Guerrilla: media warfare

Guerrilla: media warfare

The title of this post is a play on words. Social media in particular is often used as a platform for digital warfare, rebellion and a loudspeaker for those who otherwise might not have a voice. This seems obvious in the light of certain events pertaining to real life conflict, and people expressing their opinions on such. So how then, did the death of a gorilla become central to a racism debate?

Harambe was an alpha male silverback gorilla, property of the Cincinnati Zoo, who was fatally shot by zoo officials fearing for the safety of a young boy who had managed to crawl into the gorillas’ enclosure. The gorilla’s death sparked a great deal of public reaction and controversy. The public response grew like wildfire across social media. Initially, a vast majority of people were outraged by the animal’s death, with calls for the zoo to be held accountable for the endangered animal’s untimely demise, or the parents of the child to be charged with negligence. This initial reaction was overwhelmingly widespread, there was indeed a sense of solidarity in the public’s respect for a single animal. Interestingly, it was the reaction as opposed to the incident which possessed aspects of polysemic bimodality, sparking further debates about the duty of parents, animal rights and seemingly most arbitrarily, a discourse on racism; a continuation from the “Black lives matter” movement.

For some, the sense of public outrage itself was interpreted as being completely outrageous in comparison to the lack of outrage at the systematic killing of black Americans at the hands of the US police force. It seemed bizarre that humans could hold such thorough sentiment for a non-human animal, whilst actual humans are still being treated like animals due to their skin colour. Online activists have thus been berating the white community in particular for their reactions.

I’d like to suggest some possible reasoning for this mode of interpretation. Historically, through the media, black individuals have been connected with animalistic qualities, especially in comparison to gorillas. This ideology harks back to evolutionary anthropology and the birth of “race” as a social construct, whereby it was wrongly theorised that those with darker skin were lower on the evolutionary chain and therefore more closely related to primates. With this in mind, it is indeed rather strange that the gorilla imagery is abhorrent and dangerous when attached to the black male, but the gorilla itself can be perceived as beautiful and even non-threatening after its death.

However, this is far more dimensional than the idea that white people simply care more about animals than their black counterparts. The role of influential media outlets must be considered. The media is a key tool in manipulating the emotions of the masses, and is of course dominated by society’s dominant social group. It is highly possible that people’s mass sentimental reactions are greatly dictated by methods of mainstream media reporting as well as trends on social media. That is not to say that the views of black lives matter activists in this case were unfounded. More so, a suggestion that in the digital age, winning the hearts and minds of the general public is unfortunately reliant on infiltrating mainstream media.