May 17, 2022 05:22 PM
(This post was last modified: May 17, 2022 05:43 PM by C C.)
https://quillette.com/2022/05/17/confess...eme-maker/
I made pretty pictures that helped keep people enraged and mobilized. Then I asked myself: ‘Why am I doing this?‘
EXCERPTS: Eventually, I gravitated toward the social-justice art community. [...] Text-based slideshow graphics on pastel backdrops were a particular hit. They often read like instruction manuals, feeding believers the exact phrases needed to dismiss counterarguments and “educate” their “ignorant” family members.
Knowing a popular craze when it sees one, corporate America incorporated these facile social-justice memes into national marketing campaigns. Disavowing racism had become a brand imperative, with influencers and businesses alike at risk of reputational damage if they failed to jump on the bandwagon early and hard. Along with the infographics, there was an explosion in the market for illustrative typography featuring simple slogans such as Angela Davis’s “It’s not enough to not be racist. You must be anti-racist.” Silence was violence. And so on.
I accepted the underlying ideology of anti-racism without question. Publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post assured me that I was on the right side of history...
In the standard California fashion, I’d been a registered Democrat from the time I turned 18, and voted accordingly in every presidential election... My social-media output attracted the attention of a popular progressive Instagram account then called @WeFuckingHateDonaldTrump, which began regularly “pinning” my witty comments to its own posts... I befriended the account’s owners, a couple from Australia, and eventually joined their team as a content creator and curator...
[...] With my instructions being to increase our follower count ... I quickly learned that the key to reaching legions of viewers is to post content that evokes strong emotional responses. In a saturated market, extreme views drive out more nuanced takes.
The narrative we sold to the masses in late 2020 was that “white supremacy” was the greatest threat that America was facing, and that Republicans were the “party of white supremacy.” At the time, I believed this wholeheartedly...
Once we’d tapped into an emotionally satisfying narrative about the problem that America was facing, it was easy to demonize the people standing in the way of progress. But this rhetoric came with an awkward catch: In outward appearance at least, I was arguably part of the problem we were constantly ranting about—since I am a straight white female who was “centering” myself in a social-justice struggle that (as we’ve all been told) must be led by marginalized people.
Things got more complicated in January 2021 [...] Without Trump to kick around, progressives were increasingly turning on one another. Left-wing activists dedicated more and more of their time to scouring the online social-justice community, looking for opportunities to take offense.
My turn came when an activist influencer named Keiajah “KJ” Brooks called me out in the comment section of a post, after I’d made a dig at controversial right-wing pundit Candace Owens, who happens to be black. According to KJ, my white skin disqualified me from such commentary. Fred Joseph, my aforementioned coworker, joined in the pile-on.
The next day, Joseph doubled down, posting a video explaining why it was racist for white people to criticize black people for any reason. When I brought this up to our bosses, they said that they’d let a black person decide what is racist. It seemed strange to me that one would surrender his or her critical faculties for the sake of doctrinal purity. But then it dawned on me that I was being a hypocrite, as this was exactly what I’d been doing.
I’d never really listened to a word Owens or any of the Republicans I smeared ever said—at least, not in good faith. [...] I realized I needed to take a step back and re-evaluate what I was doing with my life, and so quit working for @WeFuckingHateDonaldTrump (which now calls itself The Progressivists) in February 2021.
Since that time, my former employer has pivoted to pushing an anti-capitalist agenda, notwithstanding the fact that the owners seem to share the same professional motivation as most of the people whom the site criticizes—i.e., making money....
In the aftermath, I was left with 32,000 personal Instagram followers. It wasn’t a bad tally, but almost all of these people were militant leftists whose beliefs I no longer shared. [...] As a result, I now get messages calling me a white supremacist and a Nazi, along with violent threats. All of this only serves to confirm my suspicions about the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of online social-justice culture.
I now look at the world around me, America in particular, in a new way. The United States of 2022 is a far less racist and intolerant place than it once was. Yet the denunciations of it that one hears from progressives have become steadily more apocalyptic. Activists need a struggle to overcome, a dragon to slay, even if it must be invented. And when there are no dragons to fight, they fight each other. This isn’t a recipe for societal improvement, much less for personal happiness.
[...] Seeing how the Democrats rushed to embed dogmatic formulations of social justice into their platform, I can no longer in good conscience align myself with their party. But neither do I align myself with Republicans, who, in many states, are now rolling back abortion rights (though even on this issue, I am not nearly so dogmatic as I once was). I’m now registered as an Independent, and consider my vote up for grabs.
