After Charlottesville, Grief And Humor Go Hand In Hand on Twitter

The question was simple enough: “Where the hell is Kendall Jenner with her Pepsi 12 packs?” As terror enveloped Charlottesville during the “Unite the Right” rally on Saturday, where hundreds of neo-Nazis and Klansmen violently mobilized in a mutinous showing of white pride to challenge the removal of confederate statues, that was all it took to resonate with tens of thousands. Though cloaked in humor, its meaning cut deep, the mockery of Pepsi’s ill-conceived April TV ad distilling how racial and social harmony in America remains something of a joke.

The reaction was neither unexpected nor the exception—on Twitter, the binding of anguish, cynicism, and satire has become a shared lingua franca in the wake of national torment.

I spent the weekend in Cleveland, mostly offline, celebrating a friend's wedding. What news I did consume, as I attempted to make sense of the Charlottesville protest turned melee, came via Twitter: images depicted ghoul-faced white men hoisting torches in medieval defiance, of bodies being launched into the air, and of extremists bludgeoning Deandre Harris, a young black man, as he fell to the concrete. There were people who assembled to honor the life of Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed during the rally’s fallout. Tweets, too, memorialized the names of individuals like Heyer who were victims of recent incidents grounded in gruesome racial contempt.

In spite of Twitter's capacity to rapidly disseminate news like few other digital rostrums, many of its critics (and users) fear that the social hub has largely become a cesspool of snark and nonsense; “everyone is bad” and “never tweet” are frequent rejoinders to the madness that the platform has been known to spur. In the wake of an occurrence like Charlottesville, one of such ferocity—when deep hatred, out-and-out racism, and death foment in disastrous concert—Twitter becomes a conduit for externalized grief. My feed turned into a tempest of trauma and humor, an emotional battleground yoked by what writer Hilton Als once solemnly described as “a reality I didn’t want to know.”

Rampant denial of America’s past—with its history of slavery, redlining, and mass incarceration— led to tongue-in-cheek tweets about shallow white allyship and President Trump’s equivocating “on many sides” statement. In the aftermath of homegrown extremism or tragedy, a new contagion often emerges, built on innocence and patriotism; stock expressions like “I can’t believe this is happening” or “We are better than this” become a handy, if fictitious, narrative. But on Twitter, such sentiments are relentlessly met with a chorus of ridicule and truth.

There’s also the exhaustion many feel at having to address white ignorance in moments of racial conflict.

The jokes, and their surprisingly codified form, are all part of the Twitter cycle—the news and the grief never outweigh or dilute the humor, and vice versa. And for many of Twitter’s marginalized participants, be they black or gay or female, humor functions as a necessary safeguard. “The absurdity of reality—the only way for many people to deal with that is satire and comedy,” says Charisse L’Pree, who teaches media psychology at Syracuse University.

L’Pree believes microblogging platforms like Tumblr and Twitter have become overwhelmed with people’s desire to share, which often escalates in times of crisis. “This is a process by which we cope with tragedy when there is a very visible white power movement happening,” she says of tweets like Jenkins’. But she is careful to clarify: “It’s a pretty standard reaction; we just see the evidence more because of social media. But the frequency of retweets demonstrates that what this person is saying is actually reaching and resonating with people.”

How we’ve learned to shoulder the terror, in the real world and the world we construct online, is perhaps the most telling. The footage and first-hand accounts out of Charlottesville have been at once crushing and completely unsurprising, a reflection of an America many have endured before and are likely to endure again. For those geographically removed from the mayhem, Twitter acts as a necessary remedy. It is a coarse statement, but a no less true one: humor soothes.

Early Sunday morning, I came across an image on my timeline. The photograph had been taken a month before, at a similar "save the statue" Klan rally, but it couldn't have felt more timely. A black man in jean shorts sits somewhere in the vicinity of the protest, smoking a cigarette. He looks untroubled, calm. Wholly unbothered. In his hand he holds a sign that reads “Fuck yo statue.” I laughed for a second, thinking of Chappelle’s Show’s watershed sketch about funk musician Rick James, and then I did what I always do. I kept scrolling.

CULTURE