Cher Tweets Insensitively About George Floyd
posted by Tyjahn Stokes | April 9, 2021 | In Arts and CultureWith racial tensions being as high as they were since 2014, with the shooting and killing of Michael Brown. Social media has increased the public’s power to hold people accountable, whether it be with police officers, government officials, or even with celebrities.
After an insensitive tweet, you can add Cher to the list of white people that have a lot to learn when it comes to racial sensitivities. The Goddess of Pop made the tweet on April 3. She essentially said that if she had been at George Floyd’s killing then maybe the situation would not have happened.
She tweeted: “Was talking with Mom & She Said ‘I Watched Trial Of Policeman Who Killed George Floyd, & Cried’. I Said ‘Mom, I Know This Is Gonna Sound CRAZY, But.. I Kept Thinking …..Maybe If I’d Been There,…I Could’ve Helped.”
Cher received mixed criticism with her, of course, receiving praise and backlash. Initially she doubled down on her tweet, responding to the negative critics by tweeting, “You Don’t Know What I’ve Done, Who I Am, Or What I Believe. I CAN, I HAVE, & I WILL…HELP.”
This dangerous rhetoric often insinuates that the white person in this context is a “white savior.” Which according to the urban dictionary means, “White savior refers to western people going in to “fix” the problems of struggling nations or people of color without understanding their history, needs, or the region’s current state of affairs.”
Janine Guarino in a Medium essay even breaks this down further by giving a concrete example: “with foreign volunteers doing work that can be done by local people and local leadership, voluntourists exploiting local people by treating them as entertainment and taking photos of them in their day-to-day life (often without permission), international adoptions through illegitimate means (systems are often broken and adopted children aren’t necessarily orphans), the general idea that white foreigners should be adopting children in Africa as a means of saving them (this is an issue on a systematic level), voluntourists exploiting the lives, stories, faces, and culture of African people through social media (often in the form of selfies with African children — imagine if random tourists posted selfies with your kid?), and storytelling that exoticizes the community they are working in (talking about how “poor but happy people are” — an oversimplification of human emotion).”
In Cher’s mind, she believed she possesses an ability that, unlike the people who were witnessing the crime against George Floyd, she could have prevented the situation from happening. Even if she stepped in, what would she have said?
Michael Jackson couldn’t even stop police brutality with “They Don’t Really Care About Us,” so what makes Cher believe her influence and money can fully bring down systematic oppression, things that blacks fought against since the Civil Rights movement.
Nonetheless, the “Believe” singer eventually was tapped on the shoulder by a friend for making those insensitive comments and apologized later on in the evening by tweeting, “You Can Piss Ppl Off, & Hurt Them By Not Knowing Everything That’s ‘NOT Appropriate’ To Say.” She even continued on her tweet by apologizing to the black community: “I know Ppl Apologize When They’re In a Jam, BUT TO GOD,IM TRULY SORRY If I Upset Any One In Blk Community. I Know My [heart].”
Photo courtesy of Esther Vargas
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