Discrimination and police brutality are nothing new, but last summer we saw a racial unrest unlike anything we’ve seen before. This forced more of us to confront Canada and the United States’ long history of racism. Public opinion of racism quickly shifted in the wake of the protest, with a huge jump in support for the BLM movement and acknowledgement of institutional racism, especially on social media. Has any of that support resulted in meaningful change? Dr. Moya Bailey, author of #HashtagActivism and Sandy Hudson, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement presence in Canada, discuss performative ally-ship and hashtag activism.
What is hashtag activism?
Hashtag activism is tool that leverages people’s use of digital media to support the activism that they are already doing on the ground. It’s a combination of using digital platforms to increase and bolster messages that are happening in real life or, IRL.
One classic of hashtag activism that people can immediately recognize is the use of the names of people that have been killed by police violence. This has been a way that people have understood hashtags as an important means to get a message out and across. Last summer was different as there was a succession of these hashtags used in a few weeks, the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and in more recent times, Makaia Bryant.
#BlackoutTuesday: helpful or harmful?
In a few hours more than 14.6 million black squares flooded onto Instagram feeds. The impacts of black out Tuesday can be thought of positively in the sense that any sort of feedback from mainstream media and culture is helpful and it shows a level of support. When people are interested in doing something, by seeing others post it takes away a sense of nervousness about taking a position on something.
However, the negative impacts is that it’s so easy just to put up a black square and stand in solidarity, compared to actually speaking up against the issue. Asking the government to make concrete changes-that’s a lot riskier but shows you stand in solidarity. Accomplice or solidarity actions that are built by those not following the lead of those most affected usually fall flat. In addition, many of these posts used the hashtag “#blacklivesmatters” in their captions drowning out actual BLM posts.
Being in-line with activists
When activism becomes popular the inclination is to jump in and do good. What we cannot forget is that there are people working and preparing for these moments in the in between times when activism is not popular. They have done so much work to move forward, it is so critical to check in with these people if we do want to make the best contribution to “do good”.
What work have police forces taken to show accountability and what still needs to be done?
The problem lies within the fundamental operations of police, so the individual police forces are not expected to do much. What needs to be done is changes from governments and policy makers. They need the ones taking action. There has been concrete changes made in Canada after recent events in 2020. For example, the city of Vancouver recently decided to remove cops from all schools. Changes like this show that we are in the right direction.
Has traditional media contributed anything meaningful to change?
During the freedom struggle of the 1960’s the traditional media had an important role to play in broadcasting to the world- the acracies that were happening and how black people were treated. Dr. Moya Bailey’s newest book, the Misogynoir Transformed discusses more about the transformative justice practices we can see in the media that people create for themselves. For instance, Black women are now using YouTube and other platforms to create the media that they want to see.
