Don’t Unfriend Your Racist Facebook Friends–Teach Them
May 9, 2015 in Blogs
By Dexter Thomas, The Guardian
Perhaps you’re like me, and the first thing you do every morning is to check social media. And perhaps on a recent morning, you opened your Facebookapp only to see your old high school buddy Stacey post this:
“Why don’t we just send the US Marines to Baltimore City and clean house?! We don’t need these animals around us anyway!”. It was posted an hour ago, and already has 107 likes. You scroll down a bit further down the thread. One of her friends chimes in: “I’m down! As a Marine veteran, I’d love to smoke some of them animals!”. 46 likes on this one.
I’m gonna delete this jerk, you think. You don’t need this negativity, especially not this early in the morning. It doesn’t matter if she used to share her fries with you when you ditched gym class to go to Burger King. That was then, this is now – and whatever she’s become now disgusts you. You move your cursor, hovering over the ‘unfriend’ button.
But please, don’t. Not only because she needs you (she does), but because you need her. She’s the only thing keeping you in touch with reality right now.
I get it. It’s frustrating. We went through this with Ferguson, and Staten Island. Back then, your buddy posted fake pictures of Michael Brown with a gun, and now, she posts fake pictures of looting. She posts videos of a CVS burning. She doesn’t post the videos of police throwing bricks at children, or the video of a young man literally being kidnapped by armored troops as CNN reporters ignore him. At best, she might post the now-infamous video of the woman smacking her child, calling her a hero – yes, Stacey, the same woman that posted that 10 Reasons Not to Hit your Child listicle last week. But she’s happy to have permission to cheer on the beating of a …read more
Source: ALTERNET
Recent Comments