![]() Conveniently, it was the same line that separated my country into Democrats and Republicans. On the other lay the bigots and anti-vaxxers. On one side lay those who wanted to make the world a better place. I developed the sense that we were living through a crisis that required each of us to make an existential choice. Even the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency didn’t stir the same sense of anger in me that I observed in other Democrats.īut when COVID struck, my news consumption spiked-primarily CNN and MSNBC, which placed much of the blame for the pandemic, not to mention America’s racial inequities, on Trump. I’d considered myself moderate in my attitudes, having avoided the excesses of such previous left-wing bandwagons as #MeToo. But that was the extent of my involvement (and interest) in mainstream politics. In the standard California fashion, I’d been a registered Democrat from the time I turned 18, and voted accordingly in every presidential election. If so many earnest people of all races insisted America was experiencing a racism “pandemic,” who was I, a 31-year-old white woman, to say otherwise? The online community I belonged to was effectively an echo chamber, in which ideologically non-compliant facts and statistics could be explained away with the help of all those aesthetically pleasing images. Publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post assured me that I was on the right side of history. I accepted the underlying ideology of anti-racism without question. Social-justice-themed Instagram images posted during 2020. You must be anti-racist.” Silence was violence. Along with the infographics, there was an explosion in the market for illustrative typography featuring simple slogans such as Angela Davis’s “It’s not enough to not be racist. Disavowing racism had become a brand imperative, with influencers and businesses alike at risk of reputational damage if they failed to jump on the bandwagon early and hard. Knowing a popular craze when it sees one, corporate America incorporated these facile social-justice memes into national marketing campaigns. They often read like instruction manuals, feeding believers the exact phrases needed to dismiss counterarguments and “educate” their “ignorant” family members. Text-based slideshow graphics on pastel backdrops were a particular hit. At the time, infographics educating people about anti-racism were flooding Instagram, stripping complex social issues down to ideologically slanted but easily digestible bullet points. And the cute, non-threatening social-justice-themed images that I’d been producing gave way to a harder activist message. But I assured myself this was not the main purpose.īy the time the Black Lives Matter protests and riots began in mid-2020, I was fully immersed in this subculture. And of course, when these people were moved to share my art with others, well, that aligned nicely with my goal of attracting new followers. At a time when the world was experiencing a sense of collective fear over COVID-19, it was nice to imagine that my art was giving people joy and comfort. (I have Asperger’s syndrome, a subject I have written about publicly in the past.)Įventually, I gravitated toward the social-justice art community. But for those who are introverted or neurodivergent, and who have difficulty navigating real-life social settings, the prospect of making an impact through arms-length electronic methods held considerable appeal. I began to think of myself as an “influencer.” That word now has negative (or at least mixed) connotations. #ME TO ME MEME CREATOR PROFESSIONAL#As an artist, a growing social-media following also helped me find new professional opportunities, as well as customers for products I sold on Etsy.ĭuring lockdowns, my reliance on social media became more pronounced, with Instagram as my platform of choice. Much of my life played out online, where I carefully counted the number of “likes” my social-media posts would get, imagining this to be a reliable indicator of my ideas’ worth. When the pandemic struck in March 2020, I was working out of a Los Angeles apartment alongside my two cats, illustrating children’s books for a living. ![]()
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