{"id":16272,"date":"2013-07-18T23:09:34","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T03:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=16272"},"modified":"2013-07-19T07:11:27","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T11:11:27","slug":"expiation-fail-dot-tumblr-dot-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/07\/18\/expiation-fail-dot-tumblr-dot-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Expiation Fail (dot Tumblr dot com)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wpid-goodwhitepersoncertificate\"<\/a>(Expiation, n.: the act of making amends or reparation for guilt or wrongdoing; atonement:<\/em> an act of public expiation<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

Dear reader, are you still thinking about the Zimmerman verdict?<\/p>\n

Yeah, me too.<\/p>\n

Over the last five days I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about Trayvon Martin\u2019s murder, and about George Zimmerman\u2019s acquittal, and especially about the reactions to both that I\u2019ve observed since the jury returned with a verdict Saturday night. I\u2019ve been thinking (and somewhat obsessively reading) about these things not just because of my contractual obligation as a sociologist, but because as a person I\u2019m saddened, troubled, and angered by what all of this says about U.S. society. Yet I\u2019m not just a person; I\u2019m also a white<\/i> person, and as such I don\u2019t know where to begin processing the fact that, regardless of my personal particularities, I am by this fact alone complicit in the systems of oppression that made Martin\u2019s murder and Zimmerman\u2019s acquittal possible.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing about white people, the Zimmerman verdict, and its aftermath: This moment isn\u2019t about us. I mean, it is about us, in that\u2014as Aura Bogado wrote for The Nation<\/i><\/a>\u2014\u201cwhite supremacy acquit George Zimmerman.\u201d But while I know I\u2019m far from the only white person who feels anger, shame, and grief, I also know that this moment isn\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t be about white people’s pain or guilt. The future is long, and there will be plenty of time for most of us to sort out our feelings; more than anything, Right Now is a moment for white people to shut up, to listen, and to reflect on how we can better allies in the future.<\/p>\n

Given this, I\u2019m really conflicted about the \u201cWe Are Not Trayvon Martin<\/a>\u201d meme.<\/p>\n

\"Children<\/a>
Children as Trayvon Martin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you aren\u2019t familiar with the meme, here\u2019s some quick background. The original meme is \u201cI am Trayvon Martin<\/a>\u201d; it started after Martin\u2019s death, and made a resurgence as the Zimmerman trial came to a close. The I am Trayvon Martin<\/a> tumblr features pictures from protests and portraits of people of color wearing hoodies; the We Are Trayvon Martin<\/a> tumblr features similar images plus videos, article, and personal stories; photographer Eunique Gibson Jones made portraits<\/a> of adults and children (almost all people of color) wearing hoodies for an \u201cI Am Trayvon Martin\u201d photo awareness campaign<\/a>; the Miami Heat<\/a> and a large group of Howard University medical students<\/a> posed for photos wearing hoodies as well. As Feministing<\/a> put it, the idea behind the meme is \u201clifting Martin\u2019s story out of the particular\u2014holding it up as a symbol of something bigger, tying it to the racial history of our society.\u201d But then white people got in on it and, like certain other sets of words, \u201cI Am Trayvon Martin\u201d is a different thing when it starts slipping out from between white lips\u2014which is something some white people didn\u2019t exactly understand, intentions toward solidarity notwithstanding. As Eric Liu put it<\/a>, \u201cMartin died not because he was wearing a hoodie but because he was wearing a hoodie while black. Blackness was the fatal variable.\u201d To wrap one\u2019s white self up in a hoodie and declare, \u201cI am Trayvon Martin,\u201d is fundamentally to miss the point.<\/p>\n

Before I go further, let\u2019s just pause and get this out of the way: yes, I am white. I\u2019m not just white, I\u2019m very <\/i>white\u2014both biologically low on melanin and sociologically steeped in most of the additional economic and cultural privilege that \u201cwhite\u201d stereotypically entails. I\u2019m white like my brother jokes about being one gene away from albinism, white like some faint olive undertones make me \u201cdark\u201d for my family but still way too \u201clight\u201d to be an olive that cosmetics manufacturers think exists (I know, my life is so hard). I\u2019m culturally white, too, just like all the other white folks who try to escape white normalcy through tattoos and\/or Crayola-colored hair and\/or extra metal installed in their white flesh; I\u2019m white like I have a closet half-full of hoodies and, despite what Richard Cohen says (in a 15 July opinion piece in the Washington Post that I refuse to link here), the worst that wardrobe choice can do is implicate me as probably being in a band. And I\u2019m white like I\u2019m deeply uncomfortable Being White, because unlike being a woman, \u201cbeing white\u201d isn\u2019t anything I\u2019ve ever identified around\u2014which, of course, is my bloody white privilege. I laughed through the book Stuff White People Like<\/a><\/i> because more often than not, I think it\u2019s spot on. HI YES I AM PAINFULLY WHITE, and now I\u2019m going to talk about white people\u2019s reactions to Trayvon Martin\u2019s murder and George Zimmerman\u2019s acquittal, and I honestly can\u2019t tell you even as I write this whether the fact that I\u2019m writing this makes me a part of the problem I\u2019m about to describe.<\/p>\n

