6 The Utility of Digital Allyship: #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite

Features such as hashtags and retweeting offer Twitter users ways to signal support for any issue with a few keystrokes. The research on online racial and gender justice activism presented in this book brings to the center the voices of people of color and women, especially by unpacking the technical and discursive processes that have facilitated marginalized citizens’ influence on mainstream discussions of racism and sexism in the United States. We have explained throughout why it is important to making visible the digital labor of these often ignored groups. Yet the question of how members of dominant groups do (or do not) show up to support this labor is ever present. How do white allies to racial justice struggles and male allies to feminist projects engage digitally? Focusing only on people of color when one is considering solutions to racial inequality or only on women when considering gender oppression risks perpetuating the myth that the struggle for justice is a minority struggle alone, that majority white and male citizens bear no responsibility for grappling with and dismantling the systems of white male supremacy. In this chapter, we ask what allies do to support social justice causes on Twitter. Naturally, allies play integral roles in broadcasting the hashtags and networks created by marginalized groups, as we have seen in cases like that of #TheEmptyChair, discussed in chapter 2. However, allies can also (theoretically) advance causes through their own supportive organizing. Here we consider the effectiveness of two visible hashtags that laid claim to allyship—#AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.

Allyship refers to the practice of individuals with some form or forms of social privilege uniting politically and publicly with marginalized groups to forward liberatory projects. Allies leverage their privilege to bring attention and resources to issues that do not directly affect them, with the understanding that this practice is useful not only in uplifting more vulnerable groups but also to creating a more just society on the whole. Examples of individual acts of allyship are diverse, from straight and cisgender people marching and lobbying for LGBTQ rights to male doctors performing abortions in locations where women’s reproductive rights are stigmatized or outlawed. These individual acts, in the context of social movements, are built on organized practices of solidarity. For example, during a 1977 action in which people with disabilities blockaded San Francisco lawmakers in their offices for refusing to enforce the precursor to the Americans with Disabilities Act, able-bodied members of the Black Panther Party delivered food to the blockaders and published articles in solidarity in the party paper.1 This act of solidarity was predicated on the understanding that, while the primary issues of the two groups appeared to differ, the impact of oppression on both created a sense of shared experience. In its most useful and radical form, allyship then draws from the idea that no one can be truly free unless everyone is free.2

In social justice and activist spaces online, allyship has been hotly debated. Performative allyship, the practice of announcing or demonstrating allyship for an audience, is highly contested. In a 2015 blog post on the now archived blog Black Girl Dangerous, founder Mia McKenzie described digital “ally theater.” She wrote, “A LOT of people perform ‘allyship’ in ways that are actually really harmful. This, folks, is ally theater. And there is a big difference between it and real solidarity.” She continued, “Real solidarity doesn’t require an audience to witness what a good ‘ally’ you are.”3 As McKenzie’s post reflects, self-proclaimed ally status, or performing allyship in online, low-risk contexts, does not amount to concrete actions of political solidarity or confirmation from the group with which one claims to be forming an alliance. As a result, some activists prefer the term accomplice to ally because it signals that some social risk is to be taken by those with privilege.

Allyship can also become a coveted identity, whereby being recognized as an ally becomes paramount to acts of solidarity. Here we recall the sudden popularity of safety pins in the United States in 2016. An American living in Britain and tweeting as @cheeahs suggested that people wear safety pins to show solidarity with those being harassed as a result of the heightened xenophobia following the Brexit referendum. Her suggestion was taken up by British celebrities, including Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart, who posted a picture on Twitter of himself donning a safety pin.4 While some have suggested that the safety pin is indeed an antifascist symbol in the British context—tracing it as a method to signal subversion of Nazism in World War II and to the accessories of antiracist punk rockers in the 1970s—it has never carried this meaning in the U.S. context.5 Despite this, the idea crossed the Atlantic, and many progressive-minded white Americans embraced the safety pin as a symbolic form of disagreement with the anti-immigrant and Islamophobic discourse of the 2016 presidential election. Wearing a safety pin was supposed to mark the wearer as an ally, someone safe whom members of marginalized, under-threat groups could trust.6 Safety pins were quickly commodified and marketed—on sites ranging from Etsy to Amazon—as an allyship accessory, with companies selling diamond-encrusted and gold-plated safety pins for over a thousand dollars.7 The neoliberal impulse to monetize allyship perfectly illustrates the emptiness of a solidarity strategy based on the sartorial choices of the so-called ally.8 The fact that passively wearing a pin did not embody the sometimes risky or uncomfortable actions of solidarity that should accompany allyship became fodder for many think pieces in the days that followed.9 Thus hashtags that claim to move privileged members of society toward solidarity with those less so are often regarded with skepticism as a kind of faux allyship that recenters privileged groups.

