Stop Tweet-shaming and start organizing


Earlier this month a 19-year-old and a 20-year-old were expelled from the University of Oklahoma over their so-called leadership role in a racist frat chant that went viral. Protesters picketed outside one former student’s home, which the family temporarily fled because of threats.

The same day, the University of Maryland announced it was launching an investigation of an email containing racist and misogynistic language sent to a campus fraternity by one of its members. Puzzlingly, the email was sent in January 2014. It’s not clear how it came to light this year. The author of the email was suspended from his frat. University President Wallace D. Loh vowed on Twitter to “ensure due process and protect the free speech guaranteed by our Constitution,” adding that he is “struggling with justifying this email as free speech.”

A teacher at a private Catholic school in New Jersey came under fire three week ago for posting a homophobic rant on Facebook. She has since deleted the offending post and, at the request of her employer, taken down her Facebook page. These actions didn’t prevent Susan Sarandon and Greg Bennett, a former “Real Housewives of New Jersey” cast member, from denouncing her on social media — a medium in which Sarandon and Bennett wield considerably more power than a random schoolteacher. The teacher has since been placed on administrative leave, and her family has embarked on a fundraising campaign to cover costs incurred by her loss of income.

I abhor racist, misogynistic and homophobic remarks as much as the next progressive. They’re crude, obnoxious and ignorant. But do they really warrant suspension, expulsion or potential job loss?

My compassion for the New Jersey schoolteacher is limited. She is an adult with a career; she should have known better than to write something stupid and hurtful in what is essentially a public forum. However, given the lack of evidence that her bigotry extended to the classroom, I’m not convinced she deserves to be suspended or fired.

As for the recent trend of college-age men being punished for poor judgment, I find that far more sinister.

In my early 20s, I said and wrote many things that could be construed as offensive. I also have male friends I knew when they were 20 and foolish. I believe there is a wide and meaningful gap between chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!” (a Yale fraternity chant that was recorded in 2010, leading to the frat’s five-year suspension from campus) and actually raping a woman. At 20, most people want to impress their friends — and most rapists don’t need a chant to get in the mood.

Jon Ronson wrote a fascinating piece for The New York Times Magazine in February, “How one stupid tweet blew up Justine Sacco’s life.” (He has also just published a book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.”) His thesis is that the rise of social media has ushered in a new era of public shaming, a punishment that, according to him, was once deemed “too brutal” to be carried out in the U.S. and Britain.

Publicly — and, thanks to the Internet, permanently — shaming young people whose brains aren’t fully developed, expelling them from college and picketing outside their families’ homes do not further the cause of justice. This is the kind of petty nonsense the great civil rights strategists of an earlier era wouldn’t have spent 10 minutes on. As the Trinidadian-American activist Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton wrote in “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation,” invoking an example far worse than a racist song:

When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city — Birmingham, Alabama — 500 black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination ... that is a function of institutional racism.

They weren’t saying that individual racism isn’t bad or wrong; merely that it doesn’t require towering moral courage or steely intestinal fortitude to condemn it. In other words, anyone with an Internet connection can tweet-shame a dumb fratboy. But it takes real leadership and organizational skills to take on institutionalized racism.

It’s emotionally satisfying to make a few scapegoats the focal point of our collective rage over continued inequality. But getting someone fired, kicked out of school or permanently branded a bigot on the basis of an ill-advised email, Facebook comment or 30-second chant, however crass or brutal, solves nothing. It harms individuals, not the roots of oppression. At best it’s a waste of time and energy; at worst, it’s a violation of constitutional rights.

Words hurt. They have power. Sometimes — for example, when a woman is alone at night, a boss is alone with an employee or a black man is alone with a police officer — they constitute an implicit threat. Those circumstances do not apply in these cases. Feeling hurt, angry, uncomfortable or annoyed is not the same as being threatened. Hearing a rape joke is not the same as being attacked.

It’s time to redirect all this righteous anger at the real enemies of progress. Who cares what some ignorant teenager said in a country in which megawealthy corporations systematically maltreat workers? Who cares about chanting fratboys when politicians are stripping away women’s right to choose? Who cares about a racist song when cops are getting away with murder?