In case you were abducted by aliens (or vigilantes) last week, and only just this moment returned to Internet access, last Saturday night George Zimmerman was acquitted in the murder of Trayvon Martin\u2014\u201cacquitted\u201d as in found not guilty of anything<\/i>, legally speaking<\/a>. Some white people\u2014the sorts of white people I follow on Twitter, or who ride retweets into my feed, for instance\u2014expressed shock and outrage; other white people\u2014the ones I\u2019m especially embarrassed and ashamed about being lumped in with when people call me \u201cwhite[i]<\/a>\u201d\u2014reportedly lit fireworks<\/a> in celebration[ii]<\/a>. I knew enough not to be \u201cshocked\u201d by the verdict; I may be white, but the first class I TAed as a graduate student was a sociology\/legal studies cross-register course called Race and Justice, and if there are two things of which I\u2019m certain, they are that structuralized oppression is real and that \u201cjustice system\u201d is a misnomer. Still, I was ready to be angry because Zimmerman got let off with manslaughter rather than second-degree murder, not because he got let off with getting his gun back and going home; I wasn\u2019t ready for everyone who argued, \u201cWell, Zimmerman was genuinely afraid, so it\u2019s sad but ok that he shot an unarmed kid whom he stalked and made genuinely afraid for his<\/i> life.\u201d It\u2019s not surprising that Zimmerman was afraid: welcome to Race and Representation in the United States (101). I just really didn\u2019t expect that the same stereotypes and racialized fear-mongering that I\u2019ve walked literally hundreds of undergraduate students through deconstructing would turn out to be a Get Out Of Jail Free card.<\/p>\n

The verdict reduced me to swearing on Twitter\u2026and then I kept my mouth shut, whereby \u201ckept my mouth shut\u201d I mean I spent most of the night retweeting a massive collection of reactions and, as they came out, articles. I did this because curating content and boosting signal is something I know how to do, and because I didn\u2019t know what else to do, and because I\u2019ve been socialized into thinking that when I have a feeling, or when something is Wrong, I should do <\/i>something about it. Over the last two years, Twitter has become how I experience and process events of national importance\u2014ten white fingers flying over a keyboard, two white thumbs tapping on a touchscreen\u2014and yet, even with hands in motion, the Zimmerman verdict was (and is) a lot to sit with. White supremacy is ugly, and I feel impotent.<\/p>\n

\"we-are-all-trayvon-martin\"<\/a>Enter \u201cWe Are Not Trayvon Martin.\u201d<\/p>\n

The meme was apparently sparked by one middle-aged white man\u2019s Facebook post<\/a> the day after the verdict, in which he stated that he was not<\/i> Trayvon Martin, but that, \u201cYou don’t have to be Trayvon Martin to know this is wrong [\u2026] This type of injustice will continue until enough guys like me – guys who are not Trayvon Martin – have had enough of it and finally say \u2018No more.\u2019\u201d From there \u201cI Am Not Trayvon Martin\u201d took off<\/a>, and inspired (among other things) the We Are Not Trayvon Martin tumblr, which has been my primary exposure to the revised-for-white people edition of the original meme. The best way to get a sense of the tumblr is simply to read a few posts<\/a>, but here\u2019s the general formula: 1) explain your membership in one or more privileged groups; 2) talk about one or more aspects of how great your life is; 3) (optional) talk about a time you could have gotten in trouble for something, but didn\u2019t; 4) (optional) say something about how either privilege and\/or the Zimmerman verdict is terrible and makes you feel bad; 5) conclude by reminding the reader that you are not Trayvon Martin.<\/p>\n

Compared to white people declaring, \u201cI Am Trayvon Martin,\u201d the \u201cI Am Not Trayvon Martin\u201d meme is<\/i> something of an improvement, but the problem is that\u2026I\u2019m not convinced \u2018better\u2019 actually makes it good, or right. A majority of the articles I\u2019ve been able to find about \u201cNot Trayvon\u201d have viewed the meme positively\u2014though notably, all but one<\/a> of those<\/a> pieces<\/a> were<\/a> written<\/a> by more<\/a> white<\/a> (or so-called \u201chonorary<\/a> white<\/a>\u201d) people<\/a>. Tracy Clayton mentions that reaction to \u201cNot Trayvon\u201d has been mixed on Twitter<\/a>, and Kyra Kyles mentions (in her interview with the \u201cNot Trayvon\u201d tumblr\u2019s creator) that \u201csome detractors who feel that this tumblr is a way for non-Blacks to somehow make the Trayvon travesty about them<\/a>,\u201d but these are the closest things I\u2019ve been able to find (so far) to negative coverage.<\/p>\n

