“the problem with Social Media is that it reduces Black Lives Matter to a trend and a hashtag”

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In the latest episode of Shade, Lou Mensah talks to Sylvia Arthur, the Founder of The Library of Africa & The African Diaspora. Based in Accra, Ghana, the library elevates Black literature across geography and generations, and serves as a physical meeting place, where visitors can connect through books on the continent. And as she says, “Home is where my books are.”

As always Mensah invites interesting guests and new voices. This conversation is one of my favorites - it is about the power structures of information in a Social Media-driven global society and the importance of face-to-face conversations about books instead of just posting popular booklists for the sake of likes.

“I think the problem with [Social Media] is that it reduces Black Lives Matter to a trend and a hashtag. And you know, for some of us, this is something that is a question of life or death on a lot of occasions; it is something that we live with every day.”

Whilst Social Media is helpful to getting the message out, according to Arthur, “it also becomes an outlet for people to say and do things that they would not ordinarily do if they were face to face with you. And, I think, that works on a negative and on a positive as well. So, there are people who would have all the books and all the reading lists, and they will be posting them on social media because it makes them feel good and it makes them look good. And the opposite of that is people who would say the most racist things because they are anonymous. So, it is kind of this flipside of being hyper-visual and being anonymous but doing it to get your point across: It is two sides of the same coin.”

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