Yet evidence has long pointed to the need for white people—specifically, Americans of European descent who have benefited from systems of white supremacy—to actively reject racist ideologies and structures in order to eliminate them.10 There is no reason to believe that the contemporary online struggle for racial justice is any different. Indeed, in light of the tendency toward demographic clustering online and algorithmic filtering online, and the finding that online activism works best when a committed core of activists and a large periphery of supporters work together, supportive white allies that help advance messages of racial justice across demographic and ideological groups may be more important than ever.11

The same can be said for the usefulness of male allies in feminist causes on- and offline, yet in recent years, hashtags that evolved to encourage men to acknowledge their role in gendered systems of oppression have floundered. As we discussed in chapter 1, #MeToo, a hashtag that had a resurgence of popularity in October 2017, was used to signal solidarity among survivors of sexual harassment, assault, and rape, as in “it happened to me too.” In the wake of #MeToo, hashtags like #IWill were spurred by women hoping to inspire men to become allies in efforts to stop violence against women. Two lesser-known hashtags that grew out of the #MeToo movement, #IWillChange and #IveDoneThat, were started by men to prompt other men to acknowledge their sexist behavior and hopefully foster an impetus for change. However, these hashtags failed to garner widespread use, and many women found them disingenuous and ultimately unhelpful. Journalist Taylor Lorenz tweeted, “Kind of can’t deal with all the men sharing heartfelt admissions of how awful they were to women via #IveDoneThat et al.”12

#IveDoneThat tweets included far more performative allyship than solidarity. Men were able to admit to the world what violence they had done to women, releasing their feelings of guilt or seeking solace in knowing they were not alone in their problematic behavior. These tweets may have served as a form of catharsis for the men using the hashtags, but women did not benefit directly from witnessing this perverse navel-gazing and accounting of men at their worst. Thus questions of audience and demand become important factors when one considers the efficacy of digital allyship: whom are allyship hashtags for, and what political change, if any, do they forward? Certainly, allyship hashtags that seek to educate members of privileged groups about methods for creating change or about the experiences of those with less privilege are useful to larger projects of political consciousness raising, as are those making demands of particular individuals or systems with power, but if the primary purpose of online allyship is for the privileged group to achieve catharsis, it is not solidarity.

These considerations are among those taken up in this chapter as we analyze the hashtags #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.13

#AllMenCan, But Will They?

Elliot Rodger’s deadly, misogyny-fueled violence of the Isla Vista shootings was described in detail in chapter 1. His rampage sparked a national debate about men’s violent behavior toward women and spawned the hashtags #NotAllMen and subsequently #YesAllWomen. Spurred by the success of #YesAllWomen, and hoping to push back against the derailing narratives of #NotAllMen, Elizabeth Plank, a journalist at PolicyMic (now Mic.com), was the first to report on the #AllMenCan hashtag, along with the photos and words of thirty-plus men. By embracing the idea that all men can enact strategies that undermine misogyny and gendered violence, these men positioned themselves as allies to feminism and sought to counteract the harm and defensiveness they saw being done by others who jumped quickly to narratives of male persecution in the face of critique. After the release of these photos, which were of a diverse group of men, mostly affiliated with new media organizations and progressive causes, the hashtag was adopted by others.

