats from thousands of users in response to her role in the female-led Ghostbusters remake last year (the worst part of a broader freak out over the film, as many of us will remember), some white fellow cast members and comedy peers quickly joined the Twitter fracas in her defense, or condemned the abuse in no uncertain terms, in the very least.
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When it comes to the targeting and demeaning of Black women by prominent white male figures, however, it seems the political community has largely given this abuse a pass on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, as have tech companies themselves, for all intents and purposes.
And yet, as the past two years have decidedly proved, statements made on social media platforms very much have a role in and grave impact on 'real life' offline — particularly those on Twitter, with its open access and many tweet-amplifying bot armies; young people, like AI, are especially quick to pick things up.
In many ways, the immediacy and intimacy of this format means that comments made on Twitter can have just as much of an effect, if not more, as ones said right to a target's face (but with millions of onlookers whose algorithms may bury any reply). Given the immediate harm and wide-reaching risks that these facile, cowardly attacks create, they must be treated the same way.
Brandi Collins, Senior Campaign Director for the 10-years-strong nonprofit Color Of Change, took the time earlier this month (and amid a truly chaotic work year) to discuss how the rise of en masse and Trump-tied racist attacks on Twitter has taken hold in recent years, and how the impacts extend throughout Black women's lives, eventually reaching all of us.
By phone, Collins said that the online abuse of Leslie Jones last year and public reaction thereof represent a major moment in the behavioral timeline leading to today's pandemonium on Twitter, in fact, as well as an illustrative one.
"When you first reached out to me, the target I immediately thought of was Leslie Jones," she said. "We've heard a lot of anecdotal stories from people in the Movement for Black Lives, and particularly women, in the way that they're threatened and targeted in social media in these really explicit ways, including threats of rape, among other things."
"But I did immediately think of [Jones] and the racial, anti-Black sexual harassment and violent threats that she dealt with last year that seemed exclusively driven by the alt-right," she continued.
"It was also driven by Milo Yiannopoulos, who went on to get a $250,000 book deal from Simon & Schuster — which was eventually canned, but it definitely set a precedent for what was allowed on that stage, how people could be attacked in a number of different ways, and Black women in particular."
It's no secret that behavior and biases that have been shown to be tolerated online, and by famous publishers, also tend to be met with acceptance in real life — and, of course, will have their roots there.
DJ, ur talking about @RepWilson, not @Maxinewaters (Which [you] misspelled) & u should be ashamed of ur behavior. Choose to be better than this https://t.co/yXd0UNPvV2
— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) October 22, 2017
As Collins pointed out, Black women who stand up to sexual harassment and abuse offline have never gotten close to the media attention or support that white victims do (and, to be sure, it still falls short for the latter group).
While she was reviewing TIME's recent, "beautiful" Person of the Year spread on 'The Silence Breakers,' Collins recalled, "I was thinking about who's been speaking out and who's been kept silent, and what popped into my mind was R. Kelly, who we've gone after this year, and who explicitly has been harassing and assaulting Black women for decades."
"When we're telling the greater #MeToo narrative at the end of the year, it doesn't seem like those women who told their stories are anywhere in there," she noted, "nor the Black women who have spoken out about Harvey Weinstein and others and were immediately shut down on Twitter and elsewhere, and told that their stories don't matter."
Collins continued, "There's this larger scene that I feel I'm ruminating on at the end of the year around the freedoms people have, and in the media, in the ways that Black women can be talked to and about across the board."
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And while Twitter and Facebook frequently play host to such combative, free-for-all comments toward Black women, recent instances of this public behavior, and our well-established tolerance for it, can easily be seen just about anywhere — if your social algorithms see fit, that is, or you take the time to look and listen.
This summer, for example, California Senator and former Attorney General Kamala Harris was shouted down and deemed "hysterical" while trying to question then-judiciary nominee Jefferson Sessions in front of cameras and her assembled peers in a calm, clear voice.
A few months later, a groundbreaking set of allegations against Harvey Weinstein were put forth by Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o, easily the biggest A-list-er to to accuse the mogul so far, in the form of a poignant op-ed, and almost instantaneously swept away and ignored by Hollywood and media circles in their responses to the scandal. Weinstein also made a point of specifically denying Nyong'o's claims.
"I can think of example after example of the different ways that Black women continue to be silenced or attacked with very little recourse," Collins said.
And on the internet, where massive dialogues on leading platforms have been overseen by algorithms and only a relative handful of content moderators (often hourly overseas contractors) that are trained to prioritize white standpoints, the already constant abuses can flourish with little to no limits.
"Social media as a sphere, because of its theatrical nature, is where you'll see the most profound attacks — and on Twitter, some of the most vicious attacks that are being directed at Black women, Black leaders, Black activists," she said. "It ends up getting laughed about on the [now defunct] O'Reilly Factor and other shows."
