There is indeed much discursive colonialism (a term learned from Katherine McKittrick– On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place + Dear Science and other Stories) happening on Twitter and Instagram especially. I think I first became aware of this phenomenon happening with pages like Working Class History, a page which, for me, does nothing more than showcase a “collection of wretched bodies.” These pages prop themselves up as omniscient because they are telling History (emphasis on capital H History) in a register that is supposed to run contradictory to the history books, to the state renderings of what has actually happened in this world. This is supposed History able to stand on its own. We of course see this in infographics too, the hundreds of pages on Instagram which do nothing more than describe, describe, describe. McKittrick reminds us that description is not liberation. No, not even when we are using the stories of those who fought for liberation. The trend is that these pages hasten to provide analysis (because analysis can only be found in a book? a published article? a twitter thread? –just speculation–). I also speculate that they do not analyze because they are invested in protecting or sheathing their ideological lenses. Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, The Left, The Working Class. These people try to conceal this because it would disrupt the purity of History, but they just end up reifying it anyway. The people who run these kinds of pages can’t NOT attach themselves to something. And the attachment to those lenses does nothing but, to think with McKittrick once more, provide arenas for “descriptive rehearsal”, as opposed to reaction to the material that is actually happening in the world, resistance, and pushing back against shit.
I say death to these pages. Death to black life being reduced only to black struggle to then be reified by The Working Class and The Left History that whites and nonblacks must tell to feel important. Death to it all.