The #AllMenCan Network

We collected tweets containing the #AllMenCan hashtag beginning on May 23, 2014, the day of the Isla Vista shootings. Tweets containing the hashtag began appearing rapidly in the overnight hours of May 28 through the morning of May 29, 2014, the day that Liz Plank’s article popularizing the hashtag appeared on the online news site PolicyMic.14 In the days that followed, #AllMenCan was tweeted over 25,000 times by more than 10,000 unique Twitter users. Our data include a sample of 1,047 of these users connected by 1,292 retweet and mention links. The network takes a form similar to those discussed elsewhere in this book, being centered on several key users who were retweeted hundreds or thousands of times.

A closer investigation of the timing of the tweets reveals three distinct periods during which the hashtag spread. The first aligns with the release of Liz Plank’s #AllMenCan article and is pictured in the center of the graph. This portion of the network consists primarily of the users who tweeted about the original article, including Liz Plank herself (@feministabulous), PolicyMic (@PolicyMic), and Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik), a notable media personality who appeared in Plank’s article holding a sign reading “Female students are twice as likely to be victims of school shootings than male students. Let’s stop the violence.” Skolnik’s centrality in this portion of the network is driven in roughly equal measure by his own participation in the conversation (he authored a highly retweeted tweet containing the hashtag on May 30) and because Plank tagged him in a popular tweet about her article. During this same period, the article and its themes were picked up by other Twitter users, including @cmclymer who authored ten #AllMenCan tweets on May 29, 2014, on a variety of feminist topics such as street harassment, consent, and women’s leadership, and Planned Parenthood (@PPact), which issued a tweet praising the hashtag and its value for subverting misogyny.

Following the set of tweets surrounding Plank’s article, the hashtag continued to spread for a week as digital media outlets, such as the Huffington Post, E! News Online, and BuzzFeed, picked up the trending topic and reproduced some of the most popular #AllMenCan tweets in articles and listicles. Nearly two months later, on September 1, 2014, the hashtag trended a second time when it was attached to several tweets speaking out against the unauthorized release of nude celebrity photos on August 31, 2014. Matthew Dominguez (@Matt_Dominguez), an animal-rights activist and women’s and LGBTQ rights supporter, authored a tweet critiquing men’s response to a nude photo of actress Jennifer Lawrence, saying, “I’m disgusted by all the guys tweeting about Jennifer Lawrence’s private life! What if it was your sister? #AllMenCan.” Following considerable pushback in the comments on that tweet, including men suggesting that Lawrence herself was responsible for enabling the hackers who stole her photo, Dominguez paraphrased Sir Patrick Stewart, tweeting, “Dear Men of this World, ‘it’s in our hands to stop violence towards women,’” and tagging Stewart in the post (@SirPatStew). This tweet was retweeted over a thousand times, resulting in the somewhat unusual connected cluster of Dominguez and Stewart that appears on the left side of the graph. Although Stewart himself never engaged with the hashtag, Dominguez’s popular tweet that tagged Stewart linked the two together and elevated their dual prominence in the network overall.

The final set of central nodes in the network, @WeNeedFeminlsm and @feministculture were not active in the network until nearly a year after Plank’s original tweets. Both accounts, which aggregate and retweet feminist content, tweeted out composite images containing several original #AllMenCan photos between March and May of 2015. Although these tweets did not appear at the time of particular events or in circumstances that might otherwise have caused the hashtag to trend, they created temporary surges in activity around the hashtag as thousands of feminist followers retweeted the accounts’ content.

Two types of discourse emerged from the tweets in the #AllMenCan network: directive and instructive. Directive tweets drew users’ attention to #AllMenCan by connecting it to the #YesAllWomen network or by calling on particular user accounts to pay attention to the work the hashtag was doing. These tweets were popular in the network as a direct attempt to shift conversations about men’s defensive responses to #YesAllWomen (#NotAllMen) to those that were proactively engaged in allyship (#AllMenCan). These tweets overwhelmingly shared Plank’s PolicyMic article on the hashtag or shared screenshots of the images of men featured in the article holding signs with various #AllMenCan sentiments.

