When “harshtags” backfire: Mocking #whitegirltears and joking #killallwhitemen stir up debate
Remember last week, when separate incidents out of Boston University and London’s Goldsmiths University sparked a public debate over charges of racism and sexism — and who can be called racist and sexist? Well, apparently we still haven’t definitively come to any conclusions on those. But the two women at the forefront of both controversies are now involved in new ones.
First, there’s incoming BU African American Studies professor Dr. Saida Grundy, who came under harsh criticism — and a predictably gleeful torrent of right wing declarations that “anti-white racism is rampant” — after Amherst student Nick Pappas posted some of her more controversial tweets on his SoCawlege site. “Deal with your sh*t, white people,” she’d written, among other comments on her now now protected feed. “Slavery is YALL thing…. Those euphemisms for ur ancestors like ‘farmers’ and ‘pioneers’ means you owned humans and killed natives.” In a statement last week about her Twitter comments, Grundy said, “I regret that my personal passion about issues surrounding these events led me to speak about them indelicately.”
But Grundy’s social media behavior came into question again on Monday. Fox News has reported that back in February, a poster identified as Sai Grundy got in a heated Facebook conversation over a post on The Grio critical of Patricia Arquette’s post-Oscar comments on feminism. After a white woman named Meghan Chamberlin, who claims she identified herself as a rape survivor, wrote, “I LITERALLY cry and lose sleep over this… What this article did was tell me that I’m not aloud [sic] to ask for help… Because I am a WHITE woman,” the poster known as Grundy soon replied that “You promote your #whitegirltears like that’s some badge you get to wear” and then added, “Go cry somewhere since that’s what you do.”
And over at Goldsmiths, there’s more from diversity officer Bahar Mustafa too. Mustafa recently hosted “a BME woman and non-binary” only event and explained the limited guest list by declaring, “I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men, because racism and sexism describe structures of privilege based on race and gender.” Now, she’s the subject of a petition for a vote of no confidence, and accused of spreading “slanderous rumors of staff bullying to support her campaigns, and encouraged students to believe that an individual member of staff is directly responsible for student suicide attempts disclosed to her as the Welfare and Diversity Officer,” as well as engaging in “the the consistent use of hash-tags such as #killallwhitemen and #misandry, and publicly calling someone ‘white trash’ under the official GSU Welfare and Diversity Officer twitter account.”
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/19/when_harshtags_backfire_mocking_whitegirltears_and_joking_killallwhitemen_stir_up_more_university_debate/
Classy bunch.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Hashtags are akin to saying du rec or DUZY or in the case of Twitter adding your comment to a particular topic. It's basic threading in communication and in itself neutral. It's like refusing on DU to post to a sub forum out of principal.
