Outraged: Why Everyone is Shouting and No One is Talking

ASHLEY ‘DOTTY’ CHARLES is a broadcaster and writer from south London. After joining the BBC in 2014 she became the first solo female to host the BBC Radio 1Xtra Breakfast Show in 2016, where she interviewed everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Will Smith. She has presented TV programmes including BBC One’s ‘Sounds Like Friday Night’ and BBC Three’s ‘Story of Grime’ documentary series. In 2020 Dotty was appointed to the role of Lead Cultural Curator at Apple and was named Commissioning Editor at Grazia. She lives with her wife and two sons in London.

CONTENTS

Prologue

1. The Problem With Rachel Dolezal

2. Making a Mob

3. Outrage-mongers

4. Shitstorms and Snowflakes

5. The Wrath of the Retweet

6. Rage Against the Machine

7. Outrage Fatigue

8. Make Outrage Great Again

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

I never should have checked my phone on holiday. But there I was, in sun-drenched Thailand, scrolling through Twitter, incapable of detaching myself from the Internet. As a radio presenter and therefore an egomaniac by default, the thought of disconnecting from my ‘platforms’ was an unspeakable horror that I could only endure for so long, so I settled in like the social media crackhead I am, ready to get my fix.

We were ten days into our two-week trip; we being my assorted biscuit tin of a family: me, my fiancée Lina and our six-month-old son Camden, who had impressively made it through his first long-haul flight with minimal screaming and therefore only marginal embarrassment to his mums. We were the picture of gaycation bliss.

The fun tourist leg of our trip had started in Phuket and we were now at the business end of our stay – an obligatory pit stop at Lina’s family home in Nong Khai. She’d warned me that her army of aunts would assemble the moment we arrived, expecting us (I assumed) to present our baby to the congregation Lion King style. And, right on cue, what I can only guess was the entire population of the village appeared in her mother’s driveway, eager for a first glimpse at our sperm-donor baby.

‘You guys said he would be black,’ said a disappointed family member, who hadn’t quite got to grips with biracial genetics, presuming perhaps that ‘black’ only comes in one shade.

Overwhelmed and already out of words (my grasp of the Thai language starts and ends with ‘sawadee ka’), I made my excuses and escaped inside, leaving Lina to answer the intrusive questions without me, and our infant son to fend for himself under a swarm of cheek-pinchers and well-wishers.

I closed the bedroom door, which only slightly muffled the commotion outside and, basking in the air con, wondered how I could kill an hour while a never-ending conveyor belt of aunties played pass the parcel with my firstborn. There was no harm in checking how my social media stats were doing, I thought, surely my tree-house view from Kamala Beach had notched up a few hundred likes on Instagram by now. You see, when it comes to social networking I’m a lurker more than a poster. My snoop-to-share ratio is weighted so heavily on the former you could actually be fooled into thinking I have better things to do than refresh my feed every thirty minutes. I absolutely don’t. So on those sporadic occasions when I actually post something I obsess over its performance, neurotically overthinking how well it will be received and intermittently monitoring its feedback. Because in a world where adulation is king, GOD FORBID I ever end up sharing a picture that gets less than 500 likes.

But I never should have checked my phone on holiday.

H&M is CANCELLED!

H&M have you lost your damned minds?!?!?!

Please retweet to spread the word on this racist company #BoycottHandM #HandMisRacist

I’d walked into the middle of an online feeding frenzy, one of those occasional social media moments where everyone is shouting about the same thing. But this wasn’t political commentary or Game of Thrones spoilers, it was an uprising of some sort. And by the looks of things, the wall-to-wall fury was of the high-street clothes store variety. A niche subgenre of outrage if ever I’d seen one. I swiped curiously through my Twitter feed, eager to catch up with the conversation that everyone seemed to be having. This must be bad, I salivated, so desensitised to communal outrage that it now contributed to my daily intake of online entertainment.

I scrolled past dozens of angry tweets and finally landed on the one that seemed to have started it all. The original post by @nerdabouttown included a picture pulled from the H&M website. ‘coolest monkey in the jungle’ read the iron-on text printed on the rather cheap-looking H&M hoody. It was modelled by a handsome young black boy who looked no more than six years old.

‘I’m fucking disgusted. Like… what was the thought process behind this [H&M]???’ read one of @nerdabouttown’s follow-up tweets.

And she wasn’t the only one up in arms.

‘Woke up this morning shocked and embarrassed by this photo. I’m deeply offended and will not be working with H&M any more,’ posted musician and H&M brand partner The Weeknd in a searing tweet that was also doing the rounds.

‘Wait, is that it?’ I asked myself out loud. This is the H&M hoody that everyone’s furious about? This is the ‘deeply offensive’ picture that prompted The Weeknd to cancel his brand endorsement? THIS?!! This £7.99 piece of fabric that probably won’t have any words on it at all after two cycles in the washing machine? There’s got to be more to it, I thought as I continued to trawl through tweets.

There wasn’t.