It is clear that the directive tweets were a response to the defensiveness and toxic rhetoric of so-called men’s rights activists and others who worked to silence women in the aftermath of the Isla Vista shootings because they engaged in a counterappropriation of MRA language. In particular, tweets employing the phrase “real men,” to suggest that “real men” are allies to feminism and “real male activists” advocate for gender equality rather than toxic masculinity, were popular in these directive tweets. This attempt at subversion is not unproblematic as it freezes manhood and masculinity in ways that are still exclusive. While certainly an attempt to appropriate and redefine a largely toxic concept, such tweets continue to suggest that manhood can be successfully attained in relation to performative “nice guy” acts toward women.

More usefully, instructive tweets in the network expanded the work of directive tweets (which mostly drew attention to the hashtag and those participating in it) by proposing concrete forms of allyship men can engage in to dismantle ideologies and behaviors that further violence against women. Rather than informationally sharing the Plank article or images, the text of these tweets made concrete suggestions for how men can proactively support each other and women. These tweets included suggested methods for bystander interventions, language for having conversations about sexual assault among men, and how to critique toxic behaviors. For example, user @AutistLiam wrote, “#AllMenCan Refuse to accept ‘boys will be boys’ as an excuse for sexist or violent behavior from themselves or others.” These instructive tweets drew clearly from knowledge and rhetoric developed and popularized by feminist activists around rape culture and toxic masculinity and asked men to take responsibility for incorporating these ideas into their daily interactions. They offered concrete examples of what allyship can look like in action, including the social risk of calling out other men.

Unfortunately, some #AllMenCan tweets, particularly those written by members outside the original PolicyMic-connected network or feminist accounts, reproduced problematic ideologies of chivalry in the name of allyship. Such tweets missed opportunities to dismantle and deconstruct the systemic reasons for women’s vulnerability, falling back on paternalistic ideologies about women’s fragility. Tweets calling on men to “shelter and protect women!” reflect less familiarity among members of the network with feminist frameworks and the growing pains of an allyship that lacks full political analysis.

Together, directive and instructive tweets indicate a proactive attempt at allyship, yet the limited number of men who spontaneously created tweets in the network, rather than sharing the original images or retweeting only a few users who depended on memes or quotes, indicate a lack of widespread engagement with the hashtag. Thus the possibilities for complex conversations about how men can enact liberatory gender politics, and the necessary struggle in these conversations, is limited in the network. We also note that the most active men creating original discourse in the #AllMenCan network were self-identified members of the LGBTQ community who, by cisheterosexist definitions, are generally excluded from the very definitions of “real” manhood that the original campaign sought to appropriate. Thus the network struggled to attract original content, multidimensional discourse, and active users—characteristics that made it far different from the hashtags created by the counterpublics we discussed earlier in this book.

#CrimingWhileWhite

As we detailed in chapter 5, on July 17, 2014, NYPD officers approached Eric Garner and accused him of selling loosies, or single cigarettes. Officers escalated the situation by putting Garner into a deadly chokehold, which elicited his last words, immortalized in the hashtag #ICantBreathe. The hashtag #DyingWhileBlack was also used to illustrate the many minor infractions for which Black Americans face extrajudicial death sentences at the hands of police. It was against this backdrop that Jason Ross, an Emmy Award–winning television writer working at the time on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, started the hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite to call attention to the privilege white people have to engage in illegal activities without losing their lives or freedom. We have included Ross’s own account of the significance of this hashtag below.

#CrimingWhileWhite represents an attempt to use digital media to acknowledge white privilege in a response to a social moment in which race and privilege are being openly debated in the public sphere in new ways. As Ross suggests, and as we discuss in more detail below, the jury is still out on the utility of this particular strategy—in no small part because so many white Americans continue to resist the idea of privilege, or even believe that there is bias in basic systems like policing, and because those who are not resistant have been offered so few models of white allyship in American education, popular culture, or politics.15

It is important to note that online white allies appear in, and as a part of, the counterpublic discourses we have examined: white users played a role in the proliferation of hashtags about Philando Castile and other #BlackLivesMatter hashtags that evolved in recent years, for example. In such cases they have been drawn into the counterpublic through the circulation of discourses and dissent arising from African American users. In the case of hashtags created by and for allies in this chapter, we see something different—an attempt by those with social power to not only talk about and share their concerns regarding race and gender inequality but to recognize their own individual positionality and ability to dismantle these phenomena through counternarratives that challenge dominant discourses that normalize their privilege and power.

