Performative solidarity in the digital space

March 30, 2022 1:08 PM

In 2021, an elderly white woman dying from COVID-19 made a death bed confession that as a child she had falsely accused a Black boy of touching her inappropriately. Her accusation lead to a lynching and house burning. Tens of millions of people saw the TikTok video. Five million liked it. Historian and expert on the topic Stacey Patton points out that this particular story probably didn't actually happen and explores why white people were so eager to believe it and share it. [Includes frank discussions of both real and made-up racial violence.]
posted by eotvos (26 comments total)

Toby Rollo, a political studies professor at Lakehead University whose research focuses on themes of childhood and race, says that the viral popularity of this video is a sign that white people want to believe in redemption and absolve whiteness of its serial crimes.

Sounds legit.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:24 PM on March 30, 2022 [13 favorites]

“To me, there are two sides of the racist coin in which, on the one hand, white people make up stories about Black people attacking them to cover their own crimes and misdeeds. And, on the other hand, white people making up stories about catching other white people in the act of being racist – once again – probably to cover their own crimes and misdeeds,” Rollo said. He added, “Because if just one white person can be shown to be redeemable, then whiteness itself is redeemed. Now we have bad whites and good whites, instead of just whiteness. White people want to believe in redemption.”

Dawn’s video is less about describing the grisly details of a lynching than it is about denouncing the behavior of racist white person. By posting this story on social media, she did what too often passes for activism and solidarity among many liberal whites without any real obligation to dismantle racist systems. Denying the dying racist forgiveness in her conclusion. She thought this was the right thing to do and she wanted applause for putting a racist person in her place.

QFT.

I'm glad people like Stacey Patton and her colleagues exist in the world to debunk bullshit like this. It's deeply horrible but not surprising that aspiring social media stars will stoop to such lows to get attention. The description of Dawn's original video makes me want to physically cringe. Ugh.
posted by fight or flight at 1:27 PM on March 30, 2022 [9 favorites]

Redemption by proxy seems to be a drive among many hoaxes that are, for lack of better term, too good to be true.

We've fallen for them before. The juiciest ones really allow you to demonize those individuals who are willing to call bullshit on the story. That doesn't seem to be the case here, thank goodness.

I don't know what kind of sense of absolution one gets for granting a "like" or "thumbs up" to such story. I think it's got to be worth as much as any TikTok. Maybe even two thumbs up for Dawn herself.
posted by 2N2222 at 2:10 PM on March 30, 2022

I have personally known elderly people suffering from dementia or in deep/failing illness and normal people during the wearing-off phase of anesthetics to make claims of events (sometimes as victim, and sometimes as perpetrator) that literally never happened, but otherwise reflected some aspect of their own anxieties or past traumas.

If I heard a deathbed or recovery-room confession from anyone in an altered or otherwise unclear mental state, I would definitely withhold my judgment unless I could corroborate it.
posted by tclark at 2:40 PM on March 30, 2022 [35 favorites]

DuRocher explains that white girls told these damning lies for attention and clout. “It appears that most adolescents and girls utilized the power to accuse and identify for a measure of personal gain rather than for political power; the benefits the girls sought ranged from monetary compensation and communal attention to hiding misbehaviors and sexual promiscuity,” DuRocher shares.

“White girls occasionally received praise for assisting in punishing a would-be ravager or helping to catch violators of segregation’s mores.”

And now white people trying to receive praise one step removed from the original action, seemingly without a trace of awareness about perpetuating another manifestation of harm.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 2:55 PM on March 30, 2022 [7 favorites]

So I watched the entire 9 minute video, which was a compilation that included Dawn's video. It's not just this one white lady's story, there's seven different people telling stories about confessions from elderly patients. Maybe the nurses are making the stories up. Maybe the patients are making the stories up. Maybe the patients' dementia is causing them to confuse fantasy and reality. Here's one of them:

"Not only murder, but a lot of old white people want to confess a lot of racist crimes they committed. I remember there was one police officer who was telling me back in the 60s he solved the biggest crime in New York City that was a jewelry theft at a hotel. He was very proud of this and he told me he got promoted and everything. And when I asked him how he figured out who the assailant was, he said "it was easy, it was the one black guy who was working there. I beat him up, I got him to confess. We never found the jewels but I got my man." No man, you blame the one black guy and got promoted, you never found the actual jewels, I hope that guy burns in hell."

This nurse (@myundocumentedass on TikTok) is person of color. Is he making this story up "for clout"? Is his anger "performative solidarity" and "virtue signaling"? Is Stacey Patton going to investigate NYC crime reports for records of this jewel theft and, if she can't find records of this half-century old case, write some clickable content casting doubt about it? This is all part of the same video, so is she going to point out that this nurse's story of a racist cop got five million thumbs up and then ask "What's that about?"

