An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Beyond the specifics of this incident, it demonstrated to me the limits of
call-out culture and social media. Social media is a powerful tool. People
have used it to organize social movements, including the Movement for
Black Lives and recent protests happening at the time of this writing to
bring justice for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. We should ask longterm
questions about the role social media plays in our in-person social
relationships. Does using social media produce better social relationships,
built on a foundation of compassion and love? Does it help us become more
invested in people, even when they make mistakes? Leanne Simpson writes
of her experience in the Idle No More movement, an Indigenous-led social
movement founded in 2012 that calls for the Canadian government to honor
the treaties and Indigenous sovereignty and cease environmental
deprivation:
Most of my comrades I had never met in person. While there were
small groups of people meeting and strategizing about specific actions
and events, we had no mechanism to make decisions as a movement
because at this point social media had replaced organizing.
Disagreements over analysis occurred online, and because we had
shallow cyber relationships, instead of real-world ones, the larger
structure fell apart quickly. We tried to build a movement online
through social media, and when we needed to trust each other, when
we needed to give each other the benefit of the doubt, when we
needed empathy and a history together that we could trust, we
couldn’t. 14
I believe Simpson is correct. Social media is here to stay and there is no
doubt about its powerful use in helping change our conditions. However, its
limitations are glaring when a disagreement happens. What would happen
if, instead of talking on social media, we reached out in another way? We
are so quick to use Twitter fingers that we rarely think about the fact that we
are dealing with people. Finding ways of meeting might be difficult, but we
should try.
Later in 2017, more issues emerged when another Black woman rapper
engaged in cultural appropriation, and the discourse was even worse. On
November 17, rapper Nicki Minaj posted on her Instagram a drawing of
herself depicted as three fictionalized versions of Pocahontas, which was