Outraged by Ashley 'Dotty' Charles

Author:Ashley 'Dotty' Charles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

4

SHITSTORMS AND SNOWFLAKES

With Katie’s words ringing in my ear, I thought back to Rachel Dolezal and what she had said about outrage being a tool. That it could be used for good and it could be used for evil. So are we just using it wrong?

Imagine if we took the efforts we were investing so freely in the takedown of people and focused them into the destabilisation of power structures. Would we not be putting our outrage to better use if, instead of using it to ‘cancel’ Rachel Dolezal, we used it to disrupt the systems that truly proliferate black oppression? Were we mad at Katie Hopkins or at the broader, institutionalised bigotry to which she subscribes? Was Piers Morgan really the problem or was it the media gatekeepers who enable and empower his deeply flawed (and infuriatingly smug) rhetoric?

And then I remembered something else Rachel had said, an idea my memory now latched on to, playing on a constant loop. ‘When my story got thrown into the media, everybody was like: She didn’t ask for permission; she just took this,’ Rachel had said, describing the accusations of cultural appropriation that had been levelled at her for, among other things, braiding her hair. ‘So [there are] all these assumptions about cultural appropriation and I feel like in a sense what’s actually being appropriated is activism.’

I wasn’t sure I had given this the attention it deserved at the time, perhaps letting my cynicism about the messenger distract from the message. But now it seemed an inspired notion.

‘The problem with outrage in its modern guise is that posts and retweets have replaced pickets and sit-ins,’ she had said, with the loaded stare and overzealous nod of a would-be cult leader in the pulpit. ‘The key to effective action, effective advocacy, effective activism, is to organise and channel outrage in a way that fulfils a purpose and accomplishes a goal. Right now, there’s just a whole big quagmire of stuff online.’

‘It’s like activism appropriation,’ she repeated. ‘Because people are hijacking the movement [with] cheap sound bites, and the attention span doesn’t even last long enough to actually get anything done.’

Maybe that was it. Activism has been appropriated.

By now I was becoming a bit of an activism purist, which is rich coming from me, someone with little to no protest experience, but still, I couldn’t help but daydream about outrage in its prime. One dreary Tuesday morning, around about the time I started writing this part of the book, I was sat in a taxi on my way to do a radio show at the arse-crack of dawn, when I found myself thinking back to an old-school group of activists my mum had told me about during another one of her extra-curricular dinner-table lessons in the nineties. (The school syllabus was trying to convince us that Christopher Columbus was a hero, so she felt obliged to give us some black-history balance.) They were the Greensboro Four, a defiant quartet of black students from a North Carolina college who sat at the whites only lunch counter of retail powerhouse F.

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