From fake DMs to obsessive trolls, in 2021 the Instagram page I started back in 2018 to celebrate Aussie women of colour, had become surrounded with controversy. So, how did an IG page doing so much good end up with so many haters? Well, it’s kind of predictable when I look back at it.
In 2018, I decided to create an Instagram page to celebrate Australian women of colour (AWOC). I was tired of the thin, blonde hair, blue eye image of Australian women. In 2020, I had slowly begun to realize why there were so few women of colour to spotlight. WOC were simply not being heard. I had begun receiving messages from WOC around the country talking about how daily life was ripe with racism, from the workplace to the foundation counter. I could relate.
After the murder of George Floyd and the global uprising of Black Lives Matter, I began calling out whiteness in advertising. Pretty much every fashion and beauty brand in Australia had zero diversity across their digital marketing. I took screenshots of social feeds from Witchery to Kookai to showcase the whiteness. Instantly, I was labelled as disruptive and a troublemaker. “It’s not racist if they have a person of colour”, I was promptly told by POC and white people alike. We started a campaign pushing for brands to be more diverse and sure enough, big brands ‘pulled’ up including Vogue Australia and Jurlique.
By this time, I was on everyone’s radar. And suddenly the hate started to flow. I then heard from friends in the industry that a certain stylist (whom I did not know) was emailing snapshots of disparaging direct messages from my account. I was shocked — is this a thing? Do people actually make up DMs? This was before the Chrissy Teigan / Michael Costello drama. This was the start of a campaign by him (the stylist) and his associates to “take me down”. One of them (a woman of colour and so-called influencer, let’s call her ‘bad juju’) started a page to troll me and continued for over a year. Yep, over an entire year. She followed industry professionals, talked crap about me to whoever would listen… it went on and on.
Did I make mistakes along the way? Absolutely. Anyone who actively speaks about anti-racism publicly knows apologizing is part of the fight. But photoshopping DMs about colourism (already a sensitive topic for POC) and creating lies about who I am as a person, my work and even my ethnicity? That’s on a whole other level. White supremacy was doing its work thanks to POC. Again, nothing new here. This is how systemic racism works. It can’t survive without certain POC co-opting it. It was just odd being a target.
You’re probably wondering why I just didn’t stop. Well, the first time it happened I contacted a lawyer. The press were picking up the story of photoshopped messages and I naively thought I could move past it. Also, the photoshop was so bad, I seriously doubted anyone in their right mind would believe it. I had a cease and desist issued to media who agreed, except for Pedestrian TV which only much later, despite evidence and a potential defamation case, only agreed to change the headline. Go figure.
It was the reactions that were perhaps the most shocking and took some time to process. I stopped giving a damn about the trolls and haters — after all, they are great motivation to keep going! But the responses from well-intentioned allies were something else.
The woman (‘bad juju’) involved in the troll campaign was Aboriginal and I am Fiji-Indian. I was told several times “in Australia if you aren’t white or First Nations, no one will believe you.” I was also told “South Asian women always get shitted on” and that “being disruptive will only bring you hate… like what happened with Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Ruby Hamad”. It was all heartbreaking and, sadly, true. I didn’t see the point in fighting a fight I couldn’t win, even if I was telling the truth.
But I’m also very stubborn. Take it from someone who ran away from home as a teenager and lived in NYC for 20 years on her own, it is very hard to break me, as my trolls soon found out. I have since changed the ‘AussieWOC’ Instagram account to ‘Unlearning Shit’ and I continue to speak up and take up space on topics such as fast fashion, climate change, and anti-racism.
Here’s the thing I’ve learned in the last year. If you speak up, and you’re a woman, you will be called toxic, bitter, aggressive, and a bitch. If you are a woman of colour, be prepared. You’ll be lucky if anyone gives a damn how you feel, including other WOC who — because of the scarcity mindset — feel threatened by your voice. Simply put: they wish they could do what you do. White people aside, be careful of whitewashed POC who will defend white supremacy when you speak up. Unpack, unlearn and keep going.
Thankfully, through it all, I’ve managed to build a pretty amazing community of like-minded folks and I’m really proud we were able to give the industry a much-needed wake-up call. I’m thankful to the people who turn up every day on @unlearningshit to challenge our collective thinking and in turn have made me stronger. We’re changing Australia together, even if it is on Instagram.
