A total cop out
Social justice warriors reared their heads much like an infuriated Hydra because more and more calls to the police are made against people of colour; the Starbucks incident featuring Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, and another with high school seniors Eric Rogers II and Dirone Taylor shopping for prom suits are markers of a chillingly dystopian future. Sounds a lot like apartheid and Jim Crow America, if you ask me.
However, more and more onlookers are posting the evidence on social media, urging citizens to stay woke to atrocities such as this. Last Tuesday, an irked lawyer Aaron Schlossberg threatened to call Immigration on two Hispanic women for speaking Spanish in a New York restaurant. It was then revealed a year before this, Schlossberg embarked on another heated tirade against Jews.
Another incident saw a white woman call the police on four black people in a California Airbnb, having clearly suspected them of looting the place. One of the accused, Donisha Prendergast — Bob Marley’s granddaughter — shared the incident in a video on her Instagram, citing, “I’m sad and irritated to see that fear is still the first place police officers go in their pursuit to serve and protect, to the point that protocol supersedes their ability to have discernment.”
The videos continue to anger social media users, regarding the repercussions for people of colour, and the lack thereof for white people. And there’s no cost to white people who falsely call the police on black people. It’s sadly not enough for the larger movement that continues to stifle these voices against an attitude that’s long been indoctrinated for centuries now. The representation for people of colour will always fall short in such a society, in spite of growing numbers, and very little angers me as much as this.
Pain in the membrane
As if the Internet hasn’t exasperated me enough, another leg of the ‘which is it’ conundrum has grown, this time in the form of ‘which one do you hear?’ The dress dilemma caused so much upheaval, a friend of mine didn’t talk to her boyfriend for three days because one saw a blue-and-black dress while the other saw a gold-and-white one.
So when Twitter user Cloe Feldman tweeted an audio file, asking people if they heard Laurel or Yanny, the internet divided itself like a volatile amoeba. The tweet has been shared about 90,000 times and liked by 207,000 users. Can someone tweet me and tell me if they hear Laurel, too? There have been way too many memes stating only followers of Satan hear Laurel.
Chrissy Teigen, who makes a regular cameo in this column, tweeted that she’s muted the word ‘laurel’, ‘yanny’ and ‘yanni’ from her Twitter timeline, after having an existential crisis, stating “It’s so clearly laurel. I can’t even figure out how one would hear yanny.”
The ‘Yanny versus Laurel’ debate has sparked numerous scientific discussions. A stand-out orients around ‘scientific bias’ in which the mind hears what it wants to hear and how our neural architecture is built around what our subconscious wants to mentalise.
Royal high-fives
I admit it: I stuck around to watch the wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. But more than the memes that were born in this monarchical factory, it was the footage of a guest walking into the church and openly asked for a high-five from one member of the police guard which truly stood out to me. The policeman politely declined and the woman throws her head back in laughter and carries on.
Rants and ramblings across cyberspace
