As outrage spread nationally over the death of Eric Garner at the hands of police in New York, a professional writer for Jimmy Fallon sent a half-joking tweet Wednesday ridiculing white privilege under the hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite.
It exploded, and soon white people were confessing to crimes they got away with at a rate of 600 tweets a minute: A white drunken driver given only a speeding ticket. After shoving a police officer, a man was told to go home and sleep it off.
By Thursday morning, the online campaign that some saw as a show of solidarity had become another source of division. Many blacks on Twitter began to see it as a belittling, self-serving failure to grasp the daily discriminations confronting blacks.
“I know it was well-intentioned,” said Jamilah Lemieux, a senior digital editor at Essence magazine, who launched a response hashtag, #AliveWhileBlack. “For white people to say, ‘Hey, these are all the things I’ve gotten away with’ — it starts feeling more hurtful than productive.”
As social flashpoints expand from the streets to online, #CrimingWhileWhite became the latest sign of how racial tensions can boil over in a digital age. The result was at turns organic, chaotic and raw — a flurry of expression that captured the best and worst of how Americans talk about race.
The tweets helped pull a whispered universe of racial privilege onto a national, share-able stage, and #CrimingWhileWhite became Twitter’s most shared topic in the United States and a trending topic across the world. But some questioned whether it had undermined its own message by pushing moments of privilege into performance art.
“It can be the start to something great if there are extensive conversations beyond the 140 characters, if there’s real action and work beyond just what we post on our Twitter or Facebook status updates,” said Stephany Rose, an assistant professor of women’s and ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. “It can be useful. But it just cannot remain as this performance … this distraction from what people of color need right now when it comes to justice in their community.”
At best, the tweets were untold and deeply personal, stemming from a broad section of Americans who might not otherwise take to the streets in protest.
Paired with #AliveWhileBlack, the vignettes provided a baffling look at racial inequality in the wakes of the deaths of unarmed blacks such as Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice.
“Acknowledging it first of all goes a real close way to understanding. That is tangible, that is progress,” said Christopher Parker, an associate professor of social justice and political science at the University of Washington.
But at worst, some said, the tweets amounted to a bragging board, another point of isolation over which blacks and whites stood irrevocably apart.
“It’s always this problem with the evolving nature of online media, the way social movements have used it, evolving their own form of protest,” said Cliff Lampe, an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan. “Raising awareness, does that do any good? Does that create any meaningful change?”
It would not be the first online social movement criticized as shallow “clicktivism,” with participants more concerned about affiliation with a popular cause than meaningful protest.
Jason Ross, the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” writer and a former “Daily Show” writer, launched the #CrimingWhileWhite on Wednesday, tweeting, “Busted 4 larceny at 11. At 17, cited for booze + caught w gun @ school. No one called me a thug. Can’t recommend being white highly enough.”
Ross said he sent the tweet from his personal account and was not acting as a “Tonight Show” representative.
Elon James White, a blogger, radio host and founder of “This Week in Blackness,” said the tweets showcased another America with which he could never play a part.
“It was a hard pill to swallow, reading those. You people were talking about drugs, causing accidents and getting off scot-free,” White said. “I’d be arrested just for thinking about it.”
White shared his own story of #AliveWhileBlack: Having forgot his wallet at work, he jumped a New York subway turnstile, only to find himself arrested, jailed overnight and interrogated over other crimes.
