Ashley Dotty Charles - Outraged: Why Everyone is Shouting and No One is Talking

OUTRAGED

BLOOMSBURY CIRCUS

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in Great Britain 2020

This electronic edition published 2020

Copyright Ashley Charles, 2020

Ashley Charles has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-0503-0; TPB: 978-1-5266-2566-3; eBook: 978-1-5266-0504-7

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CONTENTS

I never should have checked my phone on holiday. But there I was, in sun-drenched Thailand, scrolling through Twitter, incapable of detaching myself from the Internet. As a radio presenter and therefore an egomaniac by default, the thought of disconnecting from my platforms was an unspeakable horror that I could only endure for so long, so I settled in like the social media crackhead I am, ready to get my fix.

We were ten days into our two-week trip; we being my assorted biscuit tin of a family: me, my fiance Lina and our six-month-old son Camden, who had impressively made it through his first long-haul flight with minimal screaming and therefore only marginal embarrassment to his mums. We were the picture of gaycation bliss.

The fun tourist leg of our trip had started in Phuket and we were now at the business end of our stay an obligatory pit stop at Linas family home in Nong Khai. Shed warned me that her army of aunts would assemble the moment we arrived, expecting us (I assumed) to present our baby to the congregation Lion King style. And, right on cue, what I can only guess was the entire population of the village appeared in her mothers driveway, eager for a first glimpse at our sperm-donor baby.

You guys said he would be black, said a disappointed family member, who hadnt quite got to grips with biracial genetics, presuming perhaps that black only comes in one shade.

Overwhelmed and already out of words (my grasp of the Thai language starts and ends with sawadee ka), I made my excuses and escaped inside, leaving Lina to answer the intrusive questions without me, and our infant son to fend for himself under a swarm of cheek-pinchers and well-wishers.

I closed the bedroom door, which only slightly muffled the commotion outside and, basking in the air con, wondered how I could kill an hour while a never-ending conveyor belt of aunties played pass the parcel with my firstborn. There was no harm in checking how my social media stats were doing, I thought, surely my tree-house view from Kamala Beach had notched up a few hundred likes on Instagram by now. You see, when it comes to social networking Im a lurker more than a poster. My snoop-to-share ratio is weighted so heavily on the former you could actually be fooled into thinking I have better things to do than refresh my feed every thirty minutes. I absolutely dont. So on those sporadic occasions when I actually post something I obsess over its performance, neurotically overthinking how well it will be received and intermittently monitoring its feedback. Because in a world where adulation is king, GOD FORBID I ever end up sharing a picture that gets less than 500 likes.

But I never should have checked my phone on holiday.

H&M is CANCELLED!

H&M have you lost your damned minds?!?!?!

Please retweet to spread the word on this racist company #BoycottHandM #HandMisRacist

Id walked into the middle of an online feeding frenzy, one of those occasional social media moments where everyone is shouting about the same thing. But this wasnt political commentary or Game of Thrones spoilers, it was an uprising of some sort. And by the looks of things, the wall-to-wall fury was of the high-street clothes store variety. A niche subgenre of outrage if ever Id seen one. I swiped curiously through my Twitter feed, eager to catch up with the conversation that everyone seemed to be having. This must be bad , I salivated, so desensitised to communal outrage that it now contributed to my daily intake of online entertainment.

I scrolled past dozens of angry tweets and finally landed on the one that seemed to have started it all. The original post by @nerdabouttown included a picture pulled from the H&M website. coolest monkey in the jungle read the iron-on text printed on the rather cheap-looking H&M hoody. It was modelled by a handsome young black boy who looked no more than six years old.

Im fucking disgusted. Like what was the thought process behind this [H&M]??? read one of @nerdabouttowns follow-up tweets.

And she wasnt the only one up in arms.

Woke up this morning shocked and embarrassed by this photo. Im deeply offended and will not be working with H&M any more, posted musician and H&M brand partner The Weeknd in a searing tweet that was also doing the rounds.

Wait, is that it? I asked myself out loud. This is the H&M hoody that everyones furious about? This is the deeply offensive picture that prompted The Weeknd to cancel his brand endorsement? THIS?!! This 7.99 piece of fabric that probably wont have any words on it at all after two cycles in the washing machine? Theres got to be more to it, I thought as I continued to trawl through tweets.

There wasnt.

I paused for thought. Maybe I was being too casual about the whole thing. Ten days in a tropical climate will work wonders for your patience, so maybe the Singha beers and water sports had just heightened my outrage threshold. I probably wasnt looking at the hoody properly. So I zoomed in on it. I zoomed back out. I looked at it full-screen. I looked at it sideways.

It is kinda offensive, I guess. Why has the black kid gotta be the monkey? I thought, forcing my tribalism to kick in. That social instinct that urges you to speak up for your own in times of moral unrest. An unspoken allegiance between skinfolk that has, for generations, been a means of survival. The sort of blind loyalty that has had me defending Tyler Perrys dog-shit movies for years simply because hes one of us.

I felt like I was supposed to be angry too. But maybe the black kid is wearing the monkey hoody because nobody at H&M associated it with race, said an uninvited voice in my head. Maybe it says more about our expectations of racism than it does about any actual intentions of racism, the voice continued, contradicting everything I thought I was meant to be feeling.

Have you seen this H&M hoody? I texted my mum, completely forgetting that I was supposed to be on holiday at this point.

Yes awful isnt it, she typed at typical mum-pace, replying in the time it would have taken me to compose seven emails and a sonnet.