#CrimingWhileWhite Network Characteristics:

The #CrimingWhileWhite hashtag was tweeted almost 400,000 times by 300,000 unique users. Of these, our sample included 37,0880 tweets sent by more than 30,000 unique users connected by almost 35,000 retweet and mention links. Sixty percent of these tweets were sent in a single day, December 4, 2014, the day after Pantaleo’s nonindictment for the killing of Eric Garner and the related protests. Constrained in duration to little more than a week in total, the network is more diffuse than others studied in this chapter or elsewhere in this book. The network has nearly ten times the number of discrete components, or sets of users not in conversation with others, as the #AllMenCan network described in the previous section. Further, rather than being focused on a small number of highly retweeted users, the #CrimingWhileWhite conversation (to the extent that it can be characterized as a conversation at all) resulted from many discrete users making use of the hashtag to share stories, none of which were retweeted disproportionately more often than others in the network.

This combination of features creates a somewhat novel network relative to others discussed in this book. Rather than the broadcast structure observed elsewhere, this network is more similar to what Smith and colleagues would characterize as brand clusters.16 Typically observed in discussions of celebrities or popular products, brand clusters emerge when exogenous events (such as the release of a new model of iPhone) cause many people to independently tweet about the same topic at the same time, but not in conversation with one another. Although it is uncommon to find such a structure in a hashtag activism network, a cursory analysis of the top ten most retweeted messages (which are not disproportionately more popular than the next hundred or so) suggests an explanation for the pattern in this case. Popular users in this network are almost all white people tweeting stories of their own unpunished criminal behavior. For example, @Cecilyk, a white woman, tweeted about getting away with stealing a car, and @Joe_Schmucc, a white man, tweeted about several incidents involving guns and drugs for which he was arrested but released without being charged. To the extent that retweeting implies an endorsement, it is not clear what retweeting these messages might mean. That users endorse the criminal behavior? That they find the tweets valuable examples of white privilege? That they are surprised? Disgusted? Annoyed? Confusion over how to respond to these messages and their subtext may have limited retweeting activity, particularly as members of racialized counterpublics likely watched with skepticism as the hashtag evolved.

For a small number of messages, we see another unusual pattern in the #CrimingWhileWhite network structure. Rather than multiple retweets of a single message, we see some long cascades, or retweet chains, in which one user retweets a message, which is then retweeted by another user not connected to the first, then another, and so on. These sorts of chains are exceedingly rare on Twitter, where fewer than 5 percent of tweets move past a single retweet.17 Writing about information diffusion on Twitter, Sharad Goel and colleagues distinguish between two theoretical pathways for diffusion: broadcast diffusion, in which a key node is retweeted many times (as we typically find in the hashtag networks in this book), and viral diffusion, whereby information cascades from node to node through consecutive rounds of retweets.18 In practice, these two patterns of diffusion often work simultaneously to spread messages, although #CrimingWhileWhite is the only case in our hashtag activism network data where we see both patterns clearly present.

Following these viral chains reveals a pattern of exchange that may account for the presence of these long retweet chains here, but not elsewhere in the book. The chains originate with white users sharing examples of criminal behavior, which get picked up by media outlets, or occasionally Black Twitter users, who tweet them out with added commentary about the hashtag. These tweets are then in turn retweeted by other users struggling to make sense of the merits of the hashtag as an example of racial injustice, white allyship, or something else. Thus the virality appears to stem from the hashtag jumping between otherwise unconnected communities having different conversations about the hashtag’s efficacy.

