The Creator of “This Is White Privilege” Wouldn't Do It Again

Wide Angle The man behind the influential Tumblr reveals why he moved on—and why it feels like everything is Tumblr now. Illustration by Slate. Images by Tumblr, Twitter, and Tiktok.  If you were on the blogging platform Tumblr in the mid to late 2010s, social justice blogs like This Is White Privilege and Your Fave Is Problematic were inescapable. They introduced a generation to concepts like microaggressions and colorblind racism and the fallibility of celebrities but in bite-sized digestible nuggets that, in hindsight, seemed tailor-made to go viral. Now even the creators of these Tumblrs will admit that the blogs were also ground zero for a sort of oversimplified self-righteousness that’s still reverberating today. In a recent New York Times op-ed, the founder of Your Fave Is Problematic wrote, “For years, I’ve regretted the spotlight I put on other people’s mistakes, as if one day I wouldn’t make plenty of my own. There can be an unsparing purity to growing into one’s social conscience that is often overbroad.” On Saturday’s episode of ICYMI, Slate’s new podcast about internet culture, hosts Rachelle Hampton and Madison Malone Kircher talked to Dion Beary, the creator and moderator of “This Is White Privilege.” In…
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