A couple of the nurses are emphatic about this: "Sometimes that's just a normal Tuesday for us to hear this stuff". Another said, "Oh yeah, that is definitely a thing that absolutely nobody talks about enough in nursing. [...] If you work on a memory unity, I know for a fact you have at least one story where an old lady with dementia was talking about how she poisoned her husband."

But clearly Dawn, the first white lady in the video, was lying about hearing this racist confession. For clout. Patton writes:

"White people are gaining clout off their stories of catching other white people being racist. There’s also a cottage industry among healthcare workers right now"

OH REALLY. A cottage industry? Like the way the Cosby accusers were lying for fame and money? (Money and fame that never seemed to actually materialize for them, though they did receive online harassment.)

I don't use the comparison to Cosby accusers lightly. There's seven people (one wasn't a nurse but worked in the care facility) who are telling stories like this. Are they all lying? Are they all hoaxes? Remember, Patton's focus is not dementia-patients-say-all-sorts-of-things, but this-white-lady-is-making-it-up-for-clout.

There's a lot of other things I would comment on about this article (a lot, especially the way Patton writes about Dawn's intent, honesty, reading comprehension skills, and how she didn't have the right kind of emotional reaction to hearing a horrifying confession from a stranger), but I'm going to back off for now.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:58 PM on March 30, 2022 [9 favorites]

This is all part of the same video, so is she going to point out that this nurse's story of a racist cop got five million thumbs up and then ask "What's that about?"

Uh, the video you watched was posted by the official TikTok YouTube account, not by Patton, so presumably it's just an example of the original video (since Dawn deleted it) for the sake of the article and not an example of the rest of her work? I don't know why you seem to think Patton has to investigate every single story of nurses taking beside confessions in order to justify this one particular (very well researched and backed up) article.
posted by fight or flight at 3:04 PM on March 30, 2022 [10 favorites]

Ah, I can see where the confusion may have come from AlSweigart -- did you assume that the video in the article is the one Patton is talking about having watched and disseminated? If so you might want to note that Patton specifically says she watched the original TikTok, which has since been deleted after Dawn got so much backlash once people started poking at the "facts" of the case.

It's like someone writing an article about a Red Hot Chili Peppers song but they can't find a version of the exact RHCP video they're talking about, so they embed the next best option, which is a compilation of a bunch of other bands + the RHCP song. That doesn't mean they're going to talk about the other songs, it's just the nearest thing they could find to the source.

It's also entirely possible that Patton didn't have any control over which video was embedded in her article and it was chosen by the editor or whoever uploaded it, so she might not have actually seen that video at all..
posted by fight or flight at 3:13 PM on March 30, 2022 [4 favorites]

Because it's the video that's linked in the first sentence of the article.

In the article, Patton says that that video is a compilation that includes Dawn's video, before Dawn deleted her video. Her take away from the compilation isn't it-is-common-for-nurses-to-hear-these-kinds-of-stories but:

"Did these stories provide Dawn with the inspiration for her video?"

The accusative tone is obvious, despite Patton just-asking-questions.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:15 PM on March 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

The accusative tone is obvious, despite Patton just-asking-questions.

I thought the accusative tone was pretty obvious from the point where Patton (rightly) calls Dawn out on her entirely performative attempt at activism, no?

I mean, Patton straight up says this:

I am not inclined to extend grace to Dawn for this video which feels like the latest addition to America’s archive of pornographic racial delights. What I see is a white woman’s horror story mixed with new age witchcraft while carrying crystals in her bra to show that white people are woke and trying to curry favor with Black folks while performatively sipping tea. Dawn appears to be signaling to Black folks that not all white people are bad. That’s she’s one of the good ones. That she knows our culture even if she can’t read dates and get basic facts straight.

[...]

But for this journalist and historian whose own family has been touched by lynching, I consider this kind of performative solidarity in the digital space as yet another example of how we can be seduced into Black trauma porn while emotionally investing in the illusion of white redemption that lies even while it tries to indict itself for its own crimes.

If you're trying to read this article as Patton attempting to understand Dawn and "just asking questions", you're reading it wrong, imo. It's clearly intended as a criticism of Dawn's lies and attention seeking faux-progressiveness. So your outrage is somewhat misplaced (and, I would say, way over the top for both the subject and the tone of the piece).
posted by fight or flight at 3:22 PM on March 30, 2022 [5 favorites]

did you assume that the video in the article is the one Patton is talking about having watched and disseminated?

No, I did not.

Dawn deleted her original video. I've heard enough stories of being-a-woman-on-the-internet to take a guess at the kinds of messages she was being sent, so I can understand the deletion. A lot of racists were probably sending her emails calling her a liar also. But Patton writes:

"When Chris reached out to Dawn to inquire about her inconsistencies, she insulted him and deleted her viral video."

