I had resisted the trend, and now I am really glad I did.... As Caitlin Dewy of the Washington Post wrote yesterday, white people made our pain over Eric Garner all about them: But there’s profound privilege built into even #CrimingWhileWhite, which is supposedly such a force against it. Consider how fortunate and secure you must be, to feel entitled to talk about yourself in the face of someone else’s overwhelming pain and grief. To be comfortable flinging around light-hearted anecdotes about the police, because those interactions don’t represent any kind of ongoing threat to you or your family. To type 100 characters and stamp them with a trendy hashtag, unafraid of any blowback — because, as per usual, you rule the narrative; yours is the dominant voice. To top it all off, #CrimingWhileWhite has earned fawning, uncritical write-ups on virtually every news site out there, a scale and tone of coverage we rarely see for #BlackLivesMatter or #DyingWhileBlack or any other non-white social media narrative on race. Again, when it comes to our pain, white people have this amazing knack for making it about them. Despite their best efforts, #CrimingWhileWhite demonstrated white privilege that was paraded as sympathy and solidarity for black pain. Fail.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 07:25:00 +0000