White Women: Stop Treating Protests as Instagram Photo Shoots
American streets are overflowing with people protesting police brutality. Those protesters have been met with, in many cases, even more police brutality. There’s a raging pandemic that scientists still don’t fully understand, and an impending presidential election. It feels like, at any moment, circumstances could tip toward unprecedented, positive social change, or an apocalypse.
In the midst of all this, a freaky subgenre of social media has emerged: white women blundering into historic antiracist protests to take, presumably, clout-building pics.
The most egregious examples have blown up online: A white woman in a bralette, blocking actual protesters so she could stage a photo shoot with a “Black Lives Matter” sign. A white couple trying to get a picture of themselves suspended in a jump in front of a row of tanks sent to subdue protestors. A white woman in a sundress sidling up to sweating, screaming protesters, posing for a pic, and then walking away. A white woman in a mini camo dress seeming to use actual Black protesters as human props.
In an even more eerie episode of White Women Act Like Police Violence Is a Cute VSCO Background, some influencers capitalized on the specter of looted businesses to promote their image. One woman posed for pictures of her butt in front of smashed windows. Fiona Moriarty-McLaughlin, an intern for the conservative paper the Washington Examiner, was reportedly fired after her boyfriend filmed her while she held a drill, apparently pretending to help board up a business in Santa Monica ahead of protests.
Faking involvement in life-or-death civil rights struggle, or disrupting people who are fighting for their lives, is profoundly embarrassing. Most of us know better. Or at least, we’re subtler about it. Don’t all of us—even us nice white women who have been participating in protests, liking the “right” posts, and donating to bail funds—share the secret? The secret that our skin color lets us cut to the front of most lines in life.
Maybe we don’t agree with white supremacy, but we enjoy its effects. Now, as Black Americans take to the streets during a pandemic to assert that their lives have value, it’s an opportunity for white women to direct the camera’s focus away from ourselves. White women already have our lives—our humanity, our power, the fact that we matter to corporations and politicians and law enforcement—reflected back at us from every billboard, every movie poster, every #GirlBoss call for female empowerment.
Social media and influencer culture make a convincing case for the idea that putting pictures of your face or body online with the right backdrop or message is activism. But that’s just not true—social media can amplify or minimize; it can distract or call attention. When you use a once-in-a-generation, maybe once-in-history black-led antiracism protest to sprinkle activism-chic on your cocktail and OOTD-themed grid, you’re not adding to the conversation; you’re diluting it.
Even though I condemn the white women who are using the battered bodies of protesters as a backdrop for their profile pics, I relate to them. Women are taught our entire lives that our appearances are our primary ways of securing status and power. Being a woman means navigating the politics of appearances at all times.
I don’t know if we’ll ever live to see women free from that paradigm. I do know that within the reality of patriarchy, some white women have found ways to use their images to promote justice, not to distract from it.
Gloria Steinem used her beauty to expose the abuse of workers at the Playboy Club, then capitalized on her fame to support black women. Her appearance loaned itself to iconic images of her and Dorothy Pitman-Hughes, as well as other black activists, powerful because they are the results of actual partnership, not an influencer scam. Marilyn Monroe used her sex appeal and fame to promote Ella Fitzgerald’s career when Fitzgerald wasn’t considered “sexy” enough by a white nightclub owner. Kaylen Ward, who goes by “the Naked Philanthropist” on social media (she’s the one who sold naked pics of herself to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Australian wildfire recovery), alternates titty pics and Black Lives Matter posts on her timeline.
And if you’re a white woman and you really want to use your body and appearance more directly, check out the white protesters who physically place themselves between law enforcement and Black protesters. Or the white crowds who used their bodies as human shields for Black protesters, knowing that police were less likely to attack them.
If using your whiteness to literally stand in the way of violence seems like it might be a lot, a good start might be to try to gently bring yourself to terms with the way you have stood in the way of people of color, metaphorically. White women are harmed by patriarchy, but we still use a cocktail of femininity and whiteness, consciously or unconsciously, to push ahead. As my Glamour colleague Anna Moeslein pointed out to me, borrowing from Black culture and other minority groups without ever crediting or involving them is the secret sauce that has launched countless white women to influencer status.
Think about the feathered imitation Native headdresses white women have continued to wear to music festivals even though Native people have explained again and again why that is hurtful. Think about how using slang invented and popularized by Black and queer people—girl, dragged, lit, bae, fleak, popped off—is the way your favorite white YouTuber telegraphs that she’s cool and with it. We all love Lizzo and Beyoncé and Rihanna, but how many times have we twerked to “Truth Hurts” and then turned around and supported a racist politician or derided a Black woman as “scary” or “angry”? Black women have expressed again and again that they’re tired of their bodies being treated as “trends” by white people—like how influencers “discovered” and then “canceled” big lips. Radically changing the way you interact with Black bodies is a much more effective online activism than posting a concerned picture of yourself.
We know not to listen to boomers who claim that all social media is completely self-obsessed and narcissistic—social media is way too big for that label. Big enough to help launch revolutions, and big enough to help sabotage them with well-meaning, watered-down content.
Mirror selfies and horrifying images of police violence sit awkwardly side-by-side on our feeds. We post pictures of ourselves because we want other people to see that we’re living and thriving. Activists post images of police brutality because they want others to see that Black people are being killed. It’s okay, imperative even, for that first impulse—to show off, to feel known—to take a backseat.
Images are one of our most powerful tools to ease open steel-trapped minds and soften hardened hearts, especially during times of extraordinary change. We know people will not believe things if they cannot see them with their own eyes: If the killing of George Floyd hadn’t been caught on camera for nine unbearable minutes, it would probably have barely been a headline, let alone ignited a worldwide movement.
With phones in our pockets, we’re all potential documenters of history. Right now white women just aren’t the focal point. Instead, we need to be part of pushing in the right direction, confronting our friends, families, and our own prejudices, putting our money and bodies on the line, using our “I need to speak to your manager” voices to speak to the managers of our cities and our states and our Congress.
And if you really need to see yourself, you can always take a good look in the mirror.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
