This article by Dani McClain, The Nation addresses an issue I hear so many old-school civil rights activists talk about: the fact that a movement takes more than 140 characters. In The Nation’s article, The Black Lives Matter Movement Is Most Visible on Twitter. Its True Home Is Elsewhere,” chronicles the journey of Umi Selah (then known as Phillip Agnew) going from working with a group of college activists protesting against the murder of Trayvon Martin and Florida Stand Your Ground laws to a twitter celebrity. Once Selah realized the “celebrity” aspect of his social justice activism, unlike many new-school activists, he had to take a step back.
Some wanted to give an award to the Dream Defenders; others wanted to add Selah to lists proclaiming the arrival of a new generation of civil-rights heroes. (One writer said he embodied the spirit of Nelson Mandela.) Others wanted his perspective on the burgeoning racial-justice movement. After a while, Selah wanted none of it.
The breaking point came when a major news outlet profiled him without first conducting an interview. The result, he says, was an account that credited him with successes in social-justice movements he wasn’t even involved in. “If I was a person in the [immigrants’-rights] movement, I would look at this article and think, ‘Who the hell is this dude?’” he told me. “I really panicked. I imagined somebody saying, ‘Why is this dude telling Time magazine that he’s been in the forefront of these movements, and we’ve never seen him here?’”
Selah’s response was to pull himself out of the spotlight. He started declining media requests and posting less often to social media. When he did accept an invitation to speak, his goals were to disavow any hero label thrust on him by others and to demystify the Dream Defenders’ work.
Selah is an organizer, not a media personality, and so the trade-off made sense for him. But for others, that might not be the case.
The article talks about current Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson who is know as the Black Lives Matter movement biggest star. His live-tweeting from the protests in Ferguson earn him more than 300 thousand twitter followers and more than a million mentions and retweets earned him coverage in Time Magazine and landed him on Fortune’s World’s Greatest Leaders list. He was even compared to Nelson Mandela.
Today’s racial-justice movement demands an end to the disproportionate killing of black people by law-enforcement officials and vigilantes, and seeks to root out white supremacy wherever it lives. Social media has allowed its members to share documentary evidence of police abuse, spread activist messages, and forge a collective meaning out of heartrending news. At certain key moments, Twitter in particular has reflected and reinforced the power of this movement. ……
The people who the liberal media and social media have elevated to the position of national leader or spokesperson do not share the values of the movement,” Selah told me. “The ideas that they put forth, the platforms that they put forth, are neoliberal and do not come from a rooting in movement, don’t come from a liberation framework, from an abolition framework.” (Mckesson declined repeated requests for an interview for this story.)
So what are the values of the movement? Who is spreading them—and how? Charlene Carruthers, national director of Black Youth Project 100, has been engaged with those questions for more than a decade. While an undergraduate at Illinois Wesleyan University, she was active in the Black Student Union. She worked on campaigns in support of young black candidates while getting her master’s degree in social work in St. Louis. After she graduated, she joined the staff at an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Virginia and managed online campaigns at the civil-rights organization ColorofChange.
Got to The Nation to read the full article by Dani McClainabout the work off modern-day activists.