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When an iHeartRadio host called Rep. Wilson a "cheap, sleazy Democrat whore" on the air, for example, two weeks and countless white eye-rolls and chuckles went by before a weak, pre-recorded apology from that host was played on the station; during its airing, that conservative talk show host was en route to his induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame. In short, Collins noted, "There wasn't any kind of reckoning around that."
"There's this freedom to attack and repeated validation of it, and everywhere we go, we see corporate or government gatekeepers who decline to intervene."
As Collins explained, many of these attacks also follow a script that our country has clung to for decades or centuries, showing how the quest to silence Black women through "cheap laughs" is an established part of U.S. history.
"One thing that we’ve seen consistently in the media — not a particularly new thing — is the attacking of Black women based on their appearance, and on a number of other irrelevant things," Collins said. In the past few years, she noted, Color Of Change has worked to document and trace this all-too-common behavior, and to show how it permeates every kind of media we consume.
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"Whether it's on reality TV, in the news, or in how Black families are depicted in network shows, Black women's appearances are always targeted — and Black women's hair has been particularly politicized around what it means to be a woman, to be a politician, a public figure," she said.
"And these comments about our appearance are often a go-to when people are trying to belittle Black women's power in a number of ways," Collins pointed out.
"Whether that's Michelle Obama being referred to as 'an ape in heels' by a one-time Virginia mayor, or Don Ines calling the Rutgers University women's basketball team 'nappy-headed hoes,' or the comments Bill O'Reilly made saying Rep. Waters looked like James Brown, and when he called a FOX employee 'Hot Chocolate,' there's this consistent theme of very explicit attacks on Black womanhood."
The term 'attacks' isn't a metaphor or hyperbole, of course — such abuses have tangible, measurable tolls on Black women and families and our society at large.
"There's so much research out there showing that there are consequences for Black women when these stereotypes are allowed to rule the day. It's tied to diminished economic opportunities, less attention from doctors, stricter sentencing from judges," Collins said.
"You even see it in schools," Collins noted, "with girls being suspended because of the way that their hair looks, and a different set of [school] rules around Black girls and their hair than what you're seeing for other kids."
At the same time, Black girls must also endure finding locked cabinets around products marketed for their already politicized hair types, and getting followed around while they shop — in other words, being continually criminalized and questioned in literally mind- and life-altering ways based on nothing more than their appearance.
"It's a consistent theme that we see coming up time and time again in attempts to de-legitimize women in power," she added.
When it comes to grappling with how these massive, multifaceted, culturally ingrained problems are manifesting online, "Twitter has had a lot of issues with their ability to deal with the bullying — they've historically been super slow to act around various people, including Donald Trump, even though he's broken pretty much every rule they have," Collins said.
"Their reasoning for keeping [his account] up is that he's newsworthy, but they still refuse to regulate [the platform] like a news outlet, using some of the checks and balances that would come with that; the case with Facebook is similar."
Overall, Collins said, "These Silicon Valley platforms have a more explicit role that they could be playing in monitoring and regulating all this content, and they're choosing not to."
OBITUARY:
We are sad to announce the death of Irony (c. 500BC - 2017 AD) today, killed by a single tweet to the back of the head. pic.twitter.com/JEHCZlbooL
— John Pfaff (@JohnFPfaff) October 20, 2017
In the past several months, social media companies have indicated that they're aware of the racism, bullying, violence, and news-like spam on their platforms, at least to some degree, and will keep ramping up efforts to curb it.
Facebook has been planning to hire an extra few thousand moderators since the spring (meaning they'd onboard more employees than Twitter has total) to help tackle the range of scandals, tragedies, and content battles that have rocked the platform. Last week, Twitter also rolled out new rules it plans to enforce surrounding violence and hate speech, and while some white supremacists have already felt the purge, the wider results remain to be seen.
By email, a spokesperson for Facebook said the company can only comment on specific examples of abuse on the platform, not general trends, but noted that Facebook doesn't use algorithms to take action on incidents of hate speech or similar because of the importance of understanding context. Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.
Of course, it'll take far more than better rules and regulatory practices on social media to put a dent in the systemic, culturally entwined racism in our country, or to start addressing the damage it continues to cause.
For starters, white Americans will need to acknowledge their own damaging behaviors and those happening constantly around them, and confront those actions individually and as a group — not out of guilt, but rather empathy and goodwill, the knowledge that all-for-one thinking is humankind's only way forward (as well as the only road worth taking), and any sense of decency we may hope to claim.
Whether attacks on Black women and other people of color happen on social media, at the holiday table, in the street, or bellied up to a regulars-only bar, it will take plenty of humility and patience to call out others' biases, jabs, and 'jokes' while admitting to our own, and — most importantly, especially when taking our cues from communities of color — lots of listening, and letting others speak.
