The Problem of White Efficacy
Fellow white people: this is a message for you.
I was recently texting with a friend, the writer Jeff Holmes, and he described to me his exhaustion with what he calls “digi-rage.” George Floyd had just been murdered, and Minneapolis’s 3rd Precinct would soon be burned to the ground. “As a kid it was easy—cops are dangerous to me and mine, they harass me and mine, they stalk me and mine,” he wrote. “We knew their character, we knew the score, we acted accordingly. Now I see the meme shit and repost shit and digi-rage of what we were acutely aware of as kids and wonder if it’s people screaming into the void, or is it virtue signaling, or is it a way to wash your hands of this country’s stink so you can sleep at night?”
I had borne witness to this myself: The bizarre cycle of people posting memes about murder and outrage and then carefully composed photos of the wallpaper in their apartments, the images of Rekia Boyd and Philando Castile and Sandra Bland and Michael Brown and Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd alternating with those of sunbeams hitting a potted plant just right, a cat curled up on a comforter. Social media’s quasi-sociopathic impermanence is either ill-equipped to respond to tragedy, or the people posting are snug in their insulation from tragedy, or it’s some combination of both. “I try to remember there are real people behind the curated profiles and a part of me REALLY REALLY wants to reach out and try to find them and just swap stories in a non-public forum so we can hold some shit together,” Jeff wrote me.
After Jeff and I finished talking, something kindled in my brain. I didn’t know I was becoming sick with mania, but I was. I stayed up for two nights in a row checking Twitter and panicking and crying and pacing. On the third day, I attempted to go to a protest. Another friend, sensing I was in no fit state—my speech alternating between fast and slurred, my mind blurring between victorious images of the burned precinct and thoughts of abandoning my house and job and returning to my old work as a quick-turn political freelancer, my heart thrashing, my breath coming too quick or not at all—called me and gently coaxed me into turning around and stumbling into my parents’ house, where I promptly passed out. , I told myself when I woke up, somewhat But I wanted so badly to do . To be efficacious. By not going to the protest, I felt inefficacious, traitorous, unsupportive. What I really wanted, though I didn’t want to admit it, was relief from the rhetorical prison of white self-loathing. I wanted to be good.
