Mandy Harris Williams
⤏ IN CONVERSATION WITH FAYE ORLOVE
⤏ PHOTOS BY KARA VORABUTR | MAKE-UP BY KATIE MANN | STYLING BY FAYE ORLOVE
⤏ ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2019
Mandy gives me hope in the algorithm. I discovered her Instagram through the explore page and immediately exhausted hours reading through her essay-length captions on critical theory and anti-racist rhetoric. As a certified #WHITEPERSON, Mandy’s calls to action challenged my comforts, questioned my privilege, and gave me pause. We got to chat over the phone, as the holiday season sent us to different time zones. I was comforted to learn that Mandy sees herself as someone still growing. “In [critical] theory,” she says, “there are winners and losers. And if we’re not winning, [we] still have shit to learn.”
FAYE: What are you doing in New York?
MANDY: I’m from here, so I came back to the East Coast just to be in the homestead, you know?
F: I’m from the East Coast! I lived in Boston for six years.
M: I heard you grew up in Maryland?
F: Yeah I’m from Maryland and went to college in Boston!
M: Where did you go?
F: Emerson.
M: Oh yeah I went to Harvard.
F: Oh just dropping that?
M: You know, it might’ve come up.
F: What a coincidence. I wonder if we ever crossed paths? So, I came to know you through your instagram, and in your bio you call yourself a “critical caption essayist,” which I love. I think a lot of people negate Instagram as a valuable tool, but your approach to Instagram is so different. How did you come to use it for activist purposes and critical thought?
M: At first that wasn’t my intention, but it became really clear that there was an economy being built on the platform. I joined Instagram in 2013, and when you think about the onset of influencers, that’s pretty late in the game. By that point there was a wave of influencers that were being curated by Instagram. And although they say that they don’t do that any longer, it was explicit. There were featured users, instead of an explore page you had folks who acknowledged that they were being boosted. I’ve always loved social media. I’ve always been really interested in society and how community coalesces online. But for some reason I completely missed the Tumblr boat!
F: That’s so surprising! I feel like Tumblr is such a hub for weirdos.
M: It just didn’t reach me! I didn’t know anyone in real life who was on Tumblr, and I didn’t really find it. I had a blog in college, and I was blogging every now and then because I knew I wanted to write. I just didn’t know what the best platform to disseminate that on was. It might’ve been because I went to Harvard and Facebook was king there.
“[H]ow does the Instagram algorithm layer and interact with the anti-blackness that we have in the Western world?”
F: Did they incorporate Facebook into the curriculum? Or did you just learn about it from other students?
M: Just from other students. So I guess my Instagram start came from my writing and doing text-heavy stuff. I really wanted to be an essayist. I studied James Baldwin in high school, but I thought I would be a lawyer. Then I went into teaching, and I just felt like there was something about the way an essay moves and seduces you into an idea — it seems like one of the few spaces where someone can express the personal and the political seamlessly and interwoven. That appealed to me and it became clear to me over the second half of my teaching career that I would not be happy if I wasn’t writing. So, when I first got into Instagram I didn’t have a goal necessarily, but I quickly realized that the very thing that was attracting me was strangely not representing me. I think the first community I engaged in was the Afro-hair community. There was so much literature, and so much practice, and vocabulary, and so much work surrounding Black women and their natural hair patterns. There were so many Black women gaining this cultural pride around their hair, but what I also realized was that there was this emerging texturism. I noticed this popularity and idealization of certain types of curl patterns. And very quickly, when I felt like I was in a community, I also felt like I was not in a community. It came as a dual reckoning. So every time in my life — I’m a Virgo moon so I’m obsessed with taking inventory of my feelings — I feel like, “What’s going on here?” I feel excluded. So as I paid attention to the platform, I began to notice that it would take on an updated form of colorism, shadism, texturism, featurism, generally under the umbrella of anti-Blackness as it is expressed physically. Instagram is a space that has zero barriers in access as far as creating and sharing content with the entire globe. But then I got interested in the idea of, what happens when you have a society coming in with a media narrative or a media normalcy that is still somewhat white supremacist? Just because you have zero barrier to access doesn’t mean we’ve managed to scrub out our cognition of what we think is proper, or appropriate, or beautiful, or clean, or anything like that. That then brought me to thinking about the algorithm and the embedded white supremacist algorithm we have as Americans.
F: You know I was going to ask about the fucking algorithm.
M: So then I started to think about, how does the Instagram algorithm layer and interact with the anti-Blackness that we have in the Western world? So, it was kinda just a perfect storm of factors that lead me to expanding what I was seeing as far as the format of Instagram. I didn’t get into Twitter until after they increased the character count. I think the thing about Instagram that people don’t acknowledge is, sure it’s not an informational platform necessarily, but visuals are informative. Visuals are more informative than words and they trigger concepts that we might not have words for! And then, Instagram doesn’t have a word count restriction. So, especially for someone who is interested in critiquing the value of Black bodies, Instagram becomes the ideal place to do that. Because, in one feed you can test one’s own desirability, you can test the desirability of others, and you can critique it. All that can all happen in one post.
F: Where did #BrownUpYourFeed come from? I couldn’t find the first instance of you using it. When did that come into fruition? What are you trying to accomplish with it?
