Bark too loud, Bite too little.

Recently, in the comment section of a Miami Swim Week post highlighting primarily white representation, I made a comment on the lack of diversity coinciding with the taste level of the clothes themselves. What I was met with was shocking, to say the least.

You would think people would get more offended by my comment on the taste level of the actual clothes rather than my comment on representation. It feels like however long and hard we scream for representation in markets monopolized by primarily white funding, our voices will be just that unless there is a change in clientele. I was more shocked by the straight up racist comments I received on my post.

To quote directly, one user sarcastically commented, “yes we need some ugly diversity,” a comment that received 20 likes on a somewhat niche post, while another user claimed, “beautiful white women are the standard that people try to emulate.” With this conversation being at the very top of the comments, I knew it would attract the attention of exactly who I wanted it to, but I was never aware of the amount of support they would provide for me in confidently claiming that extremist, racist culture, especially online, is a product of self misinformation and isolation. Would any of these people be able to say these exact comments to my face? I doubt it. In fact, I would bet money on it.

Diversity, within fashion and any other industry, is an increasingly large umbrella category that elicits conversation around every single “ism” you could think of. According to the British Fashion Council’s UK Fashion DEI Report, fashion has become more diverse in its public facing image, yet people of colour still hold only a small share of executive teams and power roles. In trying to eliminate diversity altogether, especially given the current times, minority groups entering the workforce are forced to think about protections for themselves, which for white populations are often already built into the body of formal human resources structures. When comments move from generally racist to personally offensive on apps like Instagram, we find it okay to laugh it off. But what happens when people gain the confidence to bring this muddied mindset into our physical world, one which we associate with personal safety?

But let me not credit them with the false confidence that they clearly do not possess, because upon asking every single racist comment for a picture of their face, they went quiet. In a time like this, I am forced to ask myself if the defenses I use are ones that everybody has in their tool kit, or if they are the ones I have been forced to develop as a part of several minority groups because “we know what will work.” It is funny how often I find myself using the same logical fallacies I was taught in my high school English class against fully grown and developed adults.

Pew Research Center has reported that most Americans are critical of how social media companies handle online harassment, while the Anti Defamation League’s 2024 report found that severe online hate and harassment increased from the year prior. So I’ll leave you with this: there is a clear breach in our path toward equity as a society, primarily driven by the rise of anonymity. But with our defenses built in, the very thing that describes us as a “minority” also equips us with real, physical community. Their bark is much bigger than their bite.

- Anurag Ghosh

*since drafting this post, it seems the photographer has blocked me on reels :)

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Sources

• British Fashion Council — The UK Fashion DEI Report 2024

  
  

• ADL — Online Hate and Harassment: The American Experience 2024

  
  

• Pew Research Center — The State of Online Harassment

  
  

• Vogue — “A Wake-Up Call: UK Publishes First Census on Diversity in Fashion”