You can take the politics out of the content...wait, no you can't

All consumption is political. All content is political.

🤦🏻‍♂️Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately:

🤔Creators have a hard job. Especially if this is a main source of income. But the reality is, we cannot truly divest ourselves from politics or divisive topics as creators. Our creations and advice in this space are inherently political. For example:

🩺Accounts that encourage parents to heed medical advice are aligning themselves with the political orgs who support medical research, expanded access to early intervention, diagnosis programs, etc.

🧑🏻‍🏫Accounts that give advice rooted in research, pedagogy, or “best practices” are aligning themselves with organizations that support these practices.

♿️Accounts that advocate for inclusivity, awareness, or advocacy are aligning themselves with the political organizations who support inclusion and advocacy.

🚫If an account encourages the OPPOSITE of the above, they may be aligned with the opposite political agenda.

But, if an account then choose to stay silent on issues when they arise, it can feel incongruous with the stance they have aligned themself with in their content. And it allows people to “fill in the blanks” with what they may assume about the creator. This leads to a dangerous assumption, namely, “this creator must agree with me”.

🤷🏻‍♂️A question I ask myself when this silence occurs is this: is their absence of a stance a way for them to remain objective, or SAFE, or is it a way for them to avoid having a difficult and transparent conversation with their audience?

🎤When acts of gun violence, government overreach, abuse of power, etc. occur and creators say to “choose kindness,” or “we need unity” what they are overlooking is that choosing silence or emotional distraction over the loss of actual human lives is NOT KIND. There is nothing kind or unifying about centering your comfort as a creator because you don’t want to have hard conversations. No one wants to have hard conversations, but I’d rather have 10,000 hard conversations than face another preventable tragedy.

🏳️‍🌈Actual advocacy isn’t thoughts and prayers and rainbow flags. It’s discomfort and action.

Please note: as a consumer of content, we cannot assume we know someone’s whole stance. We cannot know why they may choose to back away from a certain topic, and it may be due to their own proximity to an issue. I am specifically talking about those who have leveraged an audience to help build their brand/platform who then choose to obfuscate their stance in order to maintain their brand.