Sacco Sunk
With issuing a crappy, insincere apology after her decidedly insensitive-at-best, racist-at-worst tweet (“I’m going to Africa. Hope I don’t gets AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white.”), Justine Sacco is proving to be even more annoying than she seemed when she was offline but going viral while flying on an airplane to see her father in his native South Africa (to be sure, a picture of her racist background, i.e. her father participating in the white flight from South Africa, is emerging).
The “duh” moment, of course, is that a Public Relations executive should know better than to tweet something so easily vilifying. Also, a seasoned PR person should know that one shouldn’t tweet anything immediately before going offline for over 12 hours. The marketing community on Twitter are all still in shock over the obvious gaffe perpetrated by a very senior exec at a ginormous NYC media company like IAC.
Digging Deeper
Enough has been written already about those obvious takeaways. What I’d like to talk about in the Justine Sacco saga is not Justine herself (whom I think should take this opportunity to learn from Jason Alexander’s example and really examine her belief systems) but rather the process through which we vilify and summarily judge other humans online and off.
Many newspapers, including Valleywag that broke Ms. Sacco’s tweet, wrote stories just around three facts: 1. The tweet itself. 2. Ms. Sacco’s job 3. Ms. Sacco’s inability to see the firestorm brewing online because she was on a long, signal-less international flight.
When I saw the tweet, I immediately understood what the hubbub was about but I could also see the tweet in a “compassion fatigue” context. I could read it with a tone of thinly-guised despair, like “South Africa’s high disparity between the number of white women and the number of black women who contract HIV is very upsetting to me, so I must joke about it.” I often joke (only in private with my husband) in that sarcastic manner about things that break my heart, like racism, poverty, etc. John Stewart makes a living joking sarcastically, teetering on the thin line between appropriate and shocking. I went with my merciful view of Ms. Sacco’s tweet and Ms. Sacco herself. Until I found out more.
