PostShame 2.0: Living #PostShame and Being Lucky Enough to be “Called In”
April, 2021Living #PostShame and Being Lucky Enough to be “Called In”
In a recent episode of the web series Safe Space at NeueHouse that I co-host with Danielle James I was telling her my journey launching PostShame.org and #PostShame beginning with the release of my nudes.
Danielle generously listened to my entire story and then she surprised me by saying, “I wanted to talk to you about this. I love Post Shame so much and I believe in what you’re doing but I don’t believe Post Shame is for everybody. Post Shame, to me, is a perfect example of white privilege. If I have nudes...I wouldn’t feel empowered to release them because I feel like the same level of forgiveness is not given to Black people or even women.”
When I re-watch that moment, I can see the expression on my face straining to conceal what was happening inside my head. Clenched jaw. Calm grin. Adam Listening Face. I stay in it as long as I can until my discomfort turns to defensiveness and I offer a ready-made talking point I’ve rehearsed over the last four years: “I’m always on the lookout for folks who feel strong enough to lead in their community --”
And Danielle cuts me off to say, “I don’t even think it’s about strength - please - for Black women - what is the cost of leading?”
In that moment I experienced a reckoning wondering if #PostShame was worth anything.
I was so scared that #PostShame and its mission of helping people find something in their past they worry would leak on the internet and leak it on their own with context was maybe only available to folks that looked exactly like me. Was my queerness erased by my appearance and therefore privilege?
Post Shame was designed to mitigate some of the costs of leading by disarming, deweaponizing, what one fears would cause public humiliation, bullying, slut-shaming, and cruelty online.
But in my efforts to lead by example I did not see how my example was so specific to my lived experience as a white cis-genered man?
I had an aching pit in my stomach thinking that the thing I’d been building for four years and the lens through which I’ve come to every conversation about politics, the internet, public shaming, was fundamentally flawed.
In my effort to reveal double standards in our culture was I simply showing off what I was able to get away with?
If so, is there a path forward for #PostShame after this reckoning?
***
Danielle and I cried together the week after George Floyd’s murder. Based on the memes and tweets I was seeing in my instagram and twitter feeds I was afraid of falling into the trap of well-meaning white folks texting their Black friends, or worse their Black acquaintances, “Hey, how are you doing with everything going on?”
Danielle and I giggled about the ridiculousness of text messages of our mutual friends doing the thing. She laughingly said “ ‘with what’s going on’ ?! I was Black yesterday, I’m Black today and I’ll be Black tomorrow!”
This stuff “going on” was her lived experience her whole life. It wasn’t until she told me that, that I truly understood a key difference between us.
Like other well-meaning white folks, I felt like the events of the summer 2020 were somehow “new.” I thought I understood white privilege, but after listening more closely to how the events of the Summer of 2020 unfolded in Danielle’s world, I realized that summer had been enduring her whole life.
With this new understanding I wanted to get into action right away. Danielle and I decided to revisit an idea we had for a show where we would frankly discuss questions we have about the other’s experience. The result would end up being a web series on NeueHouse’s platform. We called the show #SafeSpace and its tag line was “Tough Conversations in Good Humor.” We set out to ask each other questions we might be afraid to ask with others watching.
The pilot has a moment where I say to Danielle, “So, I knowwwwwww the reason why, because we’re friends, but I didn’t always know why...but why can’t I ask to touch your hair?” to which she replied, “Oooooh, see, even though we’ve talked about it, it doesn't even feel good to have you ask that. You have no idea how many white people have asked to touch my hair. And it’s hurtful every time. I’m not your toy.”
We set out to build a library of video content that could be easily shared amongst friends in private. In their own safe spaces. We wanted to be relatable while we talked about tough stuff: the funny friends you could see yourself hanging out with while getting serious.
Danielle agreed to do it because she wanted a way to communicate that she felt it was up to white folks to do the work. I wanted to model a white person confronting white privilege and hopefully provide an accessible rubric so others might do the same.
Our shared goal was to encourage deeper conversations.
We knew there were huge barriers to these types of conversations: there’s the fear of actually hurting another person’s feelings with an insensitive remark, and the fear of getting called out for being wrong. Danielle and I were having the hard talks, and in an after-episode check-in Danielle said to me, “Adam, it’s like you’ve been invited to the BBQ. Not all white folks are invited to the BBQ.”
