Take to TikTok: Counter-narrative and Building Resistant Educational Spaces Online
I have been active on TikTok for a little over two months now. My content is a hodgepodge of my personal and professional interests, but is focused on providing public critical social commentary to the masses via the app; to quite literally bring the classroom to them.
In an era of legislative restrictions in some states about what can be taught in formal education spaces surrounding history, race, and sex (and gender and sexual orientation by extension), finding ways to resist this form of censorship requires creativity and spaces outside the formal education system. TikTok is that space.
I recently experienced a video I made getting over 50K views. While not viral yet, it may very well be on its way; only time will tell. That is a lot of learners to reach in a single instant. Those of us who believe in the power of education do not necessarily need to be within the four walls of a brick-and-mortar classroom; all we need is the time and the ganas to teach.
The video opens up with a young white lady asking, in a rather flippant and accusatory manner, what the Black National Anthem is about. My guess is that her question stemmed from Lift Every Voice and Sing (1900) being sung at this year’s Super Bowl. I disrupt her video by reading verbatim the history of the song available on the NAACP’s website. I then let the young lady continue her commentary, disrupting at each instance in which she puts forward a narrative that is ahistorical and erases the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the United States. I counter her arguments by explaining the historical context of The Star Spangled Banner (1814) specifically highlighting that at the time of the national anthem being written, Black Americans were not seen as citizens; they weren’t even seen as human, but as property.
In the days that followed the video taking off, many applauded my approach to educating the young lady, but I had no intention of reaching her specifically, especially given the tone of her question and the commentary that followed. It was clear to me that she wasn’t asking from a place of wanting to genuinely learn but to regurgitate rhetoric grounded in erasure.
And for me, teaching is an act of love, service, and healing (Pitts, 2023). I also see it as an act of resistance. I borrow this last concept from education scholar Tara J. Yosso, who in 2005, published a piece entitled, “Whose Culture Has Capital?”
According to Yosso, resistance capital is a form of cultural capital that enables those of us who came from lower socio-economic backgrounds and Communities of Color to recognize injustice inflicted upon ourselves or others and the courage and boldness to speak out against it. We do this when we advocate for ourselves in spaces, when we advocate for others, and when we dare to ask the questions that no one is thinking to ask. We also do this work when we take the time to teach others within and outside our communities about the complexity of the social issues we face in the United States.
In this instance, I used the opportunity to teach as an act of love for the Black community, as an act of service to the Black community (who are often overburdened by having to re-explain to others why their history and lives matter) and an act of healing for those of us outside the Black community to think about the ways we might also uphold harmful ideas about Black history and people and might even be tempted to take a position similar to the young lady in the video when the conversation might come up among our co-workers, our families, our friends, and/or on our social media accounts.
And finally, my response was an act of resistance. An act of resistance to the formal education spaces that, historically, have erased, ignored, and marginalized our collective histories. This allows for young people to go through a system that doesn’t expose them to different lived experiences which then emboldens them to take positions that perpetuate harm to the very communities that they have not been afforded the knowledge and history about. It is a cycle of harm that continues generation after generation. This is quite easily evidenced by the fact that there were a handful of viewers who thought I was further dividing; some even went as far as to accuse me of not knowing anything about history (or how to study it). This taken together with the original user’s video signals to me that we need to be teaching multiple histories from multiple lived experiences every opportunity we get and in every format we can; social media being one of them.
Social media is a mode of human social relationship. In the digital age, it can be very easy to simply dismiss this human tool as frivolous; a distraction that takes away from the “real world”. But we, as a human species, have always developed new tools and technology to help us evolve and adapt to our environments. Social media is a form of human communication that even if carefully crafted and curated still holds tremendous power. Power to harm, but also the power to disrupt.
And this disruption is my form of resistance.
