Sam Smith is fighting back at the Twitterverse, whose denizens accused him of “whitesplaining” racism after he shared a story about being witness to a friend’s racist incident.
In a series of Tweets, Smith shared how the incident left him “speechless” and expressed an honest need to do more:
Twitter trolls (and more than one intern writing a click-baity headline) decided to take Smith to task for “whitesplaining” racism.
If you’ve never heard the term before, Urban Dictionary defines “whitesplaining” as “The paternalistic lecture given by Whites toward a person of color defining what should and shouldn’t be considered racist, while obliviously exhibiting their own racism.”
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Smith’s shocked response inspired this:
…and this:
Smith responded on Instagram:
“For the record, I was merely sharing an experience I had in the hope it would draw attention to ridiculous it is to be racist in 2016. This is not about me in any way, it’s about a deep rooted issue we have in our society that should now be extinct.”
“I don’t profess to know or remotely understand what it means to be on the receiving end of racial abuse, but having been bullied my whole life for being gay, what I do know is that it is wrong and completely unacceptable. Here’s to people being allowed to be people.”
Look, white people are far less likely to experience an act of overt racism firsthand, so we can understand how it would be genuinely shocking for them. For most POC it ceased to become shocking to us sometime shortly after we found out there was no Santa Claus, so we get it.