Actions or Words
Well. The first thing to say, the most and truly important thing to say, is that black lives matter. If you don’t agree with that, you can unsubscribe from this newsletter because we are not going to see eye to eye.
If you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention to the news in the last week, you may feel the same way I do. You may feel despair and heartbreak and anger, for the way Black people are brutalized in this country for the sin of having a different skin color, for the way the police perform acts of domestic terrorism to enforce their power, for the way politicians on seemingly every level are willing to sit back and do nothing.
And if you’re reading this, after the last week, you are probably wondering what on Earth any of this has to do with Disney. It is an exceedingly fair question, and the answer is no doubt much more frivolous than the rest of the news has been. But you may have noticed one of these tweets yesterday on your timeline.
You get the point. And even if you didn’t see these tweets, you probably saw tweets from other big brands, coming out in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement to the point of parody like at the top of the page. On one hand, it is an unqualified good that such large companies support equality. (In that it would be much worse if they took the opposite position.) On the other hand, companies like Disney can do a hell of a lot more than just have its multiple studio accounts tweet out the same message at roughly the same time.
If you’ve been on social media the last few days, you’ve seen links to various GoFundMe pages, from bailouts in various cities to the memorial fund for George Floyd. (The most helpful website I have found is this one, which not only collects a lot of donation sites, but also plenty of helpful tools and resources for those of us whose work to fight racism can never end. The fight itself is never over, and as a cishet white dude, my own work to recognize and push back against my inherent privilege is never finished. It’s a small piece of an extremely large puzzle, but I need to do what I can. As do we all.) What you have not seen is most major companies donating money to these funds. They could. They may well do so soon. But not yet.
This is it, in short: if you have the means to donate, you should. It’s one thing when I can set aside some money for a few of these funds. I am not Disney. And even as Disney struggles through the pandemic, the way many businesses are, they could still put some money towards the movement. So too could many companies, in and out of the entertainment industry. Right now, they choose not to.
Which speaks a hell of a lot louder than a tweet.