We Need to Talk About the White Fragility in The Comments

Mikayla Dawson (she/her) loves abortion and abortion providers, so she became the Digital Strategist at Physicians for Reproductive Health and a board member for the Stigma Relief Fund. Mikayla previously managed accounts for Whole Woman’s Health and Whole Woman’s Health Alliance. She specializes in social media strategy and branding, growing audiences organically, and clapping back at antis.  

As a digital strategist at a national reproductive health organization, when anti-abortion extremist accounts flood the comments section, I always end up with a well-meaning text or two from peers.

Wow, Mikayla. I don’t know how you do it. The antis are relentless. Hope you’re okay.

But the truth is, it’s not the antis that get to me.

Now, this isn’t to say that what the antis spew from behind screens is not violent and racist. It is just that I’ve been what the kids call “terminally online” since I was 16, during the Tea Party era. Once, in my more liberal days, I jokingly changed my name to @mikaylaobama. Conservatives would routinely mistake me for Malia Obama and flood my mentions with racist death threats. Just as often, they’d find my baby pro-abortion tweets and respond the way you’d expect an anti would if they sincerely thought they were tweeting one of the Black First Daughters. This is to say, I have seen it all.

So, when I first took over the accounts in my earlier role at Whole Woman’s Health, I was sure managing the comments section would be a cinch. Spending the better part of my high school years getting bananas and much worse tweeted at me while I navigated otherwise normal teenage life prepared me for this.

What it didn’t prepare me for was white liberal fragility.

A decade after accidentally catfishing Anti-Abortion Twitter, I have now managed repro accounts through Texas Senate Bill 8 and the Dobbs decision, with the whole country suddenly engaged in discourse about what it means to advocate for abortion. And I am here to tell you: the cis white liberal women are resisting. Sure, I’ve had a well-meaning cis white man reinvent abortion funds in my replies. One even emailed me demanding I delete a tweet from the organization I worked for at the time sent in 2013 – when I was a sophomore in high school. But we must name the opposition accurately: it is ‘pro-choice’ cis white women. If they are not writing a 1,000-word essay in our direct messages about how our posts hurt their feelings, it’s an angry comment about how they won’t be told what to do because this is ‘their’ moment, and they won’t be ‘policed’ on how to be pro-abortion. And I am exhausted, y’all.

I am STAUNCHLY pro-choice but, they say. Always with the ‘buts,’ those white liberals. This is TOO far.

“Too far,” my friends, is suggesting they simply don’t call abortion funds the Underground Railroad. Or suggesting we use gender inclusive language. Or being unapologetically pro-abortion and unwavering that there is no such thing as “too many” abortions nor is there a morally wrong reason for wanting an abortion. “Too far” is the suggestion that dressing up like “The Handmaid’s Tale” characters is racist and unhelpful. And if you even think about asking folks to consider replacing coat hanger imagery with medication abortion pills, I’ll go ahead and tell you how they’re going to respond: Too. Far.

The problem is, like with anything else sociopolitical, white liberals have the privilege of engaging and disengaging on their whims. This is a game to them. They checked out after Casey, and they’ve been throwing $100 at Planned Parenthood Federation of America and NARAL annually ever since. They’re on our side, of course. They don’t want to “go back,” of course. They are absolutely certain that if we vote blue no matter who it will all be okay, of course. But this isn’t the time to talk about race. This isn’t the time to talk about how the same extremist groups that fund abortion bans also fund violent anti-trans legislation. This is something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. Of course.

This is not a new dilemma. Cis white women centering themselves has been a challenge of “progressive” spaces for decades and while it started in many places, we can point our fingers at second wave white feminism, the messaging of which still permeates abortion spaces fifty years later. While Black women were founding the Reproductive Justice movement because white feminists were ignoring the real needs and experiences of Black and brown people and queer communities across the country, white women doubled down in their own interests. They clung to the promises of Roe while its protections were not designed to build a future where everyone could get the abortion they needed. They ignored Black and brown organizers’ warnings that “safe, legal, and rare” wasn’t enough, and the end of legal abortion was imminent. They refused to look back to a rich history of community-centered care where Black and brown caregivers have been self-managing birth, miscarriage, and abortion care for a millennium and were only interested in ringing the alarm when it was white women who were suffering from unsafe abortions and white women who were being denied access to care.

And so, because they are so convinced that they’ve done “liberatory” work for “their people,” white women clutch their digital pearls when they’re supplied feedback rooted in actual justice, actual equity, and actual inclusivity. White women’s interests are hidden in plain sight – they were “listening and learning” in the summer of 2020, only to turn the comments section of every intersectional pro-abortion post into a referendum about their own feelings. It doesn’t occur to them that some of us have poured our lives into the reproductive justice movements. That there are people who are experts on this topic. And it certainly doesn’t occur to them that many of these experts are Black and brown.

Rather than taking a step back, listening to feedback, and changing behaviors, the white women in my mentions are doubling down on every reason why what they’re doing is enough.

But there’s no such thing as enough when there is blatant injustice. Cis white women aren’t really interested in liberation, especially because that liberation requires their discomfort.

These interactions, to say the least, are frustrating. It does not matter what tone I take. It does not matter if I write three disclaimers that we are not forcing anyone to do anything, only trying to offer guidance as an organization that does this work 365 days a year. Cis white women will always find my work divisive, because it takes them out of the spotlight.

I share this because I presently do not feel that movement leadership realizes what their social media teams are up against. We are absorbing this harm unadulterated in addition to pushback from antis. Here a few things you can do to minimize that harm:

• Examine if you are empowering your staff to engage on these topics meaningfully. Your social media person has their finger on the pulse of what people are doing and saying online. Trust their judgment on how they choose to respond or not to respond. These comments are much easier to swallow when you know the organization aligns with the values of what they're posting and that they have your back. You may think they know this already – but it never hurts to affirm it again.

• Trust and respect your digital person’s boundaries. Even with a flexible schedule, there is a pressure to be online 24/7 when you’re running a social media account. Sometimes things that are ‘urgent’ arise during non-work hours and it seems like you should post something as soon as possible – but remember, posting is work and it’s not always critical to be first. Taking time off from a digital job in repro also means taking time away from the endless engagement with white supremacy, so check-in with your social media manager about a posting strategy that protects their space and time.

• Is there capacity on your team for someone else to respond to comments? The truth is that even deleting comments and muting people is draining. For someone else to take the lift of responses in highly visible posts can offer so much relief so one person isn’t taking on the wrath of thousands of comments. Even jumping on your personal account if you can in order to get the comments section centered back to your organization's talking points goes such a long way.

• Call in the white, fair weather abortion advocates in your life. Wherever you can, whenever you can. The dated talking points our movement is trying to move away from are still so prevalent offline and in online spaces not connected to repro. The truth is, we will never win everyone over – but what we need is culture change and gentle call-ins that remind folks the work and world are changing.

• Check-in with your social media person. Remember, we’re not a monolith! I personally don’t delete comments, but some social managers prefer to. My “I don’t care what happens, this is MY time” is 9:30 – 10:30 AM and after that I am available to tweet. But what works for me doesn’t work for everyone so it’s critical to have conversations where you or your organization are offering solutions to take a bit of weight off their shoulders.

As our organizations as a collective become more visible after the Dobbs decision, I implore you to examine how your audience is engaging with your online content, the labor that goes into challenging them to be better, who performs that labor, and how you are taking care of your digital team.