Speaking to a ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ audience on March 7, Princeton professor Imani Perry did what many would deem impossible: give a persuasive argument against social media to an audience of college students.

Perry, the 2019 speaker in the Office of Equity and Diversity’s social justice speaker series, questioned the effectiveness of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook in the age of online activism and social justice. “What if hearing and witnessing and circulating and retweeting doesn’t do anything?” she asked her listeners in the nearly full Olin Concert Hall.

The Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Perry has both a J.D. and a doctorate in American civilization. An interdisciplinary thinker who looks at law, cultural studies, and African American studies, she’s published an extensive assortment of critical essays and reviews and, just in the past year, three books.

Imani Perry, the 2019 Social Justice Speaker, talks about the pitfalls of online activism on March 7. (Samuel Mironko ’21/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

More recently, she said, she’s been interested in the backlash that follows movements for social change and how politics enters artistic expression.

In her talk, “Nice for What?” (named after a Drake song, to the amusement of her audience), Perry made a case for the reevaluation of technology and our relationships, as activists, to social media. She broke down the goods and bads of today’s social media landscape, from Twitter-trending violence and Facebook battle royales to “cancel culture” and the possibilities of social transformation.

Underlying these debates are questions of how we communicate with one another, the ways in which we disagree, and how we can transform ourselves and others.

The case for digital activism

Social media has reshaped the public sphere, Perry acknowledged.

“We’ve seen the use of digital platforms to open up discourse about social ills, inequality, and also function as a landscape in which networking around organizing is possible,” she said.

Providing examples from movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and even as far back as Occupy Wall Street, Perry credited social media sites as establishing networks among people who are doing similar work around the world.

“There’s a great deal of power and possibility there,” she said.

Police violence

Perry’s skepticism about social media’s effectiveness in activism dates back several years, when people began to circulate images and videos of police violence towards African Americans, particularly killings.

“I wasn’t convinced from the outset that they would change anything,” Perry said of such footage.

A protestor records video with her smartphone during an anti-government demonstration called by the Yellow Vests “Gilets Jaunes” movement in Nantes, western France, on March 02, 2019. (Sipa via AP Images)

Not only, she argued, did sharing the videos fail to create substantive change, but the witnessing of suffering itself potentially desensitized its viewers to violence and increased stigma.

“What was seen as a vehicle for possibility for drawing attention to an issue could not necessarily function as a vehicle for greater sympathy or moral outrage,” she said.

Conversation or face-off?

Speaking of an economy driven by social media traffic, Perry explained that “drawing our attention to an issue doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll interpret it in the ways it’s intended.”

Misinterpretations of social movements that become “Twitter famous,” such as #MeToo, can sometimes become as popular as the movements themselves.

Perry cited #ThemToo, a group of Twitter users who claim that sexual assault unfairly targets black men. It is misinterpretation that makes “the structure of digital activism so easily become a minefield,” she said.

Anytime someone posts on social media, the post is a replicable artifact that becomes “proxy for one’s identity…and even a form of self-marketing,” Perry said.

“Drawing our attention to an issue doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll interpret it in the ways it’s intended.”

So, when a post generates pushback, what happens is not a conversation, but what Perry identified as a “face-off” with a Battle Royale structure. Because someone’s post represents their identity, they tend to double down on their argument instead of opening up to criticism.

As a result, “the argument becomes a matter of who wins and who loses,” Perry said.

Though the arguments can seem incredibly trivial, Perry pointed out the larger implications of these online boxing matches. They “create situations where democratic spheres are easily morphed into spheres for amplified public humiliations, celebration of conflict, and gleeful insult,” she said.

Transformation, not cancellation

Perry’s biggest concern was the culture revolving around the “canceling” of those who say awful or offensive things online.

Perry identifies the punishment model of society as a reason behind this online phenomenon. Members of society tend to identify failure and oust those responsible for it. “To cancel someone is to cast them out,” she explained.

“Every time I see people being canceled I think, ‘What happened to transformation?’”

Pointing to a frequent Twitter phenomenon, Perry questioned the effectiveness of excommunicating or expelling individuals from online communities geared towards progress.

“Every time I see people being canceled I think, ‘What happened to transformation?’”

She continued, “What you want to do is seduce people into a vision of liberation they can share with you. It seems there’s something counterintuitive about the process of expulsion when what we’re trying to do is make revolution irresistible.”

