Kristen
This week a vile thing happened to a friend of mine. Kristen Howerton is a Blogger and Professor in Southern California. She and her husband have 4 children. Two of them are adopted African-American boys and two of them are daughters born to them. Kristen and her husband are both white, of european descent. I know her professionally as a fellow blogger and have followed her for years.
Here is a screenshot of her twitter page @kristenhowerton
The Attack
Recently a white supremacist, Lana Kokteff, posted a Youtube video in which she used several photos and videos of Kristen and her family without her permission. She did this to mock and condemn Kristen’s attempts to make sure her sons were not isolated from their African-American heritage.
As a result of this video Kristen received a slew of tweets attacking her and her family in the most vile way possible. Not just disgusting words but manipulating images of her sons and daughters to say these things.
She in turn started reporting these people to twitter and asked her friends to do the same. I am asking you to do this as well.
Trust me, I would not request this of standard boorish, ignorant behavior. This is well beyond that, as you will see if you go to her twitter feed. It’s not pretty. It is ugly, vile, disgusting, perverse and beyond the pale.
Periscope
You can see the Periscope live streaming video I did yesterday discussing this topic. The discussion was quite intense.
What You Can Do
Here is what you can do. Go to her twitter feed, @KristenHowerton, and scroll down until you get to the offending tweets. Kristen has retweeted them so you might see a retweet, not the original. That is ok. reporting the retweet will actually report the original tweet. You will be reporting anonymously so there is no need to worry about the attack going your way.
Remember, do not report a tweet if the person is simply disagreeing with Kristen. While you may disagree with that person’s statement, it is not likely to lead to the person being blocked or the tweet being removed. Look for the tweets that say things that are harassing, attacking, threatening, malicious. Don’t worry, they are not hard to find. When you see them click the ‘…’ at the bottom of the tweet. Click Report. There will be a series of questions asking why you want to report the tweet. Go through the questions until the end and click done. It takes a bit of time, but it is worth it.
Here are the choices I made, even for the tweets with images since the images themselves were for the purpose of harassing in my opinion.
The Goal
Kristen has requested you not engage in discussions with those who sent the offensive tweets, it gives them publicity and escalates the conflict. The goal is to have their accounts suspended and to stop the harassment, not get them more riled up.
The Virus Among Us
It is disheartening to see this sort of filth in 2016. But some in my scope and elsewhere have said, “You will always have racism and racists.” When I hear that I always get the distinct impression that the unsaid next sentence is “So don’t try to fight them.” That to me is like saying “We will always have viruses so don’t try to fight them.”
Racism, sexism, ageism…these are terrible viruses among us. They aren’t to be ignored, they are to be fought. If remnants remain, so be it. But that doesn’t mean you don’t fight.
Thank you and feel free to share this post to gather more to fight the virus.
© 2016 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Yes because White girls wanting White dolls is evil racist supremacy! Report to the PC police now! This write up doesn’t even get the story right. Watch the video before writing such inaccurate garbage crying “racism.”
Actually I did watch the entire video and it was racist in my opinion. I never said, nor did Kristen say, that white girls wanting to play with white dolls is racist. It’s not, anymore than black girls wanting to play with black dolls is. Neither is racist.
What Kristen was doing was showing an alternative event, where her daughters did not cry at being given dolls of other races, but instead liked them. This was to counter the obviously skewed agenda of the video producer, who wanted to convince her followers that white girls only want to play with white dolls and they are being forced by our culture to play with dolls of other races against their will.
However, if YOU read my post, and if you read the twitter feed that Kristen was referring to, you would have known that is primarily what I was talking about in my story. Those comments weren’t just racist, they were vile, despicable, inhuman garbage attacking a woman and her family, including her young children.
If you in anyway think that those attacks can be defended then you are delusional. You have been sucked into a skewed and perverse way of looking at the world that turned you into a person who rationalizes hate over understanding.