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It's also worth noting that our brains, like the evolving algorithms that surround us online, need to learn to recognize situations or patterns before we'll start noticing them everywhere, particularly in the nuanced shades of real life; in both cases, discussion also helps toward homing in.
While I was putting this article together, for example, I for one reason or another spotted a Facebook post by a friend of a friend who had just encountered some insistently 'casual' racist, sexist trash-talk from a celebrity on Twitter, plus ample echoing from his followers.
As Oakland-based writer and screenwriter Natasha Diaz kindly explained later by email, it all started after comedian John Oliver pressed Dustin Hoffman during a Q&A about allegations of sexual harassment and assault that a former colleague had recently made against the actor. As with most of the #MeToo reckoning, national conversations around this sensational event were happening across media and the net, but mostly Twitter.
At that point, "Dustin Hoffman responded embarrassingly and refuted the statements and John Oliver's right to hold him accountable," Diaz wrote. "Afterwards, Michael Rapaport came out in support of Dustin Hoffman, both claiming that Oliver had no right to 'disrespect' ... Hoffman, [who] was just joking and was misinterpreted, and implying that the recent swarm of allegations against men for sexual assault is just a product of women who want to be detectives and not rooted in truth."
"When a second woman who was harassed and assaulted by Hoffman [went public]," Diaz continued, "I tweeted at Rapaport with the link and said, 'What's good? You still flapping your lips about your good old boy nonsense or you ready to apologize?' to which he tweeted back, 'Homey, I got something you can flap your lips on,' implying I should suck his dick'" (a comment he deleted within a few days).
“I continued to go back and forth with him as many of his followers and trolls began to 'like' his comment and attack me, claiming that I deserved his retort and the implication he made, because I had the nerve to call him out," she said. Eventually, she blocked a "significant number" of accounts that kept firing off in the actor's supposed defense, even as Rapaport (or whoever's back there) seemingly showed all the digital signs of enjoying the action.
"Later, Rapaport tweeted in a thread I was on, 'Chickenhead gossip going hard for the gram,' once again reducing me to a blow job, since 'chickenhead' refers to a woman bobbing up and down as she gives oral sex."
With regard to my described focus for this article, Diaz clarified early on in her email, "I am multiracial, but also white passing, and don't think he attacked me because of my race in the way that many visible women of color are specifically targeted."
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"He did, however, use African-American Vernacular English in his attacks toward me, which makes me uncomfortable because he is a white dude," she continued (same here). "I feel that Rapaport also regularly uses AAVE and hip hop terms such as 'chickenhead' as a way to 'punch up' his jokes, and in doing so, he normalizes cultural appropriation while simultaneously furthering hateful narratives about women."
Such narratives, of course, lead to people getting hurt in the short and long terms.
Many of Rapaport's defenders also argued that he was an established supporter of women's and racial equality and well-being, and that she should have known this. With regard to those Twitter followers' behavior, Diaz said, "Obviously, I think a lot of these people just enjoy stirring things up but it was hard to digest that so many were willing to uphold his revolting behavior, especially with the current cultural shift and more widespread condemnation of men using their power to belittle us with sexual harassment."
But likely the most jarring aspect of her run-in with the actor, she told me some days later, stems from fact that one of the growing number of Hoffman accusers she was sticking up for just before Rapaport told Diaz to blow him was her own mother, another woman of color, who was 16 at the time.
Back then, Cori Thomas was a friend of Hoffman's daughter, and waiting for her parents to pick her up; she came forward with two other women two weeks ago.
Looking back on her Rapaport clash, Diaz reflected, "The irony of how he sexually harassed me when I was calling him out for supporting a serial sexual harasser is almost laughable, but only until I realize that this isn't some alternate or dream reality, and that he actually thought it was appropriate and hilarious."
"I don't think it is a coincidence that I, a multiracial woman, was the one doing the calling out of this white man, which made me a prime target for the harassment that ensued," Diaz added. "All too often, I see women of color doing the work on the front lines only to be beaten down and abused for speaking up."
She continued, "It's time for the white colleagues, family members, friends, and partners of these people to start speaking up and taking a portion of the backlash away from us, especially on social media, where the trolls and attackers are far more brazen and hurtful behind the guise of their avatar and the comfort of their sad caves."
Indeed, we are all long, long, and long overdue to come out from wherever we've been hiding during vile tweet storms or the same old sidewalk/coffee break/presidential insults and threats we've witnessed every day for generations.
Put another way: the time for white Americans to take responsibility for dragging our own selves and each other into the light (no matter how painful or shameful the kicking and screaming), and to judge ourselves by our actions and reactions rather than our 'intentions,' is now.
[Updated 12/28/17 to clarify and emphasize the violent threats and abuse made against Leslie Jones, thanks to feedback and time generously provided by Stop Online Violence Against Women and Digital Sisters/Sistas founder Shireen Mitchell]