The last novel pattern of note in the #CrimingWhileWhite network is the presence of a disproportionately high out-degree node. Links in a Twitter network can be represented as ingoing, directed at a focal node (corresponding with retweets and mentions), or outgoing, directed away from a focal node (corresponding with replies). This results in two ways to measure “popularity” in the network, in-degree, or by number of ingoing ties for each node, and out-degree, or by number of outgoing ties for each node. In practice, retweets and mentions are so much more common than replies on Twitter that we typically rank popularity using the in-degree metric only. That is the case with the #CrimingWhileWhite network except for one unusually high out-degree node. This user received several hundred replies to a series of #CrimingWhileWhite retweets. We initially suspected the account might be a bot, or automated account, although the temporality and content of the account’s tweets were consistent with real human behavior.19 A manual investigation of the account’s history and activity further confirmed the “humanness” of the account, which appears to be run by a Black man. Typically, he tweets about (American) football—the New England Patriots especially—and has a modest following of fellow football fans. Occasionally he tweets about racial justice issues, including several tweets about #CrimingWhileWhite. Because he is connected primarily to folks who follow his main hobby, football, he is positioned on the outer edge of the core #CrimingWhileWhite network, suggesting that his #CrimingWhileWhite retweets may have engaged a distinct group of people in the conversation—football fans who replied to his tweets but who otherwise did not engage with users or messages elsewhere in the network.

#CrimingWhileWhite: Consciousness Raising or Ally Theater?

In #CrimingWhileWhite tweets we see further complications of digital allyship emerge, but somewhat different from those of #AllMenCan. Some users engaging with the hashtag were clearly familiar with counterpublic discourses about discriminatory policing that emerged from #BlackLivesMatter networks and engaged in conversations and advocacy around these issues alongside the hashtag. These users produced a high co-occurrence in the network of #CrimingWhileWhite with #ICantBreathe and #BlackLivesMatter. While some such users were white, many were African American members of the larger #BlackLivesMatter interconnected counternetworks who found and shared #CrimingWhileWhite tweets via retweets or shares in which they added other racial justice hashtags to call their networks into the conversation. Rapper 9th Wonder, for example, became popular in the network because he actively retweeted white users’ #CrimingWhileWhite tweets to his hundreds of thousands of followers. Most users in the network, however, engaged with the hashtag but not at all with the themes or hashtags of larger conversations about racial justice online, reflecting either limited knowledge or limited interest in the larger #BlackLivesMatter and anti–police brutality networks.

While one reading of #CrimingWhileWhite tweets might locate them in the tradition of activist consciousness raising—that is, educating potential supporters and legitimizers of a movement about the political and collective meanings of their experiences (in this case, experiences with privilege)—other tweets suggest a navel-gazing that recenters (and borders on celebrating) whiteness. Within both the network and the discourse of the hashtag it is often difficult to tell whether particular users are, in fact, allies of the larger movement for Black lives and familiar with the Eric Garner case (which spurred the hashtag’s creation). Certainly, some users are, and the co-occurrence of such hashtags as #EricGarner, #ICantBreathe, and #BlackLivesMatter among some #CrimingWhileWhite tweets, along with some users’ connections to the larger #BlackLivesMatter twitter network, illustrates intentional allyship. Yet most #CrimingWhileWhite tweets do not contain these co-occurring hashtag nods to the larger movement, and most users do not connect with or engage larger questions and networks around issues of police brutality and racism. This observation illustrates (1) the limits of allyship hashtags in the larger digital public sphere, such that the hashtag may be adopted and put to use by individuals neither particularly invested in nor informed about a pressing political project, and (2) the limits of allyship tweets that do not amount to a direct call to action. While conversations about white privilege are encouraged by the hashtag, there was no call to action, and the question of what to do about that privilege, or, rather, with it, is not addressed.

Ultimately, #CrimingWhileWhite tweets perform two discursive functions, as memoir and to juxtapose experiences. Both these functions work to illustrate the benign or obliging role white Americans are accustomed to police playing in their lives—sometimes alongside implied or explicit commentary of the very different and more nefarious role of police for African Americans.

