when racial humiliation gets mistaken for complicity: on the hudson williams "discourse"
i've been thinking a lot about the whole hudson williams inflammatory photo situation, about whether i want to post anything into the internet abyss, about what i can even contribute to this matter. i've decided i'm going to dump some of my thoughts because this whole thing feels a lot less like run-of-the-mill internet discourse and more like a huge, racially-motivated internet defamation campaign.
it’s disappointing to see people demand accountability from a cyberstalked celebrity for something that may very well have been racial humiliation, coercion, and/or targeting when he was a minor. and just to be clear, the symbols in the photo are absolutely offensive. i’m not disputing that. however, a huge part of the issue for me is how few people seem interested in context & how quickly a decontextualized image has been treated as definitive proof of intent, agency, and endorsement.
i’m going to try to share this without doxxing myself. i’m white. i grew up in a very white suburban neighborhood and attended a predominantly white public high school. the racist bullying in my school was so bad that a major news network made an entire documentary about it. i share the below having spent a lot of time reflecting on my own complacency as a white person & through conversations i’ve had (and still have -- the trauma fucking lingers) with long-term friends who experienced racially-motivated hate daily in our school. i know my school is not unique, which is a large part of the reason why i've decided to share this.
(i’m about to share examples, so if you don’t want to read, i've noted below where the examples end. if you're white, please sit with the discomfort & continue reading.)
in my high school, it was commonplace for students of color -- especially melanated students of color -- to be hazed, degraded, and publicly humiliated. racist harassment and acts of racial terror were normalized, and assimilation to whiteness was expected in order to maintain the school’s (and broader community's) racial hierarchy. for many students of color, belonging was conditional. social acceptance usually required minimizing experiences of racism, laughing along with racist jokes, distancing themselves from other students of color, tolerating humiliation and abuse, proving they were “not like the other [students of color],” etc.
the reward for “playing along” was limited and precarious social inclusion. the punishment was exclusion and ostracization by students and parents alike. for many of my friends and peers, assimilation to whiteness was not a desired choice -- it was survival. people of color are often taught that they must endure racism, degradation, and humiliation to gain access to spaces that white people inhabit by default.
the same weekend my school hosted its annual “diversity night,” a white jewish student drew a sw*stika on a Brown student at a party and posted it on instagram. the Brown student was suspended for three days, and the white student -- whose parents defended him like they were in court -- got away scot-free. my friends of color have repeatedly shared that they felt gaslit by our school, which proudly hosted diversity initiatives, multicultural events, and anti-bullying campaigns, yet did little to hold individual students/friend groups accountable for racist harm. instead, the students who were held accountable were often the very students of color who fell victim to this racist harm.
i feel like a lot of people engaging in the hudson discourse are failing to recognize how often racial humiliation functions as a social ritual that reinforces white supremacy. we now have access to a photo of a teenager who was one of the only people of color in a predominantly white social environment, surrounded by white peers, with hateful symbols drawn on his face. maybe he made terrible decisions. maybe he should have objected. maybe he felt like he couldn’t. the point is, we don't know the context. why are we so quick to dismiss the possibility that an asian teenager in a predominantly white social environment may have been the target of racial humiliation, coercion, or abuse?
i also can't help but think about the model minority myth. asian folks are often expected to navigate racism in ways that are legible to white audiences -- be respectable, agreeable, non-confrontational, respond "correctly," etc. yet racism ofc doesn't always look like open hostility, and survival doesn't always look like resistance. sometimes it looks like silence. or laughing along. or enduring humiliation because the social consequences of refusing are worse. like i said above, for many people of color, assimilation is a strategy for survival. the speed with which folks have dismissed those possibilities says a lot about how narrowly many people understand racism, victimhood, and accountability when asian people are involved.
what's clear is that people have spent months digging through his entire historical internet presence, combing through the private social media accounts of people he knew as a teenager, excavating photos that were never meant for public consumption, and distributing them online to maximize outrage. say what you will about the celebrity as a surveilled public commodity -- that's not the point i'm trying to make here. people are digging through this guy’s life with the explicit goal of finding material that can be used against him, flattening every possible interpretation of the shared image into the one that causes the maximum amount of harm. we act as though the existence of a photograph tells us everything we need to know about the circumstances under which it was taken.
a lot of people seem less interested in understanding context/what happened than they are in destroying him. and (coming from a queer jew) a lot of people are suddenly very eager to weaponize antisemitism and homophobia as "gotchas" when they've never previously demonstrated any meaningful concern for either.
one last thing -- demanding accountability is not the same as pursuing justice. without context, proportionality, or any interest in the truth, it merely feels like part of the spectacle.
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