“…a cosmetic gesture used to make Facebook and its founder seem anti-racist without having to put any real legwork…” — this sentence describes almost everything that is done these days about social justice.

Its exactly my problem with the “representation” agenda. With quotas or hiring specialists to “adress” these problems. In fact, its my problem with basically every single online instance of people “defending” social justice with words and it even applies to most of what happens outside the internet.

People go to a rally and then go home, go post on social media and sleep like babies, thinking “I helped the world so much, I am such a good person, so different from everyone else who does nothing”. But they aren’t different. Its so easy to stop using racial slurs and keep complaining about racism in your lunch hour, and then tell everyone how much better you are than those who “don’t care”. And many times those who don’t care are struggling to survive while these cosmetic activists have a lot more time to spare.

I will go even further:

A white nationalist with a confederate flag proudly hoisted at his home does more for racial justice than some hipster guy posting annoying things on facebook. The annoying hipster helps with nothing and it might even contribute to a bad image of anti racist movements. The white nationalist, on the other hand, promoted awareness around him: people are remembered that the fight is real, that actual racists exist and that its not just facebook bs about political correctness.

That means facebook activism does more harm than good, unless the writer has good arguments and writes convincingly. Unless the post is intelligent. And a protest might do more harm than good if everyone who shows up is an idiot.

Just like a cool band might become uncool if the wrong people start listening to it in public, or vice-versa, everything has the potential of being spoiled by the wrong people. If bad people start defending some idea in public, the natural reaction of most people would be thinking “well, I don’t know much about that but its probably bad, then”. Sure, maybe some people will congratulate the bad person for defending that idea, specially people who aren’t thinking about causes and consequences.

So it does help he who defends that cause to improve his own image. But does it help The Cause? Or does it only help some chosen people, the anointed ones, at its expense?