But why am I not sold on the \u201cNot Trayvon\u201d meta-meme? I get that people\u2014white people especially\u2014feel bad and weird and guilty about the Zimmerman verdict in ways they don\u2019t entirely know to understand or do anything about. And as a white woman, I get why white women in particular might feel those feelings even more strongly: after all, there\u2019s been a lot of media attention given to the fact that the Zimmerman jury was all women, and that five out of six of those women are white. As a random sample, I scrolled back through 24 hours of We Are Not Trayvon Martin, and counted 102 non-duplicated posts; of them, 59 (or 58%) were written by authors who identified themselves as white women (for comparison, the next largest group was people who identified themselves as white men [10 posts], followed by 9 people who stated neither their race nor their gender[iii]<\/a>). While both the meta-meme and the tumblr were started by white men, I don\u2019t think the popularity of \u201cNot Trayvon\u201d with white women is a coincidence; even a good deal of writing about \u201cNot Trayvon\u201d by white<\/a> women<\/a> writers<\/a> includes confessional-style detailings of the authors\u2019 privilege. If (some) white people feel bad about Martin’s murder and Zimmerman’s acquittal, then (some) white women feel\u00a0really<\/em> bad; is it so bad to provide a forum for turning those bad feelings into positive action?<\/p>\n

You have to scroll through a lot of the \u201cNot Trayvon\u201d tumblr to find it, but this is the post<\/a> that finally helped me put my finger on why the site doesn\u2019t sit right with me. It begins with this reaction from an anonymous commenter:<\/p>\n

As an African American person, I’m gonna say what tumblr has been screaming: this is a huge example of appropriation. The “We Are Trayvon Martin” campaign is a way for POC to intelligently express their emotions and arguments relating to the recent travesty of justice. This tumblr is, as one blog put it, the Toms of the Internet. Please know that very Very VERY few people appreciate your efforts. Most people (Me included) Would very much like you to stop.<\/p>\n

–Anonymous<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To which the blog\u2019s creator responds,<\/p>\n

Thanks for sharing.<\/p>\n

This blog and idea is not meant to silence in anyway the voices of people of color in talking about, organizing, or mobilizing around the recent travesty of justice.<\/p>\n

This blog was started to encourage people who benefit from racism, who have racial privilege, to understand their role in the system and institutions of white supremacy and take action against it.<\/p>\n

It is imperfect, and messy, and raw, and difficult. But I believe we are opening a conversation and a direction that will support the fight against white supremacy in this country.<\/p>\n

Onward!<\/p>\n

Joseph<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2026and just, wow. Joseph\u2019s response has so little to do with Anonymous\u2019s comment that almost reads as though Joseph copied and pasted in a response originally written to someone else; there\u2019s no indication of having considered or even listened to what Anonymous had to say. Supposedly Joseph and his site are dedicated to ending racism, but that canned brush-off is dripping with white “I’m right” privilege. Not to mention: Thanks for sharing<\/i>?<\/p>\n

\"j-phelan\"<\/a>
We Are Not Trayvon Martin tumblr creator Joseph Phelan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I don\u2019t doubt that Joseph started the \u201cNot Trayvon\u201d tumblr out of good intentions, and I don\u2019t doubt that the people who have submitted posts to it have done so out of good intentions, too. But as I scrolled through post after post on We Are Not Trayvon Martin, it began to seem a lot less like anti-racist activism and a lot more like a white people’s\u00a0<\/b>guilt support group<\/b>. While a very, very small number of posts stand out for offering some kind of social insight or advice on how white people can be better allies, the majority of posts can be summed up as follows:\u00a0 \u201cHey everyone! Guess what! I\u2019m not Trayvon Martin, and I know<\/i> that I\u2019m not Trayvon Martin!\u201d And…that’s it.<\/p>\n

Such posts come off as one part catharsis (right now I am facing my complicity and I feel terrible about it<\/i>) and one part identity performance (look, see, I\u2019m the good kind of white person\u2026validate my good-white-ness by reblogging this post or clicking that little heart<\/i>), while overall, the tumblr itself comes off as something for<\/i> white people. Perhaps its creators would say that\u2019s the point: It\u2019s a tumblr intended to get people in positions of racial privilege both to think about their privilege and to take action against it, and if you want to talk to \u201cpeople in positions of racial privilege,\u201d white people are your prime demographic. But when I say the tumblr seems like something \u201cfor white people,\u201d I don\u2019t mean \u201cdesigned to speak to white people\u201d; I mean \u201cdesigned to benefit white people.\u201d More than anything it seems more like a platform for white people to get the burden (\u2018burden\u2019) of whiteness off their chests, a kind of online confessional where white folks whisper their privilege through a digital lattice to a Generalized Othered Other, seeking absolution.<\/p>\n

