Someone was wrong on the Internet

BLOT: (10 Jun 2015 - 08:51:55 PM)

Someone was wrong on the Internet

Two-ish years ago, I wrote a blog post about the Monson Motor Lodge incident, in which I attacked a Tumblr post for claiming that a group of protestors were black children out for a swim (which I felt was not only disrespectful to the protestors, but also disruptive to discussions about the St. Augustine Movement in general), and talked about not only the context of the incident but also the way that images (as well as anecdotes) can be flavored before we even see them by a caption, or a link. You can read it yourself, that link above is effectively unedited (besides to put a bumper linking back to here). Read my write-up, if you haven't, and then come back. This'll wait.

It has gone on to be one of the most read posts on this blog, read much more than the horror and weird posts, and while not everyone agrees with it [for various reasons], 99% of the discussion that has come my way has been by people interested in why I worded something the way I did or why I wrote it or what not, basically intelligent discussion and debate.

Found out, today, that someone found the blog post a couple of days back, and completely misread it, tweeting out: "when I went looking for this pic [note: not the exact one in the blog post, but of the same incident], I found this hilarious blog which tries to say that it isn't that bad in context". Note that "this hilarious blog" he is claiming hand-waves the incident includes this paragraph:

Think about what would make someone see a photo of a man pouring acid into a pool full of people, an act designed to terrify and to attack, and then try to spruce it up by saying that it was children and kind of implying that these were kids just out for a swim. And think about people who respond to the caption rather than the evidence. Finally, think about all the other parts: the large crowd and the complex history and the fact that if you look at the second, where it is a very nice beach-side place, it doesn't look like a cheap motel pool turned into a tragedy, anymore. It loses its claustrophobia but gains a truth of what the protesters were really up against: institutionalized racism from the sort of people that were probably really nice to their pets and had loving parents and good, church-going children and, more importantly, thought of themselves as morally upright citizens doing the right thing for their society.

Which is a Doug way of saying that it was, if anything, worse in context. And way more complicated.

Part of what is going on here is that the picture resurfaces every couple of months. Last year was the 50th anniversary. That link goes to a NPR post about it that is worth reading, because it includes some comments from the protestors themselves. Another recent resurgence of the pic was due to the incident where a cop pulled a gun on teenagers at a pool party, which is being linked for obvious reasons to the Monson Motor Lodge incident.

However, because the picture keeps resurfacing, people keep refinding that blog post. Though it the second paragraph it responds directly to the "June, 1964. Black children integrate the swimming pool of the Monson Motel" Tumblr caption, and despite the constant callback throughout the whole thing that "why would you say it was children to sell it?", what I've found is that people tend to skip all the context of my post and assume that I'm somehow discussing whatever caption/link they saw connected with the picture. Then, depending on said link/caption, they try to apply my "don't make monsters when history made plenty of its own" in varied ways. In the case of the aforementioned erroneous tweeter, it seemed to assume I was somehow defending James Brock, despite that language never showing up anywhere in the post. I guess the "plenty of monsters" language was also overlooked.

Where it gets interesting is that in the end, this incident verified the post further than anything else. One of my major points is that if you tell someone what a picture means, or what a bit of history means, before sharing it with them, you have already corrupted their ability to see it as part of a larger picture. They see it through your filter, even if later they find out they disagree with you. It is a powerful trick to play, like changing soundtracks to a movie to change the emotional experience. To wit, I've now seen a few other people link to my post as somehow against the protestors instead of against people calling them children.

To clarify, in a tl;dr fashion:

"We create a fake monstrous thing," means when we claim they were children just out for a swim instead of protestors part of a larger [and important] movement,
The Bill Murray example was meant to be ridiculous, and a comment about the power of suggestion to confuse even the evidence before us,
I personally think that James Brock was an asshole for doing it, even if he knew (and as I say, reports vary) that it wasn't going to harm anyone,
I'm not angry at anyone, nor amused, nor precisely neutral. It's mostly surreal that people are linking to the post without reading it, or taking bits of out of context, and ignoring the whole point of it...when that is the point of it.

Again, you don't have to agree with me, but it does help if you address what I am saying instead of your fictional account of it.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: June 2015