M: I actually can’t even think of when exactly that first instance was. I do remember that I would go on people’s pages who I thought were liberal, or thought were progressive, or loved Obama or whatever, and I’d look at their feeds and think like, “Oh, but there are no Black people on their feeds?” When I’d look at people’s feeds, I wouldn’t see any Black friends. I’d look at who people were fucking with, and realized they don’t hang out with Black people or feel like the Black people in their lives are the people they want to share.
At first it was, like, a charge. Like, people should actually be in community with Blackness if anti-racism is important to them. And I followed all these fat influencers and kinky hair influencers, you know? Thinking that would decolonize my sense of desire. But I quickly realized that it didn’t. And that was in part because so many of those influencers were lighter than me. So, I was like, “What is it about anti-Blackness that still persists here?”
So I tried to see myself more in my feed. I tried to use it to bolster my self-esteem. It was something I needed to do. I needed to see darker-skinned people, kinkier hair people, people with the same historical familial pathways as I had. Even though I identify as politically dark-skinned, I know I’m not the darkest, or have the kinkiest hair, or the fattest, or the queerest, so it’s about making space for those people. It helped me broaden space for myself. But, in browning up my feed, it helped me identify some of the colonization of my own desire and to recognize that desire is still very anti-Black.
As I felt more seen, I also felt more viable. As I fed myself people who looked like me, I realized my voice could be important here.
“People should actually be in community with blackness if anti-racism is important to them.”
F: I like that it was sort of a call to action for yourself. I really look up to you, so it’s cool to see you as someone still growing and unlearning. A lot of your posts and theories reference our current era as an “attempt at representation.” Can you explain that?
M: I think people are really satisfied with incrementalism. They’re satisfied that there are more darker people. And I think if that’s our goal, then we have to acknowledge that there are people we love that will die before they’re seen. And I’m not okay with that.
There is this phenomena of moral licensing. It’s basically why diets don’t work — because there are folks who cut calories all day and say, “I’ve been good all day so now I can eat a cookie.” So moral licensing in representation culture works the exact same way. Like, “I’ve been good. I’ve represented Black people today, so I’m good. Now I don’t have to continue to pursue that.” But if all of the Black people you represented are half-Black, or have a certain type of hair pattern, or if all the Black people are cis, or thin, then you’re not really representing Blackness in its entire spectrum. When I think about the concept of Blackness, it’s more than just people who identify as Black. It’s a category that was developed to, and conceptually and theoretically, stand in opposition to white supremacy. So unless you’re really taking on all these elements, you’re not making anti-racist work. Representation is not enough. We had Barack Obama in office. Like, representation has happened, Black people have ascended to the highest office in the US. What we need is anti-racism. Even with the best representation, it will not be enough to make the media that deprograms us from being complacent with growing fascism. That’s the political reality. For sure, we can say we’re happy about representation culture, but that just allows the least liberal to pat themselves on the back. In a way, I’m terrified of a neoliberal white moderate who is satisfied with today’s representation culture.
F: It just sucks right now. I mean, it has always sucked.
M: And we have to acknowledge the political reality that this country elected Trump after Barack Obama. If there is one precise example of the fact that representation does not protect us from fascism, it is that we elected Trump after Obama.
F: I love getting to talk to you because I’ve been reading your words for so long. And on Instagram you, and obviously I’m still intimidated by you, but on Instagram you come across as very intimidating.
M: Really?
F: Yeah! It feels like you have such a handle on these concepts. How much is still an exploration for you?
M: There’s that adage like, “The more you know, the more you don’t know.” I’m a learner. When I was born, my grandmother said that I looked all around the room. I desire language and history and theory. I’m attracted to those things in the way that some people might be attracted to aesthetics. I think that as much as people assume I’m coming from a position of knowledge, and I am, there are still people who tell me I’m wrong all the time. Sometimes I am wrong, but sometimes I just failed to communicate something. So I am kind of getting into more of a space where I can be more precise and adept at communicating. I come from a teaching background and I want my art to be didactic. I don’t want to be one of those artists who makes work and says, “Well, if you don’t get it, that’s on you.” I want to change people and change society with my work so it’s important that it’s legible. But life is long and I’m always learning. Theory of race and racism is competitive because there are winners and losers. And if we’re not winning, I still have shit to learn.
F: it’s so refreshing to hear that. I don’t feel the confidence in my own thought that you do. More people should be confident in their own thoughts.
M: Can I be honest? I don’t know that more people should be confident in their own thoughts.
F: Well, with the right critical thought, with the right labor!
M: Yes, with the right labor. But in the information age it’s not just the labor of finding the knowledge, but also the value behind that knowledge. My values are that everybody deserves love. Getting everybody the love they deserve. That’s more important than any of the information that I’ll ever learn and all the information I have learned. And I must admit, much of my study has been a result of not feeling love. So that’s my whole impetuous for learning. I believe in that so deeply.
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⤏ FAYE ORLOVE (SHE/HER) IS AN ILLUSTRATOR, ANIMATOR AND ACTIVIST ORIGINALLY FROM THE EAST COAST. IN 2015, SHE BEGAN THE NON-PROFIT SPACE JUNIOR HIGH IN EAST HOLLYWOOD. FAYE LOVES POP-CULTURE, THE FACT THAT KIM KARDASHIAN IS STUDYING TO BE A LAWYER, AND THE JONAS BROTHERS COMEBACK. SHE DESCRIBES HERSELF AS A VIRGO, A JEWISH AMERICAN PRINCESS AND SOMEONE JUST TRYING REALLY, REALLY HARD