Memoir tweets in the #CrimingWhileWhite network recount compelling personal narratives about criminal behavior and interactions with police that are dramatic, emotional, and at times astounding. Every memoir is formulated similarly: the white person tweeting confesses to his or her own, often youthful, mischievous, or criminal behavior and then describes the fairly benign interactions with law enforcement that resulted (or did not result) and the few if any consequences the person ultimately faced. These tweets paint a picture of the normalcy of “acting out” and breaking rules for white people, particularly young white people, and highlight the fact that these young people are able to mature, grow, and live full lives thanks to an understanding society that does not criminalize them.

What these memoir tweets generally fail to do is directly engage networks focused on police brutality or suggest proactive ways white allies can intervene in the system whose privileges they describe. Rather, they seem to function as a type of catharsis, allowing users to acknowledge and confess to benefiting from white privilege without clearing engaging systemic battles with white supremacy.

Juxtaposition tweets employ discourse differently. These tweets generally include an image, meme, or link to a news story about a high-profile or notorious white person’s criminal behavior, and either directly or through implicit construction contrast laissez-faire law enforcement’s (and society’s) treatment of the person with the punitive treatment of African Americans. For example, we see the results of actions of actor Mark Wahlberg, former vice president Dick Cheney, and Ethan Couch, a young man who killed six people while drunk driving and who faced few consequences after his lawyer argued that Couch could not understand the consequences of his actions, contrasted with those of football player Plaxico Burress, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, and John Crawford.

In #CrimingWhileWhite juxtaposition tweets, white men who committed extreme acts of violence are frequently contrasted with Black men who were killed by police for minor infractions or simply by mistake. The implications are clear: white men face few, if any, consequences for bad, even extremely violent and criminal, behavior. Further, they are able to live not only productive but successful and powerful lives despite this behavior, while Black men are killed by police for far less.

In these tweets, white users move away from personal narrative, seemingly hesitant to directly compare their more generous experiences with the experiences of victims of police brutality and draconian criminal proceedings and preferring to use high-profile and egregious examples of other white people’s behavior. Here, users call out the unequal application of the law through proxy examples that remove their own experiences from the equation. These contrasting tweets do more to directly engage the larger network of racial justice tweeters by regularly using the #BlackLivesMatter and #EricGarner hashtags, yet they also seem to deflect personal accountability, making white people with extreme privilege the obvious “bad” guys and the police the obvious “racists,” rather than implicating themselves in the problem (or the solution).

While #CrimingWhileWhite tweets explicitly illustrate racial inequality in the legal system and white privilege through anecdotal examples, what is missing in both memoir and juxtaposition tweets is a call to action or acknowledgment of personal or group accountability and power to dismantle white supremacy. This makes the hashtag, while more organic and more popular than #AllMenCan, difficult to truly define as allyship, if allyship requires enactment of, or at the very least a call to action for the enactment of, behaviors that actively work to dismantle inequality. Of course, we cannot know what forms of activism users engage in offline, yet what we do know from #CrimingWhileWhite tweets is that personal accountability never became part of the discourse within the network.

#CrimingWhileWhite succeeded in expanding a narrative about double standards in the criminal justice system to a new audience, allowing white users and observers, some without connections to racial justice networks, to see the lack of severity in the policing and legal systems’ response to white people’s infractions as a common phenomenon, and begin to normalize a narrative about the differential treatment of African Americans. Yet at no point do tweets in the #CrimingWhileWhite network offer sweeping or systemic recommendations, solutions, or action responses to the phenomenon they identify, and thus they fall short of embracing the strategies for dismantling white supremacy that are popular in antiracist activist spaces. This reflects one of the greatest challenges in white allyship work in which white citizens see individual stories (such as memoirs and juxtapositions) and individual solutions (such as treating African Americans as they are treated or firing racist police) as more comfortable than acknowledging group complicity and responsibility for reimaging racist systems. Thus the consciousness raising and navel-gazing in the hashtag reveal the messy realities of online activism, in which ordinary users can take up hashtags and particular political narratives to be not either/or self-serving or reparative but both, in greater or lesser degrees.