"Inconsistencies"? She told an anecdote about a deathbed confession she heard from an elderly patient. It may or may not have happened. It may have happened but the patient may have gotten dates wrong. Maybe Patton and Driskell failed to find the records, or the records just didn't exist anymore, or the records were never created in the first place. Any number of things could have happened to explain it. Why is Patton framing it as guilty-liar-deletes-the-evidence?
posted by AlSweigart at 3:23 PM on March 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you're trying to read this article as Patton attempting to understand Dawn and "just asking questions", you're reading it wrong, imo.

That's not how I'm reading it.

Just-asking-questions (also called "JAQing off") is a term to describe when people ask loaded questions. In this case, Patton's "Did these stories provide Dawn with the inspiration for her video?" is a stand-in for Patton saying "These stories provided Dawn with the inspiration to make up her story."
posted by AlSweigart at 3:29 PM on March 30, 2022 [7 favorites]

Maybe Patton and Driskell failed to find the records, or the records just didn't exist anymore, or the records were never created in the first place. Any number of things could have happened to explain it.

I don't want this to become a back and forth argument here, but I have to say coming into the comments of this article in particular to defend a white woman (at length) against very well researched and thoughtful criticism from a black woman, and citing the Cosby case of all things while doing so, is not a good look and profoundly undermines any useful points you have.

But I'll leave things here to stop it becoming an aforementioned back and forth.
posted by fight or flight at 3:30 PM on March 30, 2022 [11 favorites]

DuRocher explains that white girls told these damning lies for attention and clout.

White women absolutely victimized black boys and men. I don't know what I think about the claim that they (or girls) did it for attention and clout. This phrasing is exactly the language that is regularly used to discredit victims of sexual assault.
posted by oneirodynia at 4:04 PM on March 30, 2022 [7 favorites]

Even if this story was 100% true, It's not in my view at all okay for a white woman to take the story of a lynching to TikTok where she'd make money off of it from their creator's fund and get likes or thumbs up for whatever. If it's true, it's still fucking disrespectful, still benefiting from the objectification of Black folks for the benefit of white people, just at a remove.

When folks hear about someone being brutalized, and their sympathy and trust is for the person who witnessed it, or caused it, or was accused of it, or made a tiktok about it, and not with the person who was harmed and their family, I truly wish those folks would reassess who they are giving empathy and trust to. I wish they stopped for a moment, imagined it was a member of their family or an ancestor, and kept that in mind.

Also when experts on the violence used against Black people or other marginalized groups tell you something, I feel folks should maybe resist the urge to assume they know better unless they are equally versed in the history they have studied and can cite facts to support their view. The tendency for people with privilege to assume their own expertise is in assessing the specific claims of others serves to underpin and preserve many systems of oppression against challenges to them.

Anyway, I hope anyone who gets a long-ago lynching confessed to them, or finds evidence of some other historical crime brings it privately to Stacey Patton or someone like her; maybe she can find the family and pass that on. If it's something where people involved might be alive, I hope you go to the FBI or something. That's the respectful thing to do, in my view.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 4:21 PM on March 30, 2022 [15 favorites]

In re dementia: my mother died of an atypical dementia. She did not confess to any crimes or misdeeds at the end, but she said some extremely disturbing stuff and had some weird violent hallucinations. When your brain is literally dying and failing, the thing that makes your personality stable and keeps you pinned to consensus reality is literally dying and failing. Damage to the physical structures of our brains can really, really change personality, create false perceptions, etc.

I would definitely believe an experienced nurse who heard what sounded to them like a plausible deathbed narrative because the nurse would be in a position to observe the patient over time and would have a wide range of similar experiences with other patients for comparison. I would not categorically believe every surprising and weird-sounding story from someone dying of dementia because I have seen firsthand someone narrating a weird creepy hallucination.
posted by Frowner at 4:28 PM on March 30, 2022 [19 favorites]

This isn’t really the story of “Dawn, the lady on TikTok who probably made some shit up” is it? Perhaps it does spend too many words castigating Dawn, specifically, but the part that’s insightful is the part that’s about the role of a kind of story more broadly. Where the details of the specific story are relevant is in backing up Patton’s framing of that role and frankly

The dying woman wanted to relieve her consciousness and receive absolution before transitioning to the afterlife. “She asked if she could be forgiven. I told her the only person who could forgive her was the boy she killed. Not sorry.”

I find that a pretty convincing take on what the story is doing.

She continued, “You wanna know why? Because she saw that his sisters had prettier dresses than she did. And she just didn’t like it. So, she lied.”

