Twitter has been good to me. (Tempted to go the Sammy Sosa “berry berry good” route, but his recent bout with self-hatred needs to be addressed in a post of his very own later. I digress.) Through it, I’ve been connected with a number of creative people whose opinions I enjoy reading. Also, the nature of the medium itself, depending on whom you follow, means that folks are even better informed about important and pressing issues, such as Tiger’s car accident, L’il Wayne’s latest conquest(s), White House party crashers and…Worldwide AIDS Day!
Now, a post about AIDS Day is a hard thing to joke about. But Twitter, ironically, has given us an opening.
When you log on to the site today, you’ll notice that it’s basically an ad for Join(RED). And when you tweet #red, AIDS or HIV, your tweet turns red! Wow. Curing AIDS, one tweet at a time! Boy, I feel great…about myself.
See, my main problem with organizations like Join(RED) is that while they do good work under the surface, their superficiality and crass marketing undermine their cause. Forget about the fact that they try to make it fashionable to support AIDS research, as if we need a cool t-shirt or an annoying socially conscious Hallmark card to awaken our altruism. It’s the fact that they’ve helped the PR effort to equate Africa with AIDS.
Something that doesn’t help that effort? Making every tweet with “Africa” in the body come up red. Just like every tweet…yeah, you get the picture.
So, I can’t discuss Africa in any context without it being, essentially, equated or linked with AIDS? I mean, can you imagine the surprise some redneck Tweeter will have today when he tells some Black poster to “go back to Africa” and it pops up red? (Actually, a redneck might like that. But still.)
How in the hell does this happen? There are certain things that happen that make it apparent no Black person was in the room when someone decided to do it.
Deciding to hire Pat Buchanan at MSNBC.
Deciding Fred Armisen was the best guy to portray Barack Obama on SNL.
Greenlighting Norbit.
This, alas, is another one of them.
Join(RED), if you want to help Africa, stop making it seem like the world’s largest HIV petri dish. It has a huge problem with the disease, but so do we here in the United States. Sponsoring a, well, blushing of Twitter isn’t going to save anyone, especially when you make AIDS and Africa synonymous.
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