“The form of
corrective-ness here is aggression and embarrassment instead of understanding
and education, because of false elitism. Stunting progress.” - Me
Social media has given everyone with an internet connection, a voice. The problem is, it didn't give nearly half of the population, ears. Or factually informed thought. Opinions are plentiful and everyone is yelling over each other. It's exhausting.
I'm a conversationalist. I love strong articulate exchange of opinions and perspectives. Some people call that debating. I don't mind a good debate. Amazingly the word has been newly laced with a connotation. My only idea for why this is, is because people don't want to understand each other. Everyday online there appears to be a war with who can impose their will the most! Whether it's trivial things like who should pay for dates and how much they should cost or more serious conversations about feminism, civil rights, human decency, and financial literacy. The most boisterous opinionated era is upon us and that's a gift and a curse. The trend now is when someone says something that you disagree with, you attack them with rudeness, embarrassment, assumptions, and stereotypes. Why would your first plan of recourse for someone disagreeing and/or offending your viewpoint be venom? Where's the productiveness in that?
Daily, I start my day with a series of tweets: 1.) All Praises to the most high... 2.) All Praises to thick thighs... 3.) Black women, we love y'all! 4.) Don't Complain, Adjust! followed by a variation of three more. The mission is to spread good energy to my twitter family to start the day and to also inspire my own good energy. Especially because twitter has become the "Daily Outrage Zone". There really isn't a day that goes by on twitter where something to be pissed off about isn't trending. Even when said thing is misleading or out of context. Agendas are in constant play. Battle of the sexes, Battle of the riches, Battle of the races... you can almost guarantee some daily outrage will fall into one of those categories. The latter of the three will always be, the first two are the ones that more concern me. This is because it's normally "friendly fire" or "Us" fighting against each other. Trying to one up each other. Who's the smartest, who's the richest, who's the most loved (superficially), and who's the most accomplished. We're always tearing each other down to put ourselves or the people around us directly on a pedestal. It's the domino effect of being have-nots. It's disheartening first from a standpoint of black unity, but it's also disappointing from the perspective of a student of life. I love to learn and teach. You can't put the chicken before the egg. I love to learn from other people and in that delivery is important. I feel a lot of times on twitter someone may be ignorant to a situation or conversation and speak from that place of ignorance unknowingly, and is immediately attacked. That's a missed moment to educate someone and gain an ally versus embarrassing someone and making an enemy and deaf ear out of them.
A personal recent example is earlier this week a very educated friend of mine asked a question about do men have "body image" pressure or insecurity. I quoted and replied, in essence, that I don't personally because I don't think women are as visibly stimulated as men are and that I've known men of all body sizes be attractive to women because of their intellect and personality. However, I have friends and associates that do struggle with body image expectations. I continued to express how they are the minority in my experience because typically the superficial expectation is that:
"Women have to be attractive. Men have to be successful. That's just the game. Deal with or take your ball and go home."
That was my exact tweet. My failure was that 1. I left out the "it" after "Deal with" and that I didn't properly thread this tweet with the rest of my point. The Deal with it or take your ball and go home was a reference to if you don't want to play that game, leave the park. Don't play into perception. Don't live your life based off of these superficial society standards. Because you're not going to win that battle against the majority. You can try to fight that fight, that's dealing with it. But, I was attacked. Continuously. I'm very thick skinned so it didn't affect me emotionally, but it did disappoint me intellectually. Woman after women said "Well you must feel like this cuz you're ugly" or "But all y'all n****s broke" or "Men are trash" or "You men are so stupid". This is full aggression and embarrassment tactics. Just as, if not more, insensitive as the misunderstood tweet that offended them. There were also men who came to tell me how dumb I was also without looking on my timeline to get the full context, that one tweet was retweeted and hence, outrage! To be expected, unfortunately. I took time to screenshot the full context of the convo and post as a reply to some of the tweets and received apologies for them jumping to conclusions but those knee jerk reactions happen by the second online. Do people say stupid things online without proper context to back it up? ALL THE TIME. Including me, I'm sure! But why become what you despise? The worst group to be on the wrong end of this is Black Feminists Twitter because they have more "feet on the ground" than the U.S. Military. Feminism, ideally, is very much needed. There's some extremists who are more loud than they are thoughtful though. And some that are more interested in aggression than education. This is definitely not exclusive to Feminists online because many other groups do as much, if not more, bad and not nearly as much good but my sentiment is the same. In any of these instances, with any of topics or groups, I feel the initial recourse should be an ATTEMPT to peacefully understand or educate. We miss so much valuable time to unify because we want to be the smartest one in the room all the time. We want to strike the hardest blows. We want everyone to look at us administering the metaphorical hammer because that increases our visibility. At the expense of others. I hate that. Let's teach, or at least try to teach, each other first.
Just My Thoughts!