That’s as offensive a characterization of a woman’s motivations as anything people have taken issue with in this thread, all to set up the teller’s moment of righteousness.
posted by atoxyl at 5:47 PM on March 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

I find that a pretty convincing take

Patton’s take that the story serves to demonstrate that the teller is a good white person, I mean.
posted by atoxyl at 5:59 PM on March 30, 2022

Historian and expert on the topic Stacey Patton points out that this particular story probably didn't actually happen

No, she doesn't. She says she can find no record of it. She goes on to observe:

"At least 4,000 human souls were lynched in America between 1882 and 1968, and doubtless many more whose names have been lost to history. Most of these crimes took place in the South, and the overwhelming number of documented victims were Black males. As historian Vincent Vinikas has noted, “Those missing altogether from the record are inaccessible to historical inquiry. Many lynching victims belong to a secret and irrecoverable past.”

Whether this nurse’s story can be confirmed through documentary research is an open question, but this lynching certainly could have happened exactly as the dying woman recalled it."

posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 7:34 PM on March 30, 2022 [5 favorites]

The internet: It's self-righteousness all the way down.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 8:18 PM on March 30, 2022 [5 favorites]

if the storyteller, in whatever condition she was in when she told the story to the tik-toker, went to a serious journalist and told this story with no other corroborating evidence besides her say so, would they publish it? i dont think so. social media, if you want to trust it, should be held to the same standard. otherwise anybody can say anything that feels true or like it might be true or should be true, and hey, fuck it, good enough.

that is not to diminish in any way the actual history of lynching in america which, as the article points out, is something actual historians have spent lifetimes memorializing. in fact, to glom uncorroborated nonsense to the actual history is the real disservice to memory.
posted by wibari at 10:21 PM on March 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Appreciate that Patton contextualized and framed this moment. Her basic thesis, that this specific event is unlikely to have happened, and whether or not it happened, that the TikToker's framing - of herself as a good white person - is self serving and runs counter to the needs and desires of Black people, seems right on.

The article points to, and this metafilter thread seems to reproduce, how very little theoretical framework we have to think about, for example, the broad impact of anti-Black violence has in US culture, or on how gender is leveraged to reinforce a racialized class system.I mean, neither a politics of white deference to Black speakers (as suggested above), nor a politics of Believe Women (as also referenced above) seems useful for framing the situation highlighted in the article, which is further complicated by the special role that nurses have in the culture right now as 'heroes' of the COVID crisis.

From my vantage point, this story just seems like hooey. Sure, demented people make stuff up (my demented mom would frequently just fill in details that made sense to her but had no basis in fact to explain the world around her), but also, we ALL do that. You don't have to be demented to twist your history, it's literally how memory works that we over-write our memories each time we recall them. There is no protected repository of memory in our brains, instead, every story we hear on the news or in history class or in movies or from people around us shapes and distorts how we perceive the things we directly experienced. An old person on their death bed has had many years to re-write their own stories beyond recognition. And Patton points out that this supposed deathbed story echoes older cultural tropes of deathbed confessions. Which no doubt unconsciously or consciously influenced this nurse in how she either recalled or made up the story.

My takeaway is that as a culture, many of us have absorbed the idea that racist harms have had a terrible impact on society and on Black people especially. Whites who have little direct experience of these harms, and have done no special work to learn about them, want to be 'good guys' and attempt to signal their goodness and position themselves on the 'right side'. In the case of this particular person (who, I would guess, is a well intentioned young person who unfortunately was born into a moment where anyone has access to a video platform that can immediately reach the whole world) tried to show her goodness through some combination of lack of analysis and confabulation. And that's emblematic of an overall problem in how we think about racist harms, especially how white people think of racist harms.
posted by latkes at 5:35 AM on March 31, 2022 [11 favorites]

From my vantage point, this story just seems like hooey.

I don’t think it would be too cynical of me to suggest that this isn’t the only one of these “deathbed confession” stories that is probably hooey. People make up stuff all the time for all kinds of reasons, and people want to get on a bandwagon of having a story to tell, and social media is designed to reward users for doing whatever catches people’s attention, and one could write about these kinds of trends from that perspective, too. It’s just the use of this particular theme also feels like a petty exploitation (intentional or not) of tragic Black history.
posted by atoxyl at 8:54 AM on March 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm wondering whether the version of OCD which causes the feeling of having committed a crime might lead to some false deathbed confessions.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:00 AM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

From the article: “Black men and boys remain the primary targets of white women’s rage in the United States. This brutalization of Black males occurred in a world where white women were actually sexually assaulting Black males and accusing these men and boys of rape if they refused the white woman’s advances." attributed to Tommy Curry, a philosophy professor at the University of Edinburgh

Dang, that is an extraordinary claim.
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 11:36 AM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

The video link in the article “deathbed confessions from nurses” is gross. Nurses are professionals. That is private workplace info, not fodder for your me generation tiktokkery. These kids today.
posted by freecellwizard at 3:31 PM on April 1, 2022