We like to believe we harbor no prejudices. We like to believe our humor is always politic. We like to believe we always say and do the right things. This does not excuse her words, but is Justine Sacco different from any of us? We like to think the best of ourselves. If someone hadn’t tipped off Gawker, if thousands of people hadn’t shared Sacco’s tweet, if Buzzfeed hadn’t latched onto the story, making it go ever more viral, we would have never known about Sacco’s racism and ignorance. She made her comments in public, but her public was quite limited. She was, before this debacle, someone with only two hundred Twitter followers. The bigger problem is that her mindset is no barrier to corporate success.”Īt the same time, we are only outraged about Justine Sacco because we happened to hear about her tweet. As Anil Dash noted on Twitter, “That Sacco is offensive is obvious. We also need interrogate the corporate culture where an attitude like Sacco’s was clearly not a deterrent to her success. It seemingly did not cross her mind that it would be inappropriate to make that joke in such a public forum. We can excoriate Justine Sacco but we need to interrogate white privilege and the relative comfort Sacco felt in demonstrating such poor judgment. She has since apologized, though it is hard to take the apology seriously because we have become so accustomed to this cycle of public misstep, castigation, apology. She made a cheap joke and paid a steep price. In her case, though, the consequences were severe and swift. Justine Sacco’s actions should not have gone without consequences. In that regard, it was heartening to see that someone purchased the domain and redirected it to Aid for Africa so that some good might come out of such a crass and careless remark. Her cavalier disregard for the global impact of AIDS was offensive. To be clear, Sacco’s tweet was racist, ignorant and unacceptable. We expressed some of the very attitude we claimed to condemn. It is something, though, that the Internet responded in kind, with an equal lack of empathy. Justine Sacco did not express empathy for her fellow human beings with her insensitive tweet. Somewhere along the line, we forgot that this drama concerned an actual human being. The amount of joy some people expressed as they engaged with the #HasJustineLandedYet hashtag gave me pause. The online outrage and Sacco’s comeuppance seemed disproportionate. It all felt a bit frenzied and out of control, as interest in the story mounted and the death threats and gendered insults began. It was a bit surreal, knowing this drama was playing out while Sacco was at 38,000 feet.Īt the same time, I was horrified. I followed along even though something in my stomach twisted as the hours passed. Here was a woman reveling in her whiteness and assuming that her whiteness was some kind of shield against a disease that does not discriminate. Here was comeuppance for a white person generalizing shallowly about Africa, the continent, as if it were one large country with only one story to tell. Here was instant comeuppance for someone who said something terrible. Justine Sacco unwittingly scripted a gripping, real-life soap opera and she wasn’t even there to watch it unfold. During her flight, Sacco gained thousands of Twitter followers, an audience raptly waiting, somewhat gleefully, to see what would happen next. Sacco’s former employer, InterActiveCorp, immediately distanced themselves, condemned her words and she was fired. The digital echoes of her mistakes will endure. These have all been deleted but nothing on the Internet really disappears.
She had made inappropriate tweets before. Her entire online footprint was revealed. Her work and cell phone numbers were uncovered. Internet sleuths figured out which flight Sacco was on and when she would land. Even Donald Trump, a paragon of ignorance, chastised Sacco on Twitter, saying, “Justine, what the hell are you doing, are you crazy? Not nice or fair! I will support Justine is FIRED!” A great many of the tweets including the hashtag were downright hilarious. Between the time Sacco tweeted and when she landed in South Africa twelve hours later, the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet trended worldwide. PR executive Justine Sacco wrote an offensive tweet before boarding a flight from London to Cape Town, South Africa.