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.
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.
This post was very informative. I think the connection you make between the business sector and the media's representation of white privilege are rarely connected. Businesses play a role in perpetuating hegemonic values in their advertisements. It is because of this that social injustices that occurred 50 years ago are still a prevalent issue today. I question how effective simply tweeting will be in overcoming this boundaries since they are weaker ties, as you mentioned. Still the avenue of social media is a variable over time and may be able to reframe issues in a way where color blindness is finally recognized as nonexistent. If the society, at large, is unaware of the challenges minorities still face, then the problem still lies at multicultural awareness and acceptance. Acknowledgement of a multiracial world is key to uncovering the message behind oppositional decoding and why social media subculture are outrages by certain racialized events.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. I have edited some part of the blog post about the link between the actions of business and the social movements through media so that you could see it more clearly. In my own opinion, twitter is a good tool for raising the awareness of people of the problem rather than showing the clear strategy to solve it. However, when people are aware of it, the possibilities of making changes will increase. As you said, one day people might realise that the color blindness have not been achieved yet, and they could see the problem more clearly. We should take advantage of social media to make progress and I hope that we could achieve the goal in the near future because it seems to me that at least more and more actions are taken to ask for solving the problem.
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