[...] Everything worth knowing is much more complex than any slogan can possibly convey... (MORE - missing details)
I made pretty pictures that helped keep people enraged and mobilized. Then I asked myself: ‘Why am I doing this?‘
EXCERPTS: Eventually, I gravitated toward the social-justice art community. [...] Text-based slideshow graphics on pastel backdrops were a particular hit. They often read like instruction manuals, feeding believers the exact phrases needed to dismiss counterarguments and “educate” their “ignorant” family members.
Knowing a popular craze when it sees one, corporate America incorporated these facile social-justice memes into national marketing campaigns. Disavowing racism had become a brand imperative, with influencers and businesses alike at risk of reputational damage if they failed to jump on the bandwagon early and hard. Along with the infographics, there was an explosion in the market for illustrative typography featuring simple slogans such as Angela Davis’s “It’s not enough to not be racist. You must be anti-racist.” Silence was violence. And so on.
I accepted the underlying ideology of anti-racism without question. Publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post assured me that I was on the right side of history...
In the standard California fashion, I’d been a registered Democrat from the time I turned 18, and voted accordingly in every presidential election... My social-media output attracted the attention of a popular progressive Instagram account then called @WeFuckingHateDonaldTrump, which began regularly “pinning” my witty comments to its own posts... I befriended the account’s owners, a couple from Australia, and eventually joined their team as a content creator and curator...
[...] With my instructions being to increase our follower count ... I quickly learned that the key to reaching legions of viewers is to post content that evokes strong emotional responses. In a saturated market, extreme views drive out more nuanced takes.
The narrative we sold to the masses in late 2020 was that “white supremacy” was the greatest threat that America was facing, and that Republicans were the “party of white supremacy.” At the time, I believed this wholeheartedly...
Once we’d tapped into an emotionally satisfying narrative about the problem that America was facing, it was easy to demonize the people standing in the way of progress. But this rhetoric came with an awkward catch: In outward appearance at least, I was arguably part of the problem we were constantly ranting about—since I am a straight white female who was “centering” myself in a social-justice struggle that (as we’ve all been told) must be led by marginalized people.
Things got more complicated in January 2021 [...] Without Trump to kick around, progressives were increasingly turning on one another. Left-wing activists dedicated more and more of their time to scouring the online social-justice community, looking for opportunities to take offense.
My turn came when an activist influencer named Keiajah “KJ” Brooks called me out in the comment section of a post, after I’d made a dig at controversial right-wing pundit Candace Owens, who happens to be black. According to KJ, my white skin disqualified me from such commentary. Fred Joseph, my aforementioned coworker, joined in the pile-on.
The next day, Joseph doubled down, posting a video explaining why it was racist for white people to criticize black people for any reason. When I brought this up to our bosses, they said that they’d let a black person decide what is racist. It seemed strange to me that one would surrender his or her critical faculties for the sake of doctrinal purity. But then it dawned on me that I was being a hypocrite, as this was exactly what I’d been doing.
I’d never really listened to a word Owens or any of the Republicans I smeared ever said—at least, not in good faith. [...] I realized I needed to take a step back and re-evaluate what I was doing with my life, and so quit working for @WeFuckingHateDonaldTrump (which now calls itself The Progressivists) in February 2021.
Since that time, my former employer has pivoted to pushing an anti-capitalist agenda, notwithstanding the fact that the owners seem to share the same professional motivation as most of the people whom the site criticizes—i.e., making money....
In the aftermath, I was left with 32,000 personal Instagram followers. It wasn’t a bad tally, but almost all of these people were militant leftists whose beliefs I no longer shared. [...] As a result, I now get messages calling me a white supremacist and a Nazi, along with violent threats. All of this only serves to confirm my suspicions about the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of online social-justice culture.
I now look at the world around me, America in particular, in a new way. The United States of 2022 is a far less racist and intolerant place than it once was. Yet the denunciations of it that one hears from progressives have become steadily more apocalyptic. Activists need a struggle to overcome, a dragon to slay, even if it must be invented. And when there are no dragons to fight, they fight each other. This isn’t a recipe for societal improvement, much less for personal happiness.
[...] Seeing how the Democrats rushed to embed dogmatic formulations of social justice into their platform, I can no longer in good conscience align myself with their party. But neither do I align myself with Republicans, who, in many states, are now rolling back abortion rights (though even on this issue, I am not nearly so dogmatic as I once was). I’m now registered as an Independent, and consider my vote up for grabs.
[...] Everything worth knowing is much more complex than any slogan can possibly convey... (MORE - missing details)