Misinformation: Why It’s The Sexiest Thing Ever
When someone who we all love says something outlandish but disappointing, it’s not really about her, it’s a referendum on all of us.
It was one of the strangest things i’d ever read on the Internet. Something that I wouldn’t have bet on in a million years – Janet Jackson echoing right wing extremist nonsense.
A Sept. 21 article in The Guardian caught up with the pop music superstar for an interview. The article went over her current tour, the decisions she’s made and even her relationship with her late brother, Michael (the article ran just after older brother, Tito had died, but the interview was given weeks before).
Deep into the story, written by British journalist Nosheen Iqbal, in an otherwise obscure paragraph about Democratic presidential candidate and current Vice President Kamala Harris, there it was:
“Well, you know what they supposedly said?” she asks me. “She’s not black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”
She looks at me expectantly, perhaps assuming that I have Indian heritage.
“Well, she’s both,” I offer.
“Her father’s white. That’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days,” she coughs. “I was told that they discovered her father was white.”
It shocked the social media universe to the extent of its attention span. All six hours.
People went wild with their attacks against Janet. People who had staunchly defended her during the “wardrobe malfunction” incident of Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004, acted like they had a Velvet Rope for her. Too much is at stake it seemed, for one of our own, one of our strongest voices, to repeat the same nonsense that Donald Trump had uttered in a July appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, where the ex-president condescendingly questioned her racial background.
An individual who claimed to represent Jackson issued an apology, falsely quoting her. But her camp told Variety the person is not connected to them and that she is managed by her brother, Randy.
A relative few others, who lurk in social media backwaters, some of which may be bots or AI, or just trolls, applauded Janet as if she told some politically arcane truth. How she came to this conclusion is a mystery to me. There’s unconfirmed rumor that Randy is a right-wing extremist himself and may have influenced his sister. But, that family is busy mourning their brother and Janet is continuing her tour, so I’m not expecting any new statements from them.
Clearing the Crystal
The reality is this: Kamala Harris is a Black woman. She is also South Asian. She identifies as both and has been more than vocal about this. Her Indian roots come from her mother Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who died in 2009. Her Black roots come from her father, Dr. Donald Harris, a retired economist with Stanford University, who was born in Jamaica to Black West Indian parents.
The ethno-cultural description “Black,” is clearly defined as a person who traces their genetic roots directly to the African continent, and belongs to one or more of the many diasporic subsets of those descendants. Each individual in this group of 1.2 billion people are manifest globally through colonization, chattel slave trading or migration. Harris’ roots qualify as such without question.
But I’m not here to debate something that is undebatable. The issue here is Janet repeating racist misinformation, and apparently leaving its stale scent to waft in the air of public opinion. It really represents something that has been poisoning the public discourse for years and is amplified by social media, nonsensical fabrications or half-truths that are spread and used by one group or another, entering the political sphere.
It’s not new, either. There are many examples in history, but for these purposes we can go back to 1835 when The New York Sun published a series of articles on the supposed “discovery” of life on the moon. In 1933, the Nazis spread deliberate misinformation against Jews, Blacks and any people they felt were unfit to live in German society. Even within recent memory, the Bush administration, just after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, told everyone the Iraqis were brandishing “weapons of mass destruction” and started an eight-year war that cost more than 100,000 civilian lives, and 4,400 U.S. military personnel.
So misinformation isn’t uncommon, but we find ourselves in an era in which it’s ubiquitous thanks to social media. There is an entire industry in creating bots that post nonsense to Twitter, deepfake photos to Instagram and Facebook and the most ridiculous rumor videos to Tiktok. Trolls, some of whom are foreign nationals with the intention of disrupting social discourse, and others who are conspiracy theorists or sociopaths are out to skew thinking to extremist conclusions.
It circulates around the political spectrum and ranges from things like the coronavirus vaccine being designed to alter human DNA, something that spread on the far left and right, to the more recent nonsense about Springfield, Ohio being overrun by illegal immigrants from Haiti who are stealing people’s pets and eating them.
Ten years ago, you would never have been able to convince me that a candidate for President of the United States would argue in a debate with his opponent that human beings are consuming dogs and cats, just for the purpose of echoing something spread by white supremacists. But here we are.
Faith in Darwin
Maybe it’s me but I can remember a time when i was a kid when people were more discerning, meaning they had a more well-tuned bullshit meter. Back then, people pretty much understood that the world was round and “flat earth” theorists were blown off as numbskulls as they should have been. Only old folks and people who didn’t understand the concept of physics believed that no man had ever landed on the moon.
But around 1982 or so, things changed. That Halloween there was a scare that rushed through the media like wildfire that people were poisoning childrens’ candied apples, or that razors were being placed in bite-sized treats. Before you knew it, people were forbidding their kids to trick-or-treat, something children had enjoyed for generations. Religious zealots cited it as proof of demonic interference in our daily lives. Even as a kid then, I thought it was ridiculous.
The major media networks and their local affiliates, which have never had a lack of paranoid journalists and managers willing to embellish or outright fabricate a story, drove news of the deaths of a handful of children that had nothing to do with Halloween or poisonings by strangers into the public discourse, which evolved really quickly into hysteria.
After this, it seemed like people were more willing to believe the craziest stuff. By the mid 1990s, everybody I knew was emailing around the “Willie Lynch” letter, which has no historical authenticity and was debunked soon after it started to circulate. In the 2000s, I even took it on the chin a few times myself when I sought to clear up a continuously emerging rumor that a woman claimed to have won billions in a lawsuit against the filmmakers who created “The Matrix.” That legal windfall never happened, but there were people who wanted to go for my neck over what I wrote back then.
These are just a few examples of items that if we Googled, we’d find an abundance of just because the internet and social media are so pervasive. Those things might seem harmless, but misinformation has become a tool to use for very nefarious purposes. My fear is that right now, someone, somewhere is brewing a massive lie to tell everyone that will lead millions down a rabbit hole they will not be able to climb out of. I’ll have to put my faith in Darwin for that one.
Endgame
Let me just say I still love Janet. I’ve had a crush on her for about 40 years, pretty much my longest and most functional romantic relationship. But her confusion about Harris’ racial identity – something that as an adult, she’s responsible for reading about since she influences so many – is no different than Trump claiming he didn’t know while he was being interviewed at the NABJ convention. Both send a public message that it’s okay to accept misinformation as truth because it’s convenient.
If you can read, it’s up to you to find credible sources of the information you digest. You wouldn’t fill your car up at a gas station if you saw water coming out of the gas pumps, right? It’s much better to go to a station that you know actually sells gasoline.
If I’m playing chess with you, what I want is to make you believe that you have a path to my back rank so that you can mate my king. But what I’m really doing is moving so that I slowly take your pawns, your knights, your bishops, your castles and your queen. Eventually, your own king has no defenses and I wind up mating him. Misinformation serves the same purpose. It makes you think you have some advantage, when really the person spreading it just wants to weaken what should be strong defenses.
If you expect to win the game, though, you have to be alert. You have to expect that there’s someone out there trying to fool you with decoys and ploys. But if you keep your eyes clean, your ears open, and your nose closed, you’d be surprised how clear your mind stays.
Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.