As part of my Friday night Twitter ritual, two of the trending hashtags caught my eye: the second on the list was “White Girls Do It Better,” and further down was Serena Williams.
What I don’t understand is why people allow a rude thing to trend the way it did. I suppose you could argue it’s better to be infamous than popular, but what good does it do? That’s not to say I agree with the statement.
Talent does not discriminate based on race or gender. It’s something you have or don’t have. The top 100 or so tweets for this trend were ironically-written and I did laugh at a few. The backlash was not what upset me.
It was the reaction from the majority of Twitter users that felt the need to say something about the hashtag. Things like “#WhiteGirlsDoItBetter is stupid.” Yes, it is. What seemed more stupid is they used the hashtag and upped the count so more people would see it. By condemning the statement, they had increased its popularity.
Some of the better responses I saw attached a collage of celebrity pictures like Rhianna alongside Taylor Swift with a new tag: “#AllGirlsDoItBetter.” This was refreshing. I think my favorite was a collage of girls wearing hijabs and showing off perfectly-groomed eyebrows with the hashtag used as a punch line.
It was worse to scan the list of tags and see Serena Williams’ name in what I assumed positive updates about her tennis career. I was only partly right. According to some outraged followers, The New York Times described her physique in a way that was less than flattering.
Hope for some empowering feed of how Williams proved “all girls do it better” was vanquished. I could still see the picture from the “white girls” feed of a man with his head in his hands that was captioned with something about how terrible Twitter is.
I resonated with that poor guy as I reached for another Reese’s Pieces. Why do people insist on complaining about everything online? There was no discreetly dismissing the “white girl” tag because it had to be trolled and made infamous first.
Maybe I’m no better as I’m giving it my two cents rant on a different site. I just can’t understand the value in talking about something that’s already viral just to see it become No. 1 on the Twitter list -- not that it’s likely.
While this all could be a sign to let up on Twitter, I feel like Willy Wonka watching the kid get stuck in the chocolate tube. It’s so terrible, I just can’t bear to look away. And what more entertaining way to look at the world than reading what ticks people off on a Friday night?