So, while identifying online offenses can be useful, it can also halt any kind of transformation geared toward showing the offending individual the error of their ways.

As a possible remedy, Perry asked her audience to consider the practice of a transformation in which we can shape our community and individual relationships to incline toward justice and equity. “To what extent,” she asked, “are we willing to be transformed?”

Imani Perry speaks with a student at her talk on March 7. Perry encouraged her audience to think about how to engage in transformation. (Samuel Mironko ’21/ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ College)

Perry concluded her talk by explaining philosopher Stanley Cavell’s idea of a “passionate utterance.” Unlike a “performative utterance,” which could be any social media post leading to a general conclusion, a passionate utterance “invites an exchange rather than invoking a procedure.”

Perry explained that this exchange is “essential to social transformation,” yet it is difficult to achieve on social media due to the superficial nature of Facebook and Twitter posts that so often fail to identify what the posters really mean.

The activist’s goal is to engage in a way that recognizes the messiness of life underneath the surface presentation of social media, Perry said.

“One of the things I’m recommending is openness,” she said.

A school popular with students committed to social justice, ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ presents a daylong training program in organizing and advocacy skills starting at 10 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 3, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

Open to the public, the six-hour D4D on the Road Workshop will be led by the Center for Progressive Leadership. CPL is a national, nonpartisan political training institute that develops diverse leaders who can effectively advance political and policy change.

The event is co-sponsored by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ and Project Pericles, and is funded by The Henry Luce Foundation. Due to space limitations, attendance is by registration only.

This interactive workshop for students, faculty, administrators, alumni and community leaders will impart concrete tools for successful action, including values-based messaging, analyzing root causes, identifying targets and tactics, and strategic planning.

Participants will identify new strategies for making change on a particular issue or cause, practice developing and delivering an effective advocacy message, and build relationships to support and sustain their work.

ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ is one of 12 colleges offering the training this year. Since 2004, CPL and the CPL Action Network have trained more than 5,000 diverse leaders through these intensive programs.

Project Pericles is a nonprofit organization that encourages and facilitates commitments by colleges and universities to include social responsibility and participatory citizenship as essential elements of their educational programs.

Founded in 2001 by philanthropist Eugene M. Lang, Project Pericles works directly with its member institutions as they individually and collaboratively develop model civic engagement programs in their classrooms, on their campuses, and in their communities.

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships continues its 2008-09 Civic Forum series, “Maine in a Transnational World, ” with a presentation on women’s rights through the international perspective of female activists.

Debra Schultz, an historian and human rights consultant; Jael Silliman, a women’s rights program officer for the Ford Foundation; and Shalom Odokara, executive director of Women in Need Industries, offer a presentation titled “Women’s Rights and Women’s Activism: An International Perspective” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21, in the Edmund Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

The event is open to the public free of charge. For more information, please contact the Harward Center at 207-786-6202.

Schultz is the author of Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (New York University Press, 2002). The director and founding board member of the Open Society Institute’s international women’s program, she is co-author of  Memory and Justice: Confronting Past Atrocity and Human Rights Abuse, a Ford Foundation-commissioned report. Schultz has taught history and women’s studies at the New School, Rutgers University and LaGuardia Community College.

An activist in both the U.S. and international women’s health and reproductive rights movements, Silliman was a program officer at the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation program and an early supporter of organizations of women of color. A program officer concerned with reproductive rights at the Ford Foundation, she is the author of  “Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization,” co-edited with Anannya Bhattacharjee. As a professor of women’s studies at the University of Iowa, she wrote about social movements, reproductive rights and women’s health.

One of six children of Nigerian educators who helped build a university in her native country, Odokara, is executive director of Women in Need Industries. Founded in Washington, D.C., in 1995, WINI moved to Maine in 2002, where it helps women who have become homeless or victims of domestic violence. The program also teaches such women to help themselves. WINI makes efforts internationally to help stem the tide of AIDS in Africa and treats those infected. The group also works on projects in Maine, including a temporary home for women released from prison, as well as a spice and beauty products factory that will include a health clinic, day-care facility and educational programs.

The Harward Center forum is a lively series that invites the audience to explore civic, political and policy issues significant to the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ community, Maine and beyond. The Harward Center leads ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝’ efforts in community involvement, including programs in service-learning, community volunteerism and environmental stewardship.

The center works with community partners to meet community needs and, in the process, to integrate civic engagement with the ŔÖ˛Ľ´ŤĂ˝ educational experience.