@SonOfBaldwinfb inset photo, background image of James Baldwin with gesturing hand, foreground text says "Over it in Baldwin"

Social Media Activist @SonOfBaldwin Gets Banned on Facebook Over Anti-racist Post

Popular social media activist and writer Son of Baldwin gets banned on Facebook over an anti-racist post that he believes Facebook thinks is racist. The post was about black people feeling a homogeneous guilt for negative actions done by other black people.

Son of Baldwin told Core Magazines that “All I have to say is that I hope Facebook and its administrators find a better way to delineate between hate speech and free speech, anti-bigotry and bigotry.”

The article titled “Dear Black Folk,” begins with the line; “Do NOT feel collectively responsible when an assailant is black.”

@SonofBaldwin reposted the article on Medium. “This is the sixth or seventh time this has happened to me though it is the first time they unpublished the Son of Baldwin page,” he says.

He mentioned that Facebook also “deleted another pro-black page, Kinfolk Kollective, earlier this week.”

One commenter on his Medium post pointed out that account bans are done by a person, not a machine, “so you likely got reported to a racist. The pro-violence racist, sexist, religionist baloney on FB usually gets a pass under an “offensive humour” exception…”

He believes that he was mass reported to Facebook by people who don’t like his message, which he says was addressed directly to black people as the title suggests; “Dear Black Folk.”

The ban also affects his personal page for 30 days and can be reinstated earlier if there is enough commotion by the Facebook community, suggested a Medium commenter.

Inspired by the work of authors and thinkers, particularly James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, @sonofbaldwinfb won the 2014 Weblog Award for LGBT Blog, and  is a “literary, sociopolitical, psychosexual, pop cultural” safe space for “exploring, critically, issues that matter to queer people of color and their allies.”

Other articles written by Son of Baldwin include the recent “In Defense of Black Women and Loving Black Children,” which is a sociopolitical commentary that analyses the idea that some black men have a misogynistic attitude toward black women and feel that way because they were beaten by their mothers as children – he  reduces this argument to simple fallacy.

There’s a theory going around, he says, which says the reason “that black men hate black women— black male gangsta rappers in particular —  (and) are so hostile toward black women is because black women beat their sons.”

I don’t “entertain this theory as having any validity whatsoever,” he says.

In the meantime @sonofbaldwinfb is up and running.

Cherryl Bird – Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Twitter @ladycbird | Instagram @cherrylbird

9 thoughts on “Social Media Activist @SonOfBaldwin Gets Banned on Facebook Over Anti-racist Post”

  1. Son of Baldwin, it’s good to see that Facebook admitted they made an error and fixed it promptly. –Cherryl

  2. Can we address Kinfolk Kollective and their recent ban now? Or, the many bans that activists receive daily? Or, the many bans that don’t happen with vile, racist, oft times violent posts that don’t get removed? This goes far deeper than mass reporting.

    1. Right after I got unbanned, I sent the Facebook connection person a message asking for Kinfolk Kollective to be re-published as well.

      1. Hopefully, they’ll come to the same conclusion with Kinfolk Kollective as well. Keep me posted. –Cherryl

  3. Shango works on my behalf.

    Facebook unbanned my admin account.

    A big thank you and much gratitude to Emma Bates Zar, Michael Salem (a data scientist at Facebook), Nathan Wellman, Cheryl Bird, and the entire Son of Baldwin community.

    Your support humbles me. Thank you very, very much.

Add your comments about this story in the space below:

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.