I am all for people who have privilege recognizing their privilege, and I am all for people who have privilege working to dismantle privilege and counter discrimination. And by all means, yes, let\u2019s have a whole bunch of really hard conversations about racism and sexism and all the other *-isms that plague our society. But here\u2019s the thing about being a good conversationalist: you have to know how to listen at least<\/i> as well as you speak, and you have to know when it is you should be speaking in the first place. Truly becoming an ally in the struggle against racism means starting with yourself, and it doesn\u2019t just mean \u201cbecome aware that you have racial privilege\u201d; it means doing the hard work every single day to struggle against the racism that you yourself have already internalized. It means developing the sociopolitical self-awareness to know when it\u2019s not your turn to take up speech-space. It means confronting racism when you encounter it\u2014not just by signing large-scale petitions, but also by speaking up in one-on-one conversations\u2014and it means learning to recognize racism in places where you\u2019ve been taught to be blind to it; it means owning your anti-racism, and saying “that offends me” instead of “that’s offensive to <insert group here>.” Perhaps most importantly, being an ally means acknowledging that it takes a lot more than \u201cconversation\u201d to fight racism. It means acting on that knowledge, and it means resisting the urge to go running for a gold star when you take action. You don\u2019t get a gold star. That\u2019s not the point.<\/p>\n

To be fair, We Are Not Trayvon Martin does have a \u201cTake Action<\/a>\u201d page (under a sidebar link titled, \u201cFIGHT RACISM NOW\u201d), but aside from a list of books and some links to petitions, the suggestions it offers are so broad and vague as to be essentially meaningless. If the \u201cNot Trayvon\u201d tumblr creators are serious about enlisting newly-awakened white people in the fight against racism, I\u2019d like to see them instead offer advice that\u2019s more like \u201cHow to be an anti-racist ally<\/a>,\u201d \u201cWhite Anti-Racism: Living the Legacy<\/a>,\u201d or some of the tools from The UNtraining<\/a> (which unfortunately costs money<\/a>). I\u2019d like to see them engage with people like “Anonymous” rather than brush off both the critic and the critique. I\u2019d like to see them spin the support group stuff off to the side, and make anti-racist education and collaboration their front-and-center focus.<\/p>\n

Oh, and I\u2019d really like them to change the name of their tumblr\u2014because it is<\/i> appropriation, and because right now simply isn\u2019t about the white \u201cwe.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whitney Erin Boesel is, as always, on Twitter: she\u2019s @phenatypical<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Children as Trayvon Martin image from here<\/a>; Joseph Phelan image from here<\/a>.
<\/p>\n
\n
\n

[i]<\/a> See also: what happens if you search \u201cI Am George Zimmerman\u201d and look for people who are saying it with pride \u2026but I\u2019m not going to link to any of that, either.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[ii]<\/a> At least some of the fireworks reported following the Zimmerman verdict have since been determined to have been in celebration of unrelated events (such as a Philadelphia Phillies game). Still, it says something about our country and our society that people in several cities across the U.S. were able to read mid-July fireworks as \u201cabout the Zimmerman trial\u201d in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[iii]<\/a> Full breakdown: of 102 non-duplicated posts, 59 authors identify themselves as white women; 10 as white men; 9 who specify neither race nor gender directly; 6 as Black women; 4 as white people (unspecified gender); 3 as Black men; 3 as Indian men; 2 as Latina; 2 as women (unspecified race); 1 as an Asian woman; 1 as an Indian woman; 1 as a biracial person (unspecified gender); 1 as an Asian person (unspecified gender). [Notably, 5 of the 10 white men also identified as being gay.]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Expiation, n.: the act of making amends or reparation for guilt or wrongdoing; atonement: an act of public expiation.) Dear reader, are you still thinking about the Zimmerman verdict? Yeah, me too. Over the last five days I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about Trayvon Martin\u2019s murder, and about George Zimmerman\u2019s acquittal, and especially about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1875,"featured_media":16275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967,892],"tags":[521,22926,17619,22923,22920,22918,3312,14,14944,4601,22924,22919,22921,396,507],"class_list":["post-16272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-essay","tag-anti-racism","tag-anti-racist","tag-george-zimmerman","tag-guilt","tag-i-am-not-trayvon-martin","tag-i-am-trayvon-martin","tag-privilege","tag-race","tag-trayvon-martin","tag-tumblr","tag-verdict","tag-we-are-all-trayvon-martin","tag-we-are-not-trayvon-martin","tag-white","tag-white-privilege"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2013\/07\/wpid-goodwhitepersoncertificate.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16272"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16293,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16272\/revisions\/16293"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}