Woke Instagram Slideshows Promise the Thrill of Understanding Without the Bore of Grappling
What you ~NEED~ to know and why you should probably read that book instead
In those turbulent summer months it seemed that all corners of American life were occupied by the echoes of the outraged marching, singing, screaming in response to the state sanctioned murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black Americans. Our streets were packed to the brim, every corporation in the world emailed out a reflective tome about systemic racism, our politicians kneeled in kente cloths, and our social media feeds were saturated with black squares, protest updates, videos of police violence, and of course, slide shows.
During that summer of uprising I often turned to my Instagram as a practical tool in the revolution. My feed was “Support needed in Hollywood!” “White Folks come prepared to use your bodies!” and other urgent calls to action. This is what a mass platform of connectivity can be, I thought: a material guidepost to connect disparate actors in a shared purpose. But as the immediacy of action faded and some of the broader ideological aims of the moment began to take precedence over the physical necessities of protest, slideshows became the primary mechanism of a certain form of consciousness raising.
Written with the declarative confidence of a college lecture and presented with the earthy sheen of a GOOP wellness post, these slideshows are a bite sized way of expressing “What You Need to Know.” Updates on Breonna Taylor’s case, excerpts from a book that links the construction of gender to the construction of racial categories, definitions of white fragility, explainers on why we use “folks'' instead of “guys''; the Instagram slideshow is deeply malleable, a vehicle for any content one wishes to share, but crucially, it is also always resolute. Its short punchy, highly attractive presentation implies inarguability. While slideshows have brought useful information and ideas to many different people, there is something deeply nefarious about the push to immediately turn a moment of true civil unrest, of national spiritual reconsideration, into something so brandable, so boxable, so clean. These are, after all, not easy ideas to engage with, particularly on the part of newly eager white folks.
The proliferation of slideshows through niche networks is what disturbs me most. I note the inadequacy of leaning on anecdote when discussing larger social trends, but I imagine what I have seen is not rare for young progressives in generally woke spaces. What has generally happened in my network is one person, usually a Black peer, will share a slideshow or infographic, and then suddenly I will notice many, many white people also share that same post. And it is this trend of cue-taking along with the neat aesthetics of the slide shows that gets closer to what is so disappointing about this moment on the part of eager white folks. If you’re merely looking to mimic the actions of Black peers, and your reading and expression of ideals is something as uncurious as slideshows, it appears you’re not doing much inner work. Would a time of truly deep reflection not have some bearing on this state of mimicry, this state of hyper-stylized activism? If “silence=violence” what does an obligatory repost equate to? And that’s the despair of this era. That those months of outrage, mourning, creative resistance, reimagining, mourning, were all so quickly funneled into a digital infrastructure that flattens everything.
The pragmatist in me wants to say, “Hey, if these are how necessary ideas are spreading, let it be.” But, if your connection to a profound idea, such as abolition or socialism, primarily derives from a pastel-hued listicle written in the millennial snark of a Buzzfeed post, I rather you not have that connection at all. I assure you, that supposedly held conviction will disappear at the first sign of friction. And worse, your ideological unraveling will be hidden by the elusive drag of a haphazardly learnt “woke speak.” Ultimately, your radicalization was nothing more than a communal headache.
I wonder, what would a social media response that truly grapples with the complexity of this racial reckoning consist of? There are surely many, many examples of viral posts that, at least somewhat, transcended those sleek white boxes. There was Kimberly Jones’s prophetic monologue that made the rounds, where she moves from considering the role of property damage in protest to crying out with the warbled voice of truth, “fuck your social contract.” There was Sonya Renee Taylor’s poignant video statement to white Americans, to whom she implored to stop haggling over the politics of Black folks’s death, and start considering the sickness that allows that conversation to exist with such casual and callow consideration. And then of course, there was Floyd, whose long gruesome murder, the world bore witness to. This video, unlike the others, was no self-aware statement, but documentation. In Floyd, the world saw life as it is, and our collective life contorted around it.
I notice that every post I mentioned has been a video. Maybe, instead of didactic text, we could have human beings in space and time considering life aloud. Maybe our “solution” to the moral paucity of slideshows is video. But of course the problem here is not just a medium that is inherently performative such as slideshows, but the platform they exist on. Even those videos still exist on the same platform that houses the globe’s memes, sponsored posts, racist propaganda, Throwback Thursdays and selfies. Images and posts can bring attention or new knowledge, but as long as they exist alongside the world’s infinitely expanding collection of digital trash, their power will be muted.
We have a medium problem. We have a platform problem. And our strategies for reforming both through legislation that, for example curtails tech’s incentives to incite perpetual outrage, seems unlikely. So maybe it’s best we consider the “us” problem. I have no immediate actionables for eager white folk in a rush to help, but let us start via a process of elimination and take this conversation, perhaps, offline.