Trial by Instagram and the Cynical Wielding of New Power
I became deeply suspicious of the white ally call to arms years ago.
The instructions for inclusion to the club were simple. Strolling through the language, membership was predicated upon a recognition of white privilege, a commitment to listening to the ideas of the marginalized, and taking a backseat while funding the movement.
On paper, this sounds reasonable and progressive until one goes beyond the words and into the expected behaviors invited.
Recognizing and acknowledging privilege in practice means Accept a never-ending self flagellation and daily apology for existence. Only the genuinely masochistic could swim in that pool of ideological horseshit.
Listen to the ideas of the marginalized in practice is a Möbius strip for anyone with even an iota of critical evaluation skills. It means in practice Do not question and embrace the ideas of the marginalized because, if you do not, you haven’t listened.
Taking a backseat and provide money to the cause sounds good until one realizes that, in practice, it really means that the only way to get the decoder ring and Kool-Aid cup is not be included in the club. It is the essence of Shut the fuck up and pay us to take your stuff.
Patrick Harrington, the owner of Kindness Yoga in Denver, Colorado was a white ally. In his nineteen years in business, his tiny yoga studio business had a reputation of inclusivity — gender-neutral bathrooms long before they were popularized, person-of-color yoga nights where “white friends and allies” were asked to “respectfully refrain from attending”, LGBTQ yoga workshops. He, like any dutiful white ally should, hired a diverse staff of instructors.
Kindness Yoga didn’t charge for classes. The model of business was entirely donation-based so that anyone with interest could learn without regard for economic ability. Some students paid one dollar to attend classes regularly because that was all that they could afford.
The model worked. By 2019, Harrington had eight studios running. When the pandemic shut the world down, he managed to crawl through the trenches of red tape and secure a $300,000 federal aid package to pay his instructors during the lockdown. Unlike much larger corporations, he actually used the money to, what do you know, pay his instructors.
Harrington even started a “digital-dialogue” called Unlearning Racism: How to Become a Better Ally with vocabulary lessons and ideas on better allyship to communities of color.
In practice, this guy was almost a poster boy for the entire concept of allyship. He was the fucking Tom Cruise of white allies. There were two problems with Harrington that his work and effort could not overcome. He was white and his business had an Instagram account.
Unlike a host of large and small companies using the current civil unrest to show shallow support for black lives, Harrington actually meant it and had put it all into pragmatic behavior. When Kindness Yoga posted a Desmond Tutu quote in support of #BlackLivesMatter on June 1st, a campaign started by Davidia Turner (a black woman who has since started her own yoga studio and ends her posts with “I accept Reparations via Venmo and PayPal”) and Jordan Smiley (a transgender man, also now starting his own studio) accused Kindness Yoga of “performative activism” and “tokenization of Black and brown bodies.”
The campaign claimed that Harrington declined to hire an outside diversity expert and that his effort to “unwhite” his website by featuring photos of black, brown, and trans students was a horror. The murky demand for “systemic changes” caught fire and within 48 hours, Kindness Yoga closed down for good.
Interestingly, neither Turner nor Smiley even bothered to confront Harrington before unleashing the online tsunami. Talking to him “would be a danger to my mental health,” claimed Smiley.
I’ve long held the belief that social media is a tool. No different than a phone or a hammer it has a designed function and use. Like a phone or a hammer, social media can be used as a weapon despite the fact that it is not really intended as one in concept. Blaming the internet for opportunistic assholes is like blaming the hammer when it splits your thumbnail while trying to hang that Justice League poster. Blaming social media for this excessive aggression is like blaming McDonalds for the fact that we are a fat, fat country.
Twitter is just that lard-laden, salty delicious thing that is so goddamned tasty, we can’t help ourselves but have hours of it without recognizing the damage done. Facebook is french fried information — high in calories, low in informational nutrition and fucking irresistible. Nothing wrong with a hunk of chocolate cake but if you eat cake every day without pause, you’ll die in your own bed unable to get up to piss because your fragile underused bones will be drowned in the sheer weight of your useless body.
As a tool, social media is perfect for social justice with its ease of communication to huge swaths of people. It is likewise the exact right tool for those who would use social justice ideas for selfish gain.
Despite the extraordinary speed and massive reach of the internet, there are more effective ways to build genuine changes in society. They happen in person, face to face filled with perceptions of microaggressions that are less aggressive than just clumsy and more than sentences written on a phone in someone’s basement.
True change comes with skin in the game rather than the bloodless bullying and theater of online posturing. Most effective activists know this already. “People don’t understand that organizing isn’t going online and cussing people out or going to a protest and calling something out,” Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, wrote in “How We Fight White Supremacy.”
Public shame is most effective in bringing change when levied against the Big Guys in power rather than a horizontal cancelling of those whom we simply dislike or want to replace. The second kind smacks of petty office politicking and a mirror of the very approach our idiot savant president takes to bully his rivals.
Turner and Smiley do not behave in real life like activists seeking change. They wouldn’t even bother speaking to Harrington before hitting the cancel buttons so change was not the goal. Given both waited until the business was in peril due to Pandemic Alley, went in for the kill and now are opening their own replacement studios is quite telling.
Also, anyone who signs a public post with “I accept Reparations via Venmo and PayPal” is a douchebag and an opportunist, not an activist.
Unfortunately, Harrington’s struggle session isn’t over. Apparently he is spending his now unemployed time working on his white privilege including reading “White Fragility.”
“Did our community in Denver gain something by Kindness Yoga closing its doors?” Harrington said. “I struggle to understand the benefit of this outcome for white people, people of color, LGBTQ+ people. I don’t see the benefit of taking us down this way.”
After a beat, he added: “My privilege could have me blind to that. I’m trying to learn.”
None of this is to indicate that true allyship is out of reach or undesirable. True allies, like true friends, speak their minds even if it’s ugly or in disagreement. True progress is built upon collaborative work, not sycophantic purity worship. Collaborative work is the work of equals and isn’t that the fucking point of civil rights in the first place?
Beware of those who use the outrage of the moment as a grift for themselves. Those who have genuinely suffered discrimination, economic deprivation, and unrelenting bigotry deserve better allies than self-flagellating self-loathing masochists. Those are the types of allies no one has any respect for because they are effectively useless in the hard work for change.
They are, however, completely willing to be destroyed by you for your stated cause.
