Throughout this long, locked-down summer, Americans have been seeking to lend new substance to our republic’s age-old challenge of achieving racial justice. Mass actions against racist policing have burgeoned into the largest protest movement in our history, and books advising a predominantly white readership on heightened awareness of the racial disparities assailing our common life have stormed up the bestseller lists—despite some glaring weaknesses in this brand of corporate-sanctioned therapeutic counsel.
 
It’s thus no great surprise that the new moment of racial reckoning has overtaken Instagram, the sprawling photo-based social media site owned by Facebook. In the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd in late May, Instagram’s slideshow format—known, as most things affiliated with the site tend to be, by a cutesy sobriquet, “Instagraphics” became flooded with helpful explainers on how the site’s following can set about the work of identifying and remedying implicit racial bias in their daily lives.
 
It’s a worthy undertaking, as far as it goes—but as The New Republic contributor Rachel Hawley notes, it doesn’t actually go all that far. Gram-rendered campaigns for social justice tend largely to begin and end in the cloistered social world of the model Instagram user. And as with the boom in anti-racist advice literature, that model user is presumed to be white, and their putative grasp of the ugly and tangled history of American white supremacy tends not to run terribly deep—or toward anything all that threatening to them or their Instagram-enabled identities. As a result, the Instagraphics addressing today’s racial crisis veer into glib feel-good sloganeering and regimens of user self-improvement as opposed to disruptive, collective calls for police defunding or abolition of the carceral state. The cumulative effect of this barrage of slideshow presentations is to make racism seem more like an entry on an H.R. division’s to-do list than a crusade uniting an outraged democratic citizenry in a plea for long overdue justice and equality. This outlook of broad social quiescence is more or less nested into the form of the Instagram presentation, as Hawley observes:

Wherever the Instagraphic audience craves authority on a subject that may confuse or intimidate them, Instagraphic creators are happy to supply it. While some viral Instagraphics are one-off endeavors, others belong to larger catalogs; there are entire accounts dedicated to Instagraphic content. Instagraphics from these larger efforts, in particular, tend to approximate the style of educational materials; they may sport titles with a “101” suffix as well as a bibliography of cited works on the last slide. They are effectively “explainers” in the style of Vox, with a specific social-justice bent. (How fitting, then, that Vox recently published an explainer on slideshow activism on Instagram.)

But a breezy tone of explanatory authority is a far cry from an impartial pose of political non-alignment, Hawley argues. The amorphous-yet-concerned affect of explainer-style rhetoric tends to land the audience for such appeals right back where they started from: in a hermetic flurry of energetic pointing, clicking, and downloading—which tends gently to displace any need to resort to anything so messy and fraught as protesting in the streets or canvassing recalcitrant white voters who might not be so quick to adopt postures of online ally-ship.

The trouble with “explainer” content, whether it appears in journalism or on social media, is that it relies on simplification of complex histories and ideas—a process whose outcome depends largely on the ideological perspective of the person doing the simplifying—all while positioning itself as a thoroughly non-ideological product.

This is, then, the source of gut-level misgivings with the popularity of the Instagraphic phenomenon. Instagraphics appear to share the goal of educating on social justice-adjacent topics, particularly issues surrounding racism. But political education is a means to an end, and having scrolled through hours’ worth of these graphics, it’s hard to avoid the knotty fear that most of the creators of this content assume the goal of education is not to step toward mobilization but to be part of a never-ending treadmill in which posts are shared, likes are awarded, and books are sold in greater quantities, but substantial action never quite materializes.... At their worst, Instagraphics can feel incredibly facile—as you watch friends from high school and college repost them to their stories, you may come to suspect the propelling force in this new exchange is not the search for deeper knowledge but rather the desire to feel as if you have contributed to “the movement” without the inconvenience of actually having to do anything.

This state of foggy (if well intentioned) inertia is also hardwired into the Instagram user experience, Hawley notes; unlike the more abrasive and confrontational discourse that dominates Twitter, Instagram harbors an endless stream of consumer-friendly content. That, indeed, is one key reason that the platform has spawned burgeoning corps of brand-aligned “influencers” hawking all manner of goods and experiences for monetary consideration. The problem here, of course, is that consumer brands are also all but allergic to the bald political confrontations that are required to achieve the substance, as opposed to the rhetorical appearance, of racial justice. In place of real-world politics, Hawley writes, Instagram will always proffer “the possibility of self-actualization, possibly through delusion”—together with the promise of still more explainer content, just one more click away.

—Chris Lehmann, editor