tl;dr: I agree with Imani Gandy and accalmie. Also, Twitter is the NFL, Chuck C. Johnson’s punishment isn’t an overreaction.
Over the course of the week, twitter banned Chuck C. Johnson. Some call him a troll, I would even go so far as calling him a hate monger. The instance that cost him his social media presence was a tweet he sent out in which he asked for money so he could “take out” civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson (@deray on twitter.) McKesson understood the tweet as a threat on his life, which is certainly a valid interpretation of the tweet, especially considering the atmosphere of violence against Black men in which McKesson lives and works. When a right-winger with some influence who’s known for doxxing rape victims and other despicable things uses language like that, you can see that as a direct threat. At first glance, I personally thought Johnson wanted money so he could sabotage McKesson’s work and destroy his reputation and ability to work – which I thought was already bad enough.
Today, people in my twitter timeline are criticizing a think piece Amanda Hess wrote for Slate about McKesson and Johnson in which she interviews Johnson and friends and calls the banishment of Johnson an “overreaction” and “silencing.” It’s a peculiar text from Hess, as it doesn’t even make sense considering her own writing history. Early 2014, Hess wrote a great piece for the Pacific Standard called “Why Women Aren’t Welcome On the Internet” in which she talks about the harassment women receive on the Internet, including harassment through twitter by people who are called “trolls” but who are much worse, calls online harassment “the next civil rights issue” and discusses the few methods there are to deal with online harassers. In other words, she wrote about how people like Chuck C. Johnson are a massive problem.
Hess strikes a different chord in the Slate piece: Johnson is bad, yes, but you gotta hear both sides, and what about free speech, and Twitter just gave in to the loudest complaints (McKesson actually got to go on CNN to talk about the threats.) Great Black women in my timeline, including Imani Gandy and accalmie, point out that it is unlikely that Amanda Hess had written the same piece if a white woman had been the last victim of Johnson instead of a Black man. I agree with them, and am honestly still a bit baffled.
I usually appreciate Amanda Hess’ writing, but here she’s lacking.She takes harassers either serious or just shrugs them off as troll. And her analysis is lacking intersectionality. Because that’s the thing – DeRay McKesson is a man (and has 5x the followers of Hess,) but he’s also a Black man working for social justice, so most of the structural things Hess herself lamented about apply in this case, too. I’m also baffled because so many prior victims of Johnson are women. I think her piece is a flawed judgement of the McKesson-Johnson situation (at best.) That she is this lacking when it comes to an intersectional perspective calls into question her decision to call online harassment the “next civil rights issue.” I think you can call online harassment and its effect on online civil spaces that, but only of you include harassment happening to more than one group discriminated against. (That she quoted an apparent white nationalist as just another twitter troll might just be ignorance, but it’s also not great.)
At the same time, she does have a point: The way Twitter handled the suspension of Johnson is too intransparent, and Twitter does not react enough to many instances of harassment. In some aspects, it’s like the NFL’s punishment of Ray Rice, after the Baltimore Raven running back hit his wife last year: The way Twitter (the NFL) handled the case was intransparent and inconsistent. Moving forward the rules of conduct and punishment need to be defined more clearly. Inconsistency and intransparency in judgement and punishment are big problems for all our communities. That doesn’t necessarily mean Chuck Johnson’s or Ray Rice’s punishment was an overreaction or that they should be let off the hook.
Thoughts?