August 16, 2017… Day 209
Just checked again, and this tweet now has 3.8 million likes:
Side note. Forgot to say yesterday, in all the commotion–I really appreciate how the women on Hellbent (Sarah Lerner and Devon Handy) model the behavior of white non-fragility. They have a weekly feature where they say what Maxine Waters has been up to and award someone a Maxine Waters Badassery Award (or some such name). And a black woman wrote in and said that this was fetishizing Congresswoman Waters and this was forcing her into this position where she had to be this magical negro that replenishes others’ spirits, etc. etc. And Sarah and Devon were just like “Wow, that made us both really uncomfortable because we recognized the truth in it.” And they ditched that feature. They said they would still talk about Maxine Waters from time to time but they wouldn’t frame it in the same way anymore. And that was that.
I knew there was an element of truth to the criticism right away, because remember how I said that Hellbent reminded me of Baby Geniuses, which is why I like it so much? Well, Baby Geniuses has a weekly feature called Chunch Chat… in which Emily & Lisa hilariously and adorably check in on Martha Stewart’s pony, Banchunch. I don’t think I need to say more.
I too admire Maxine Waters, and I too will take more care with how I talk about her.
P.S. it’s a few hours later now and the Barack Obama tweet is up to 4.0 million likes. The tweet from Twitter–pointing out that Obama’s tweet is the most-liked tweet ever–is itself up to 284,000 likes.
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