In Memoriam: The Online Policing and Trivialization of Black Lives and Black Deaths

The internet has proven itself an invaluable resource in providing information about the Black Lives Matter movement in real time. As people around the world make a commitment to anti‐racism and equality, social media has become a tool for meaningful engagement with the issues and, for many, a platform on which to begin their journey of anti‐racism. However, there are notable inconsistencies between people's declared commitments to social justice on social media platforms and the content they share publicly. Following posts on Twitter and Instagram, I examine the moral policing which takes place in discussions about the Black Lives Matter movement. I argue that the typical forms of virtual policing operate through similar mechanisms of whiteness that are present in respectability politics, in which only those lives deemed worthy and “good” are valued. These conditions allow for room to debate on whether an individual victim of police brutality ultimately deserved to die or not, instead of meaningfully engaging with the systems that enabled a victim's death. The conditionality of death paired with misogynoir—an intersection of racism and sexism that the BLM movement explicitly tries to disavow—has set the stage for the trivializing of Breonna Taylor's passing: some turn her untimely demise into the punch line of a joke while others comment on it in a purely performative type of activism for the sake of their social media aesthetics. I argue that these individuals' ease in piggybacking off of this movement for their own personal gain should be held up to critical scrutiny so that we can progress towards a community that benefits from meaningful solidarity and not empty performativity.