Marquette University Intimations Project

Anonymous

Growing up, every time I was sick, I would watch Scooby-Doo. My favorite part was when they all realized the monster wasn’t a monster but a human being—a neighbor, a waitress, a CEO. They never ended an episode with a masked monster who was never revealed and simply continued their unwarranted cruelty. It is a good show for children to watch. We learn that there are bad things in the world but that the good people always fix it. A wrong is done, the person is caught, and the evil is punished. Simple, swift, and right.

The summer of 2020 means so many things to so many people, but to me, it was a summer of revolution. It was a summer in which a day off from work meant that I found the nearest protest and marched the day away amongst people who demanded punishment, justice, and retribution. We protested more than just police brutality that summer. We protested against a nation that praises black bodies in marketing campaigns then criminalizes and degrades them in every level of law, government, and society. For all of these reasons and many more we roamed the streets of Milwaukee chanting “Black Lives Matter” because the world we were living in did not seem to believe this simple fact. 

Protests like this were happening around the world, even in the white, suburban town I grew up in, just outside of St. Louis. My friends from home told me they were protesting, and I was so proud. So proud that people like me and my friends who have only known privilege could for once look outside of ourselves and see that our privilege should not belong to us. They asked me tips like what to wear and how to be safe when they were amongst hundreds of people during a pandemic. I told them about how all of the protestors wore masks. These were not the masks of the villains of Scooby Doo but masks that protected the bodies of our fellow revolutionaries and even the bodies of the police officers who were ever-present, trying to find one reason to use the tear gas they spent so much money on. We didn’t wear masks to hide our identities from the cause. We were proud of what we stood for, but we all loved each other enough to prioritize each other’s safety.

So, my friends went, with their masks and their signs, and they protested white supremacy in suburban Missouri. They recounted it all to me the next day, but one thing that they told me broke my heart. They said that a boy from our high school, who I’ll call John, had driven by their protest and yelled “white lives matter.” And John wasn’t hard to spot. He wasn’t wearing a mask. He did not care that the spit that sprang forth from his ugly words could be deadly, and he didn’t care that his face, his full face, would be associated with those words of hate and ignorance. He had unveiled his own mask right there in front of everyone; he didn’t need Mystery Inc. to do it for him. But the difference is, he got to drive away. Only a few people recognized him, and his declaration of hate came with no repercussions for him. 

That is not to say there weren’t any repercussions. I am sure that any black person protesting in Chesterfield, Missouri that day who heard John’s statement felt it deeply. He took their trauma and threw it back at them without so much as a thought. And that made me angry. So, I took to Twitter, knowing at that time that many of my followers knew John from high school, and I said, “Yesterday John Doe drove by a Black Lives Matter protest and yelled ‘white lives matter.’” Simple, yet effective. Within minutes, my mom texted me and said, “Is this who you are now? Someone who calls people out by name on Twitter?” And that made me more angry. If John did not want people to know what he did, why would he do it in front of hundreds of people? Was he not proud? I was just stating the facts, telling people who he was. It was exactly what had occured, and I was just the vehicle that let a few hundred more people know. In the end, my mom convinced me to delete the Tweet because I was too emotionally exhausted to fight about these things with her anymore, but I haven’t forgotten it.

I think a lot of people would look at what I did and say that I was wrong, and I can understand that. I grew up in an age where anonymity had become so accessible, so easy, that it seemed like something we were entitled to. We are entitled to the technology that allows us to hide behind a nameless, pictureless profile and harass and bully and hate. Somehow, we have earned this anonymity, so our actions do not need to have consequences if we do not want them to. Police officers have standardized uniforms and haircuts and cars so that they are not themselves when they are on the job but a nameless, faceless officer of the law. They are just doing their job. They’re doing what they were trained to do. They are doing what any other cop would do. And they become anonymous amongst the thousands of other officers who have already done the same thing. And was that not what we were protesting? Punishment isn’t justice. It doesn’t bring lives back that never should’ve been taken, but it sends a message. It says, “this is not who we are, and this is not what we stand for.” We will not let these actions slip into oblivion. They have to be answered for. 

I have grown so tired of anonymous hate. I really have. I think it’s ironic that even now I do not write about John using his real name. He has long forgotten what he said that day, but I haven’t. I am sure that many people at that protest that day haven’t forgotten either. Why is memory left only to the victims? Why are the names Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor etched into our memories instead of Darren Wilson, Derek Chauvin, Brett Hankinson, John Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove? We want these people to remain anonymous so that they are not real. We want to ignore the reality of hate that we live in and that we allow so that the burden of participating in this senseless violence by our silence does not threaten to collapse us with every waking breath. 

So, yeah, I guess that Tweet was my misguided attempt to become part of the Mystery Inc. Gang. I just wanted someone to answer to something for once. I wanted it to be as easy as taking the mask off of a Halloween costume and revealing the villain, but John is not the villain. The villain isn’t one big mastermind who doctors hate and slips that poison into our drinking water. It is a whole society that believes only rich people deserve doctors, only men deserve to dress and drink alcohol freely, and only black people deserve to be shot in their cars. And that is something we all perpetuate in different ways every day. And my hate for his hate won’t fix that when hate is not only the symptom but the cause. So, I’m glad I deleted that Tweet, and I am glad I continued to protest in my own ways. Scooby Doo is a great show, and I still believe that, but I am old enough now that the world is much more complicated, much more horrible, and much more beautiful than a talking dog who solves crimes.