Action over Allies

While the other chapters in this book illustrate how decades of mass organizing, activism, and theorizing of racial and gender justice causes by the groups most affected by inequality inform the discourse, reach, and impact of their online networks, here we see the significantly underdeveloped nature of public allyship. In both cases, that of #AllMenCan and that of #CrimingWhileWhite, good intention and a recognized need for change are limited by (1) a lack of nuanced calls for action and systemic political analysis, (2) navel-gazing and performativity, (3) lack of engagement or presence in smaller networks, and (4) the tendency of allyship hashtags to respond to a viral hashtag stemming from a marginalized group, rather than erupting independently and becoming self-sustaining. This pattern results in allyship hashtags being relatively superficial and derivative and thus potentially appropriative of the attention garnered by the group with which their authors hope to be in solidarity. #AllMenCan does offer some directive toward action by acknowledging the need for individual behavioral change, while #CrimingWhileWhite is story-driven, allowing self-reflection, yet neither clearly embraces a discourse of systemic change outside individual good acts and experiences. It thus appears that the well-developed and nuanced themes of identity, inequality, and action that arise from counterpublics are picked up clumsily by ally networks, which struggle to offer models of coalitional politics.

This observation aligns with polling evidence and scholarship that suggest that white Americans, for example, are increasingly aware of racial inequality yet often are unclear about what to do with that awareness.20 Stories of white allies, such as those documented by Cynthia Stokes Brown, William Ayers, and Theresa Quinn, in which individuals as members of larger social movements take tremendous personal risk—financial, physical, and reputational—to respond to and support the expressed needs of African American liberation actions, from abolition to civil rights, and in which systems and power analysis are central, offer valuable lessons for those seeking to transform their awareness of racial inequality into action.21 Notably, these examples also normalize the often painful experience of grappling with one’s own role in systems of white supremacy as a necessary part of supporting efforts for lasting change.

Likewise, we can see one example of feminist allyship that offers a model that appears to be working toward actionable and systemic change. The #HeForShe hashtag and campaign, launched in September 2014 by United Nations Women, endeavors to highlight men’s role in ending gender inequality and fighting for women’s rights. Actress Emma Watson of the popular Harry Potter film franchise was advanced as the Goodwill United Nations ambassador for the initiative, and her speech announcing the project went viral. The campaign was endorsed by many world leaders and is accompanied by dedicated staff and a United Nations Women budget line. The hashtag is bolstered by an extensive and robust plan of action that fundamentally assumes offline action and solidarity beyond simply using #HeForShe in tweets. Notably, the campaign was started by a powerful institution rather than organically on Twitter. Thus, allyship hashtags may be most successful when they are grounded in allyship theory and practical expertise from the start and supported offline, like the counterpublic hashtags we have examined elsewhere, by concrete organizing.

While neither #AllMenCan nor #CrimingWhileWhite was begun by an entity as powerful as the UN, and though both are more spontaneous, both were created by people with deep knowledge of entertainment and news media. Ross, a media insider, and Plank, a digital media insider, both had larger platforms and connections than any of the hashtag originators we have studied in other chapters. Despite their limited reach on Twitter, both hashtags were covered in mainstream media. Write-ups on the viral spread of #CrimingWhileWhite appeared on CNN, in the Washington Post, in Huffington Post, and elsewhere, all within days of its trending on Twitter.22 And as noted, E! Online, BuzzFeed, Feministing, and other popular viral sites spread the #AllMenCan hashtag. That these hashtags did not experience more virality at the time perhaps speaks to the opaqueness of the hashtags in terms of the particular actions or political narratives they took up, or, perhaps simultaneously, the discomfort they likely made their intended audience feel as they required recognition and discussion of privilege. We looked but could not find any widely visible allyship hashtags begun by nonelites.

Ultimately, emergent allyship hashtags that riff off the viral circulation of an incident of racial or gendered violence, such as those discussed in this chapter, have the potential to shift attention away from the incident and engender a level of self-centered reflection that does not contend with the systemic nature of the problem. Yet these hashtags also welcome new audiences into conversations about power and privilege and may reach members of dominant groups who are not as likely to engage with the narratives arising from counterpublics. There are clearly limits to the utility of organic allyship hashtags in creating the kind of solidarity that brings about measurable social change, but these hashtags nonetheless promulgate important conversations online and in the larger media ecosystem.