Until about a week ago, I had no idea who Logan Paul was. Apparently, I was in the minority given his nearly 20 million YouTube subscribers and 3 billion views. But that doesn't matter now because unless you've been living under a rock, everybody knows who Logan Paul is.
That unfortunate fact is a result of the incomprehensibly disturbing video Paul posted to YouTube last Sunday of him and his friends visiting Japan's historic Aokigahara forest and showcasing the body of a man who had presumably commit suicide. Yes — an actual dead body.
Oh, but the horror doesn't end there. As it turns out, Paul's abhorrent disrespect and ignorance extended to his entire stay in Japan, as was discovered when this compilation video that shows Paul carelessly meandering around Tokyo mocking Japanese culture went viral.
Yup. Logan Paul is pretty much human garbage. But beyond that, his antics prove just how dangerous it is to keep engaging in this culture that props up talentless white men who offer a distorted sense of comfort and refuses to hold them accountable. This is the same culture that has removed the video in question, yet has failed to ban Paul from YouTube. It's the culture that has allowed Paul to monetize his apology video — which currently stands at nearly 35 million views — while YouTube continues to demonetize "sensitive" LGBTQ and mental health content.
This culture has allowed an entire system of excused accountability to flourish under it — a system where privileged members of society don't need to answer for their behavior; where Harvey Weistein's career was allowed to span almost four decades before he was held accountable for over 80 sexual assault allegations; where Donald Trump was allowed to become president with over 20 cases of sexual assault claims against him.
The blame for Logan Paul's stunt does not fall on him alone, just as Trump's election does not merely boil down to one hateful person. That's the common denominator between a YouTube vlogger and our president: accountability, or the lack thereof. These people are irredeemable and their actions are inexcusable — there is no way to correct the damage they have done. But no, I don't blame them.
I blame the people who support them.
I blame the people who got Logan Paul to a place where he felt so arrogant and untouchable that he thought he could show a dead body on camera without repercussions. I blame the people who see an unremarkable cisgender white kid crack a few jokes and then place him on a pedestal where he can do no wrong. I blame the people blindly follow their white saviors in the abyss, whose concepts of morality have been watered down to the idea that disrespecting an entire culture is totally fine because "everybody makes mistakes."
We can do better.
There are real, human costs to blindly submitting to the messages of powerful white men just because their voices are shouting the loudest. These people have power because we give power to them. We're cranking up the volume on voices that are already too loud, voices that have been drowning out the sounds of everyone else for generations
.We can and need to do better in holding the privileged accountable — we don't seem to have a problem in holding the entire Muslim community accountable for terrorism, or undocumented immigrants for taking jobs. It took a literal dead body to wake people up to the danger of someone like Logan Paul: a rich, white, heterosexual, cisgender male with a platform that doesn't just allow, but encourages him to say and do anything he wants.
Logan Paul is but one piece in an entire power structure that has always let privileged members of society get away with behaviors that would never be tolerated if enacted by marginalized groups. It is our responsibility to dismantle this system that favors those who believe power is their right instead of their privilege, and that only begins to punish them after the damage has been done.
We must stay active and engaged with the world around us and with communities that are different from our own; we cannot afford to remain ignorant. As long as we do, the Logan Pauls of the world will continue to believe they hold absolute power, because that's exactly what our unquestioning complicity tells them.
"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game." -Toni Morrison
