Responsibilities of businesses in supporting online activism against white privilege

These days I have been overwhelmed by the two names: Michael Brown and Eric Garner. I heard about them on the TV, I read their stories on the Internet. What I wanna talk about today is white privilege and online activism. Activism is known as intentional action to bring about social and political changes which is similar to advocacy or speaking on behalf of groups usually in relation to legislative changes. The kind of activism associated with social media today is known as online activism, which are totally different from the “traditional” activism. While the “traditional” activism is built on strong relationship among activists, online activism is dependent on weak ties. Doing activism online “seldom leads to high-risk activism”. (Gladwell, 2010). It does not require people to take “financial or personal risk”, and you also don’t have to “confront socially entrenched norms and practices”, so it might involve a larger number of people. 

The topic of racism in general and white privilege in particular has been ignored for a time because of the belief in the existence of post racial society (To remind you, that is the time when people of color no longer have to face the obstacle of race. The inequality in the society now is thought to exist because of the economic or political reasons, and does not base on ethnicity anymore. Privilege is defined as particular advantages, permissions, rights or benefits that just an individual, class or caste could afford. This means that when the white has privilege, they have access to many things that people of other skin colors don’t). However, because the real problem has not been solved, activists once again raise the awareness of people about the existing issue. 
But this time, “the new tools of social media have reinvented social activism”.(Gladwell, 2010), they used another tools, that is social media in general and in this case, Twitter in particular.  Twitter seems to be a more effective channel to do the online activism because it has unique advantages of speed, the short reporting structure, the ease of use and egalitarianism (Marfo, 2014) On Twitter, there are some typical hashtags might be considered resistant to the the racism and white privilege:
#Fegurson: The hashtag is used to express people’s anger to the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson. The hashtags shows the opposition of people to the white privilege and the inequality justice system which allows white police officer to do such action with black people. It calls for change in polices in particular and the equality for the black in general.

#Iftheygunnedmedown : The hashtags is used to criticize the biased media portrayal of Michael Brown in particular and the black in general. In the case of Michael Brown, the boy was portrayed with the image as a “gang sign” instead of his true image in everyday life as a “gentle giant” or with any photo of him in daily activities.

#CrimingWhileWhite are created when grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer who put 43-year-old Eric Garner into a chokehold, killing the black man in New York City in July for selling untaxed cigarettes.

White privilege is why the black see the society with anger and struggle for justice and curse our unfair society, which drives them to create such hashtags to create a larger conversation. But why do companies should care about this? Companies should recognize the multiculturalism, diversity (awareness and appreciation of difference) and social justice (examine how systems impact individual) existing to not only support their business to have cultural competence (skill development for work across cultural lines) but also join the multicultural conversation as a part of the society. It is impossible for enterprises to join the conversation with hashtags on Twitter as an individual, but this does not mean that they have no other way to join it. In many of my blog posts, I have analyzed many cases of companies which fails to join the conversation by making mistakes in their ads or media products. For example, the biased portrayal of black people in the Suits series of Universal Cable Productions or in the Huffington Post, or the reinforce of white privilege when using most of white models in the ads of Triumph International Vietnam fanpage in particular and many other businesses  in general. What businesses could do is solving the problem of white privilege by their own power such as avoiding the reinforce of white privilege in their ads and supporting the multiculturalism in their organization like increasing the diversity of their staff.