I paused for thought. Maybe I was being too casual about the whole thing. Ten days in a tropical climate will work wonders for your patience, so maybe the Singha beers and water sports had just heightened my outrage threshold. I probably wasn’t looking at the hoody properly. So I zoomed in on it. I zoomed back out. I looked at it full-screen. I looked at it sideways.

It is kinda offensive, I guess. Why has the black kid gotta be the monkey? I thought, forcing my tribalism to kick in. That social instinct that urges you to speak up for your own in times of moral unrest. An unspoken allegiance between skinfolk that has, for generations, been a means of survival. The sort of blind loyalty that has had me defending Tyler Perry’s dog-shit movies for years simply because he’s one of us.

I felt like I was supposed to be angry too. But maybe the black kid is wearing the monkey hoody because nobody at H&M associated it with race, said an uninvited voice in my head. Maybe it says more about our expectations of racism than it does about any actual intentions of racism, the voice continued, contradicting everything I thought I was meant to be feeling.

‘Have you seen this H&M hoody?’ I texted my mum, completely forgetting that I was supposed to be on holiday at this point.

‘Yes awful isn’t it,’ she typed at typical mum-pace, replying in the time it would have taken me to compose seven emails and a sonnet.

‘Oh dear, they’ve got to her too,’ I sighed.

When the online mob (and my mum) saw a black boy in a monkey hoody, they saw an offensive image. And I can understand why. Black people have a very uncomfortable relationship with the word ‘monkey’ – it’s a loaded word that has been hurled around football stands and spat viciously across train carriages. When coming from ill-intentioned mouths, the word ‘monkey’ is hate speech. It carries with it a history of abuse – the type of abuse that no longer needs to be shouted across the street but can instead be woven tauntingly into the fabric of modern-day life.

Because of this, a significant number of people believed that the placement of a monkey hoody on a black child was H&M’s way of quietly expressing their deep-seated racism. It didn’t matter that the brand had proudly partnered with Beyoncé in 2013, or that the Sudanese supermodel Alek Wek had been an ambassador for the H&M Foundation for almost four years. The fact that they had recently featured Nicki Minaj, Kevin Hart and Naomi Campbell in their ad campaigns was irrelevant. After all, sharing in the influence of notable black faces doesn’t grant you a get-out-of-bigotry-free card. So no, none of that came into it. Because H&M were racist. Apparently.

Wading through the posts it became clear to me that several people thought that H&M were provoking the black community for the purposes of publicity. As if one of the world’s leading high-street juggernauts, with annual profits of more than $1 billion, suddenly had the urge to risk it all for a bit of notoriety.

But these weren’t the only theories being punted by the self-appointed keyboard correspondents of Twitter and Facebook; many felt that the race issue at play was more about representation in the workplace. After all, if H&M had some black decision makers in their ranks somebody in the meeting room probably would have spoken up and said, ‘Hey colonisers, how about we don’t call the black boy a cool monkey?’

To be fair, all of these perspectives were plausible. And their respective spokespeople were being particularly persuasive from their Twitter accounts. So I continued to thumb my way through the receipt-roll of outraged posts, impressed by my generation’s ability to intellectualise a pullover.

Because truth be told, all I saw was a cute kid in a hoody. An unremarkable and inoffensive hoody. A hoody that likened playful children to cheeky monkeys; a motif that I’d seen on kids’ clothes a thousand times before. In my eyes, the boy modelling it just happened to be black.

Suddenly it bothered me that in a world where racism was already jumping off the page, we were going in search of it by reading between the lines. That we were being outraged by the faint whiffs of racism next door rather than attending to the almighty stench of it on our own welcome mat.

I was disappointed that this is where our outrage had ended up. On the stockroom floor of sodding H&M. Our powerful self-expression was being used to get an £8 hoody pulled from shelves.

‘Are you just going to sit in here on your phone?’ interrupted my fiancée, sticking her head around the door and redirecting my attention to the imminent outrage looming right in front of me. I looked up from the screen, remembering that I was 5,000 miles from home and suddenly realising that the sun had gone down.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m gonna write an article about outrage.’

‘The Currency of Outrage’*

Published in the Guardian, 25 January 2018

Everyone is offended by everything. It’s exhausting. Keeping up with all the non-inclusive, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, ageist, cultural appropriating, body-shaming propaganda that seems to litter the social media age. Apparently in 2018, almost anything is subject to the scrutiny of one marginalised eye or another. Being outraged allows you to take the moral high ground. It reaffirms your righteousness. It lets you say: ‘I am offended and therefore I am principled.’ It lets you jump on the bandwagon and pledge allegiance to the latest campaign on your timeline. It gives you a vehicle to add your name to the narrative. It proves that you are following current affairs, albeit from the comfortable vantage point of your Instagram feed. It allows you to place yourself on the virtuous side of the conversation. It says: ‘I am woke.’

And for that reason, outrage has become currency.

Outrage was once reserved for the truly unjust. It was for civil rights activists and suffragettes. It has fought against police brutality, institutional racism, unequal pay, segregation and voting rights. Outrage gave a voice to the voiceless and forced society to take a long hard look in the mirror. It has challenged the status quo, prompted legislative