Surprise! Shane Dawson is a Racist and Groomed Racist Apologism on YouTube

Why does the internet think that racism is okay?

Uhhhh–

Ok, ok follow me on this. This week Olivia uses Shane Dawson as a case study about how the internet normalizes racism. Shane Dawson is a YouTuber who has been on the platform for over a decade. Over the course of his career, he made a name for himself by making racist/sexist/ableist/inappropriate content. Recently, he was exposed for being exploitative and manipulative for the sake of his content. That’s not what we discuss today, but D’Angelo Wallace does an excellent summary of the situation in his video on Shane Dawson. Additionally, if you’re in for a wild deep dive on the controversy and his garbage apologies, Mörges does an excellent video as well. The result of this reckoning was people more closely examining his past actions and content. That’s what we’re going to be discussing today. Not the details of his old content, but the ripple effect it had on YouTube and a generation of viewers.

A tad dramatic.

Fair. I’m not arguing that he’s the only actor in this, but his content definitely had an impact.

Alright, I’m interested.

The first and most crucial component of this is the relationship he had with his audience. Shane’s audience was predominantly younger girls that fell for his swoopy hair and stayed for the heartfelt content. Amongst the racist segments or jokes that sexualized children, Shane definitely played people’s heartstrings by opening up about his past, feelings, and personal struggles. This creates a parasocial relationship between him and his viewers, that see him as a role model at best and a close, personal friend at worst.

Role models are given a lot of power over the people that look up to them. There have been instances of people gradually accepting viewpoints completely anathema to their own because the people they look up to vouch for someone else’s content. An excellent example of this is the reverence of Jordan Peterson, who touts reasonable philosophies but is still undoubtedly a component of the alt-right. Ollie from PhilosophyTube and Natalie from ContraPoints do great videos on this. So when he made deplorable content, a venerating audience ate it up.

But this was so long ago. Comedy was a lot different back then and we thought a lot of things were okay but aren’t.

This is not true, and is a rhetorical tool used to excuse racism. People had been criticizing Shane since the beginning of his career. Activists on Tumblr and Twitter, many of whom were black women, had severe complaints about the minstrel shows he was putting on. But many people regarded these criticisms as too harsh and the critics as too sensitive to get “edgy” humor. That is the viewpoint that Shane took as well, all the while blocking everyone and anyone that disagreed with him or criticized him.

Moya Bailey, a professor at Northeastern University, coined the term “misogynoir” to describe the unique position black women are in – being subject to both racism and sexism. The lack of credibility given to these activists is another painful example of black women being bullied and ignored. In a discussion with independent author/blogger Trudy from thetrudz.com, Trudy described the pushback that black women received by coining and using the term misogynoir:

“This pushback occurred primarily on Tumblr, a space where a lot of Black women develop theory that is often mocked at first, plagiarized second, and absorbed into the mainstream last, often where the originators are erased altogether.” (On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism)

A particularly illustrative example of this is Shane’s treatment of Francesca Ramsey in 2014 (and later 2017). While Francesca describes her experience in full here, Shane essentially wielded his millions of fans at her in response to her criticism. It is only now that the internet (and many of his fans) have decided that Shane is, in fact, racist.

Well, at least he’s canceled for good.

Quite frankly, canceling (especially when directed at cis straight men) doesn’t really stick. Especially since cancelling has really just become a witch hunt used by virtue-signalling white folks at this point. 

But even if he was canceled, the problem would go unchanged. Now you have a generation of people that argued for years that offensive comedy (specifically comedy made at the expense of marginalized groups) is acceptable because it was funny. Many of them can argue that it isn’t a big deal because it isn’t. So when a YouTuber apologizes for something that their audience doesn’t think they need to apologize for, they can easily accept the apology. When others refuse to do the same, it leads to people demanding that others get over trauma/racism under the guise of making space for growth. YouTuber amandabb discusses in detail how Jenna Marbles’s exit from youtube is an example of that.

But it is important to allow people to grow and learn from their mistakes.

Of course! And I’m not saying it isn’t. But white people seem to regularly empathize with racists. Kat Blaque talks extensively about the phenomena of white people befriending and forgiving racists, which communicates that what they’re doing isn’t that bad. It is time to put a wrench in the gears and get the cycle to stop.

But how?

The fact of the matter is that we, as white people, empathize with and have compassion for white racists. This is in part because all white people are racist by virtue of having positions of privilege and power in a structurally racist society, but also because we know we’ve said bigoted and racist things in the past when we were what we would describe as “different people.” It doesn’t matter how “bad” the racist thing was, it doesn’t matter how old we were when we did it. The racist or otherwise bigoted things we did caused direct harm, and that harm supersedes our desire to excuse ourselves.

When we see a white celebrity or influencer get called out and raked over the coals for their past racism, we immediately look for reasons to believe that they’ve changed - because if they can change, so can we. We latch onto any evidence that the person is forgivable because we desperately want to be forgiven. Not because we necessarily feel bad for what we did (though we might), but because we want to be accepted by the people who are judging our actions. So many YouTuber “apologies” focus so heavily on getting their black audience to like them again and continue to watch their content. The fact of the matter is, many, many black people will never like you again after finding out about your past or current racism. You aren’t owed their friendship, and they are well within their rights to simply move on from you. 

We break the cycle by being okay with our own mistakes and ignorance. If you truly mean to do as little harm as possible, do the work every day and weed out the bigoted nonsense that took root while you weren’t looking. Take responsibility - without feeling the need to announce your responsibility - and make yourself a safer, better person every day. Do it for your own growth and for the people who you’ll meet in the future who don’t deserve your internalized biases against them. Do it because you want to be better, not because you want their approval. And do not be surprised when many people don’t accept your attempts to make amends - they’re going through their own journey of pain and healing. Remember, if you rescind your anti-racist work because a black person was rude to you, then you were never an anti-racist to begin with. Start over, and continue doing the work.