It was in that moment we realized that despite my gaps in knowledge or understanding we were modeling what it means to be “called in” instead of “called out.”
Once we started doing live recordings on NeueHouse’s platform the feedback was extremely thoughtful. People watching - black and white - said, “Please keep doing this. Stay in it.” I felt honored and grateful to Danielle for doing this work with me.
***
After the disastrous results of the 2016 election I decided it was finally time to run for office.
Knowing a little bit about politics, I began doing opposition research on myself. I knew that there were too many salacious bits of my past recorded - hackable, leakable (the internet remembers everything) - that could quickly derail my campaign. #PostShame, in its infancy, was going to simply be a way for me to get ahead of all of the stuff in my past that I worried would derail me if I ran for office.
I had spent several years working to get two collections of nude photos of me scrubbed from the internet. I was successful, but never felt good about it, considering the way nude photo hacks and upskirt photos of female celebrities persisted.
In this moment, like so many people, I was falling in love with everything Brené Brown has ever said.
Brown says “Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it - it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy.” I wanted to synthesize all her TED Talks and apply it to my nascent campaign.
I wanted to live a life after shame. I knew I had to release the naked photos on my own.
I wrote an essay called “What To Do When You Find Naked Photos of Yourself On The Internet”.
It went viral. I took it on the road. I did interviews. And I used this new lens as a way to look at everything from shame-click-culture to how public shaming is dramatically hastened by the internet.
I set out to find that first “class” of candidates to run and release their nudes on their own. It took me to Harvard, a little press tour on podcasts and I got to interview people I admired in the internet privacy and policy space and get to know leaders smashing taboos like Erin Gibson with her book Feminasty.
I was having a gleeful experience, unafraid to share my story of leaking my own nudes.
But during this kind of victory lap celebrating my own #PostShame moment a consistent response to my story was: when a woman’s nudes are leaked she almost immediately receives threats of sexual violence on Twitter.
Blindspot #1 was revealed.
I committed to growing #PostShame as a tool - a continuously growing conversation - about the double standards of how men and women are treated online.
I turned to women as trusted advisors. I became laser focused on gender as the great shaming mechanism. I followed Katie Hill’s experience with revenge porn. I learned as much as I could about the coming wave of deep fakes and who they will be used against first. I investigated activists living out and proud despite the cacophony of online hate thrown their way.
I thought I was about to be knighted as an honorary Spice Girl.
However, during the summer of 2020 I was about to be shown Blindspot #2.
Danielle showed me that this big thing I’d been working on, talking about, thinking about, regaling dinner parties with, was actually founded in my race and my privilege.
Hearing she felt she couldn’t do what I was doing made me feel terrible. I worried that Danielle would feel our difference and want to friend-break up with me because I’m a white dude and I was doing a white dude thing.
I was operating from a place of racialized ignorance: I was considering the ways people get shamed on the internet but I had had a blindspot around race. I was ignorant to the fact that shame is always gendered and racialized. I had so much more learning to do. Here I am, calling myself an activist and an ally to women and inadvertently leaving a whole group out.
While building and being so very #PostShame I ended up feeling shame.
Turns out releasing my nudes was easy. The recognition that I had created something exclusive that was supposed to be inclusive had me shocked at myself.
Following my own steps of living #PostShame and I went to my trusted advisors. I shared my experience of having my blind spot revealed to me by Danielle. I listened to them, and I wrestled with what I was putting out there, and how it was affecting others.
Call it critical thinking, call it growing, call it learning how to be a better friend - I arrived at a new understanding.
That new understanding gave me the courage to share my story, in hopes it helps spark another white person’s learning.
This process made me want to renew my mission. If #PostShame v1 was all about reckoning with our shame and leadership beyond it, #PostShame v2 is about the questions of who is shamed and for what, and about our experiences of figuring that out.
I apologize to those to whom I was committing casual racism when I got all high and mighty about my project, not fully understanding that shame is always gendered and radicalized. I feel guilty for having inadvertently flaunted my privilege. I’m willing to stay in the conversation and confront the ways I’m complicit.
I count myself lucky to have had a friend as patient as Danielle who was brave enough to tell me what she really felt, based on her lived experience. I hope people witness our story and start having tough conversations about what’s going on in their lives. One “calling in” at a time.