No, White Gen Z, You Don’t Need Humour To Cope With Racism

This was originally posted on my old website on 28/06/2020

For many of us, 2020 is not the year we expected it to be, I, for one, came into this new decade (that apparently isn’t really the start of a new decade) hoping for a change not only in my own life but also the world around us. In my own context, the UK had once again voted in an austerity supporting party, and things were starting to look even grimmer for minority groups within the country. What I didn’t know at the time of New Years 2020, was that the type of change I wanted was about to hit a lot of us like a dump truck.

I am, of course speaking of the collusion of a global pandemic, an international financial crisis, and the growing spotlight of antiblackness caused by the murders of innocent black people. And if I’m going, to be honest, it’s a lot to witness within the short span of six months. Going online every day to see some new humanitarian crisis being ignored or that once again, someone’s life has been cut short due to police brutality is hard to stomach. However, as much as it pains me to see uncensored human suffering online, I haven’t succumbed to the pressure of making a meme about it like many other Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok users (who are also mostly non-black) have.

And you may ask me, “Well, Haaniyah, why can’t people make jokes anymore? This is just you speaking over their freedom to cope with humour.”

This same argument was used at the start of the year during the heated tension between the USA and Iran, we saw quickly how social media filled up with joking posts about WW3 drafts, bombings, killing Iranian children and war crimes. The reasoning behind the why social media users did this was ‘coping’. That the experience of an unprecedented war was far too much for people to talk about seriously, so instead they NEED to make memes to feel better. And frankly, I want to call bullshit. I’m 21, and I’m part of the eldest section of Gen Z, I get coping with humour, I mean that was my entire personality as a teenager, but I used humour to deal with my own pain and trauma, not that of others. Because frankly, it wouldn’t have been people on the West affected by war, it would be citizens of Iran and neighbouring countries that have already dealt with their infrastructures being decimated by the war on terror.

And what it comes down to is this; who are you coping for and what are you coping with?

Because using experiences of war or the death of victims of police brutality is not your trauma to cope with, take, for example, Breonna Taylor, a then 26-year-old Louisville resident who was wrongfully murdered in her own home due to a no-knock search warrant. As of today, she died 107 days ago on March 13th, 2020, but her killers Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove still have not been placed under arrest.

There has been a longstanding issue within civil rights movements and the BLM movement itself in regards to speaking up about the murder of Black women. So when people online realised this (some for the first time), there was a clear plan to consistently remind us that justice had not been done for her. Remembrance for Breonna came not only in the form of tweets that directly asked us to contact Louisville officials to indict the police who murdered her, but it also came via an online celebration for her 27th birthday. However, this also snowballed into people making memes of her in a similar format;

You’re all fucking dickheads pic.twitter.com/gjUcVoxHPc

— timothée chalagec (@haaniyah_) June 13, 2020

These posts seem to follow similar patterns of inserting her name within commonly known meme’s, such as ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’. They bring users in by handing them a familiar joke format, but instead of the punchline being a joke about depression or self-depreciation, we instead see that it’s a call to justice for Breonna. And at the centre of these jokes, there is a semblance of goodwill, it is clear that these people are trying to bring about awareness; however, it is also incredibly inappropriate at the same time to forgo the gravity of her situation for a few RT’s. Like the aforementioned WW3 memes, it seems that movements such as BLM, ACAB, Defund The Police and so on have all landed in this awkward placement as joke fodder for privileged people.

Privilege is a concept I do not want to bring up, but still, it would be amiss to pretend this doesn’t relate to the conversation at hand. Because frankly, the need to make jokes about situations through ‘coping’ when you aren’t directly impacted by the said situation, points towards the idea that it makes you uncomfortable. That talking about race and racism is something you aren’t used to and so when for the first time ever you’re expected to take on this anti-racist stance you only can do it through a lens of humour. That isn’t the experience of Black people, we can’t just make memes about our right to live and go on about our days. Sure, some Black comedians have stand-up routines about racism, but that is because it is something they experience daily. They aren’t just making random jokes about something they’ve never personally gone through. We can’t merely tweet a Breonna meme and ignore the fact people are still being murdered, racism can’t be switched on and off like a faulty internet router.

I feel like when this gets posted, I will be called out for not understanding Gen Z, that I am simply unable to comprehend their ‘elite’ sense of humour and that I take things too seriously. I mean, look at how Jeff Kinney, the creator of Diary of A Wimpy Kid, was treated for disagreeing with the use of his character as a pro BLM symbol.

imagine trying to cancel the creator of whatever dumbass meme you’re trying to do because he’s stopping your bag because y’all can’t ever take shit seriously https://t.co/aphUNXzYVB

— ß (@holychrissy) June 28, 2020

So to be entirely fair I hit up the creators of ‘The Manny will not be Televised’ to get their take on things. Vista, one of the members of ‘The Manny’s” said that it was created in solidarity of things going on around them but didn’t anticipate how quickly it would spread.

“We didn’t expect it to catch on the way it did. But the people behind it are responsible enough to know it’s for the movement and not the movement itself, as first intended,” he says to me over IG DMS. The team seem to be more aligned with the political side of the protests going on right now and want to make sure that nothing is lost in translation, which happened when the message reached Jeff.

As Vista tells me, “We feel horrible that it reached him as a joke before we were able to navigate it to be a proactive symbol. The internet moved too fast for us to spread out the initial message behind it.” It seems that the team are trying to right the wrongs of how the movement changed into a joke, mainly through creating http://mannyflag.org/ and on this site, petitions, donation links and educational materials can be found for Gen Z.

I guess where I leave off this topic that will most definitely confuse a historian in 30 years is this; racism isn’t supposed to be a comfortable experience, it is hard, it is tough, and it is awkward. But the sooner we all get used to that, the easier it becomes to have these conversations without devaluing the causes we so clearly want to support.

For more information on how you can get involved; https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/.