part three: Your Attention, Please

Before digging into this piece, read part one: Confronting Conflict Within Movement Work and part two: Limitations of Binaries.

public/private dichotomy
Wider access to the Internet affords the public-at-large unprecedented opportunity to directly engage within and beyond in-person relationships. We can better connect and get to know each other, share information and resources, navigate disputes and conflicts and much more. A number of online platforms allow us to make public a multitude of difficult experiences, from unpleasant service at a restaurant to an acquaintance tweeting an offensive remark. The politics of open forums to air grievances invoke issues caused by how we conceptualize public and private spaces in the digital realm.

Perhaps our understanding of the public/private divide has not yet caught up to cultural trends driven by social media. Systemic oppression and identity-based power dynamics inform the public/private binary, deeply impacting our physical and digital interactions, influencing what we choose to keep to ourselves and among folks we spend time with in person, and what we share online. Social media platforms are just one of many kinds of spaces to work through conflicts among organizers. We use social media to increase awareness, promote actions, connect with fellow organizers and the public, and share and celebrate successful praxis. We also use social media to drag one another, call each other out, and sometimes, to show off our performative bullshit.

Far too often, we decide for affected parties if conflicts should play out privately or publicly without considering restorative solutions, the weight of our own ego, the power we wield, the consequences of our actions, the benefits of mutuality and holding multiple truths, and figuring out what our end goals are. Every conflict involves different spaces, motivating factors, people and groups, communal impact, and resolutions. Establishing our personal and group values, identifying where our values diverge, overlap, coexist and clash, and strengthening our toolkit with conflict resolution practices helps us exercise a consistent approach to handling conflicts. This continual practice of self and communal reflection is well worth our time and effort because a substantial amount of problems in organizing spaces could be resolved and sharpen our work long before they become larger conflicts unnecessarily impeding movement building.

call outs, a brief case study
An online call out is not a fundamentally unhelpful tactic to use, but depending on the situation, private conversations may be more effective to engage people we know and work with often. However, an online call out may well be the best method for calling attention to a problem and justice-oriented ideas.

This past January, the local chapter of the Women’s March organized an anniversary rally and invited Leah Humphrey and Kyra Harvey of Indy10 Black Lives Matter to speak. Their speech served as a call to action for white women in feminist spaces to confront their own racism and show up for women of color, black women in particular. Two days later, IUPUI professor and political blogger Sheila Suess Kennedy published a post describing their speech as an offensive attack on women in attendance, and characterized Humphrey and Harvey as divisive and counterproductive. A day after, Indy10 posted a statement, a line by line rebuttal to Kennedy’s assertions.

The situation highlights several layers of power dynamics at play impacting the problem-solving methods employed. Kennedy is an older white Jewish woman, and a fairly popular pundit in Democratic spaces in Central Indiana. Her platform touts a large public and academic following at and beyond IUPUI. Humphrey and Harvey are young black women leading the local Black Lives Matter chapter, a grassroots organization sustained by unpaid labor and in-kind donations. Kennedy’s blog post juxtaposed hopeful white allies and ungrateful black organizers, shaming and policing Humphrey and Harvey’s tone, language, and organizing tactics, while failing to recognize her actions demonstrated the gendered racism their speech was about.

In this instance, an online call out involving two parties with considerable impact in shared communities was not unwarranted. Indy10’s statement sparked ongoing conversations about the insidiousness of white supremacy and anti-black racism in organizing spaces and resulted in a donation campaign to the organization to support their upcoming projects.

attention economy
Online call outs are effectively a public response to inter/personal issues, meant to garner attention to meet an end goal. The purpose may be personally motivated, communally minded, and may be entirely unknown. Without attention, a call out remains in our own echo chamber. Social media gives us the attention we seek when we call others out.

Experts argue current technological developments exploit what is called the attention economy, treating the attention span as a scarcity. This is not a piece about social media supposedly killing real communication, but some platforms are explicitly designed to capture and keep human attention for as long as possible. Whether our collective attention span is dwindling is not the point here. We have, however, socially constructed attention as a valuable resource in organizing spaces. A commodified attention span is a reflection of neoliberalism, what Eve Ewing describes as “the prevailing political logic of our era.”

Simply put, a neoliberal politic applies capitalist principles of scarcity and competition to movement building. This practice quantifies the attention span and casts attention as a primary source of genuine care and compassion and appropriate public response to injustice. Conflict occurs among us as we utilize inflammatory means of gaining attention to inflate our sense of self worth and in hopes of producing positive results in our work. And worse, we tend to conflate heightened public attention with justice itself. Promoting awareness is important to movement building, but more attention does not directly translate to material investment or meaningful progress. Attention is an unreliable resource in this regard. Attention, our work, social causes themselves are commodities open to oppressive violence when we subscribe to this politic. In effect, we are competing against ourselves for public attention, creating and aggravating conflict that harms rather than builds.  

This is not a unique problem of community organizers and movement workers, but we must mitigate its effect on our work. Audre Lorde reminds us in Sister Outsider, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” We cannot submit to the politics of scarcity and appeal of power-grabs when our work is to uproot global capitalism and remove its chokehold on our communities, our bodies. Liberation is not possible within the confines of oppression and we must not embrace ways of being remade in its image.