#MenAreTrash and I am men. When the political becomes personal

Obviously, the persona we project on social media is a rose-tinted version of our day-to-day existence in the physical world. But what is not often noted is the impact of the social media environment on our so-called “real life”.

Sometimes these effects are nothing more serious than social media providing a topic of conversation, or being a running commentary for what we’re up to in our daily lives.

However, at other times, social media has a deeper impact. Sometimes it transcends memes, viral tweets and internet hits, and describes a trend, an attitude and a mood. A set of values.

These values are often valid, noble and progressive. They may be the result of an outpouring of outrage against injustice. For example the #metoo movement against the epidemic of harassment, sexual violence and rape of women by men. Likewise, the #AmINext hashtag drew attention to the daily threat to their lives and safety that women face.

By extension, the #MenAreTrash hashtag provides a useful generalisation for women in our society, surrounded as they are by dangerous men looking to seduce, deceive and exploit them for their personal gratification, if not outright rape them. When most men present a rape risk, it is useful to avoid them like trash, until they prove otherwise.

In the racial space, the more militant, “woke” branch of the Twitter community is led by an army of assertive, conscious black people who refuse to perform racial politeness, and will not excuse intentional or oblivious racism from whites.

These proud black souls are also deeply aware of the structural oppression of blacks that survives in the economic composition of our society, typified by generational privilege and wealth in the hands of white people, ongoing white dominance of business structures, and a clumsy sense of white entitlement.

White monopoly capital, or #WMC, has become the shorthand for this lingering white dominance and its effects, whether incidental or planned. This hashtag is a legacy of the state capture era, when a British PR firm was engaged to sow racial division in South African society to muddy the waters around theft of state resources.

No doubt white people are and have been involved in similar unjust exploitation of South Africa for centuries, and we remain so. Many of us are racist – either consciously or subconsciously.

However, many of us dream and work towards a united and democratic South Africa, “conscious of the injustices of the past”, as it says in the preamble to the constitution.

Likewise, there are men among us, who accept that women are literally under siege by male predators, and risk their lives and their safety every day. We strive to support women and their fight for equal rights and protection, even if we may be clumsy and inadequate as we do so.

Unfortunately, these polarising, though important, social media movements can also polarise personal relationships.

Where whites are portrayed online as racist exploiters of blacks, what does that do to individual interactions between black and white people?

When men are trash, why would you want to be in a relationship with one?

The sad fact is that social media attitudes affect, and infect, our relationships in the real world. The political becomes personal. The broad becomes narrow. What they say, affects what we do and say to each other.

Social polarisation – even when based on facts and general, lived experience – can lead to personal tensions. Between friends, lovers, co-workers and casual acquaintances.

It may seem obvious to say that we should assess everyone according to their individual character and their behaviour. But we are each also representatives of our groups. A man is a symbol of all men, a white person represents all white people, and our generalised attitudes can determine how we relate to those people.

Should we not see race? Not see gender? Of course not. They are determinant.

Can we make an exception for certain people, exempting them from our attitude to their comrades? Should we?

I believe that in our interpersonal relationships we must remain aware of a person’s group, but we need to foreground their personhood. What they show us is what we should judge them on.

And in doing so, we need to be careful of living out other people’s generalised opinions – on social media and elsewhere – in our specific personal space.

As the great Lucky Dube said in his classic song Eyes of the Beholder, “I’ve got to be aware of who I listen to!”

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