Are You Tired of the Social Justice Outrage Machine?

By R.L. Stephens / orchestratedpulse.com
Jan 23, 2014
1
Are You Tired of the Social Justice Outrage Machine?

I’m exhausted. I can’t keep up with the latest social justice outrage.

In any given week, the internet will be in an uproar over the latest sensational headline. Ani DiFranco’s racism. Beyonce’s feminism. Duck Dynasty’s bigotry. It doesn’t stop.

We condemn or defend the person, and in about a week we move to the next controversy. Justine Sacco who?

Media outlets have got this viral internet craze thing down to a science, literally. It’s not really about creating quality content; the internet game is all about getting as many readers to view and share the story as possible.

In this context of shareability and hair-trigger publishing, outrage is one of the most reliable ways to draw attention to a story. In social justice circles, like many other places on the web, the outrage machine often operates at a fever pitch.

In a way, it makes sense that a lot of our political energy is wrapped up in these outbursts of outrage. Mainstream culture is very powerful, and how your identity/ideology is represented within it can have a tremendous impact on your political success.

Though cultural representation certainly matters, I can’t escape the feeling that we’re simply posturing, moving from outrage to outrage without ever building any committed practices to intervene and dismantle the systems that we claim to oppose. Outrage within social justice circles grabs attention, but is outrage enough?

Is The Outrage Machine Working?

I first began to question the social justice outrage machine during the Rick Ross fiasco in spring 2012. Rick Ross’ lyrics were certainly evangelizing for rape culture, and it was more than right to oppose his efforts.

Yet, the majority of the outrage essentially asked Reebok to discipline Rick Ross over rape culture, with almost no one noticing that rape culture is something that Reebok itself also perpetuates.  Reebok uses sweatshop labor. Sweatshop labor is disproportionately made up of young women (and girls) who are often beaten and sexually assaulted on the job. Here is a video of women in Thailand standing up against Reebok’s exploitation:

By firing Rick Ross, Reebok got to appease 1st world activists while continuing to abuse 3rd world women. They came out as the “good guy”, a real PR coup. Something is deeply wrong with this picture, and I don’t think it’s just a failure of “intersectionality”. Oh well, within a week, we had already moved to the “accidental racist” controversy.

More recently, we have the Ani DiFranco drama. Yes, public outrage shut down her ridiculous retreat at a slave plantation. Yet Nottoway Plantation remains open, emerging from the PR wreckage largely unscathed. The plantation was even able to continue portraying itself as a benign educational site, despite the fact that it’s nothing more than a racist shrine to the “good old days”. For Nottoway Plantation, a successfully managed scandal is just free publicity.

I don’t want people to stop talking about these issues, they are important. However, are these discussions providing us with real analysis of oppression, or is it just shallow posturing? I’m not entirely sure.

Reacting Without A Purpose?

Outrage isn’t bad. Outrage is a weapon. When I went to Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, I was plenty outraged. For years, social justice organizers mobilized our outrage and channeled it into political movements. Yet, it seems that many social justice circles have traded mass movements for massive traffic.

Media outlets are manipulating our good intentions in order to boost their web traffic, and the aimless outrage has many social justice circles spinning their wheels and going nowhere. We can’t build transformative change that way.

Cultural critiques are important (I enjoy them), and I support people standing against injustice wherever they find it. However, a knee-jerk reaction is not the same as a thoughtful criticism, and outrage without understanding is futile. Don’t forget, “there are levels to this shit“.

I want to find ways to accurately describe and dismantle oppression, and that doesn’t happen if we’re constantly reacting to shenanigans. In my opinion, we’re looking for politics in the wrong places.


R.L. Stephens II - I'm a graduate of Carleton College, almost finished with law school, and a soon-to-be teacher. I like talking about race, culture, and radicalism.

Trending Videos
CIA Stories: The Jakarta Method (2023)
68 min - Abby Martin speaks with journalist Vincent Bevins about the hidden CIA mass murder in Indonesia, which created the model for US extermination campaigns against socialists and accused leftists in...
Remembering That Life Is Good
14 min - As humans, we are always trying to control everything. We think we have the ability to change anything that crosses our path and believe we have the capability to handle it to our perfect...
Unknown Influence | Social Media, Democracy and Transparency
13 min - Is Instagram fueling eating disorders in teenagers? Does TikTok harm your mental health? Are Facebook groups encouraging people to take part in offline violence? The answer is… we don’t know for...
Schooling the World (2010)
66 min - If you wanted to change an ancient culture in a generation, how would you do it? You would change the way it educates its children. The U.S. Government knew this in the 19th century when it...
The Limits of Ally-ship
The History Our Culture Doesn't Teach
Long Videos for Listening to While You Do the Dishes
Recommended

Films For Action hosts a subscription service that currently offers 55 highly-curated, solutions-oriented films to Patron subscribers donating $5 per month. 

Subscribe here. Your support helps grow our 5000+ video library, which is 99% free and contains no ads thanks to our patrons.

Cancel any time via your settings page.

 

How to Use and Contribute to this Library

  • Use the Explore menu to filter content by type and topic. Selections stack, so you can view Film Types about Specific Topics.

  • Submit videos directly to our library! Just sign up and click +Add Video at the top of the site and paste the video URL to get started. 

  • Create an account to save videos and articles for later and rate content for others

  • Filmmakers: Interested in our TVOD or SVOD services? Films For Action is one of the best homes for paradigm-shifting documentaries.

  • Contact us if you have a site or film suggestion, question, want to volunteer, or you're a filmmaker looking to collaborate. 

    Let's be the media!