The brand of online social justice predicated on sales numbers is always going to fall flat. Yes, your choice blockbuster made a bajillion dollars. But numerous other diverse works don’t, for a reason. Don’t pretend oppressed minorities have equivalent buying power.

If we acknowledge that non-white people, women, and LGBT people are economically oppressed, that they make less for the same work than hegemonic identities, then we can’t just pretend they can BUY HARDER to solve our problems. We need a structural critique.

If we’re making less, then predicated our success on having spent more money is always going to be a losing proposition. Massive financial success not only shouldn’t be a metric of success, it literally should be something we don’t want to happen on that scale.

For every diverse movie that makes a billion dollars, there’s a hundred that fail because of structural issues and prejudices. Holding up those massive successes as our successes is trickle-down economics. Period. Not just comparable-it’s literally the same thing.

Let me tell you, there are studies. In a video game studio, producers will present meticulous studies that show very clearly that diverse games are riskier than the alternative. They’re well-researched studies-these companies commissioned them because they want to make money.

If you turn the right knobs and push the right buttons, you can make diversity “safe” for the mass market. Which is to say, inoffensive for cis het white men. But we need to reject that model as success; we CANNOT exist only in ways they find “safe.”

We see this same issue in the punk rock scene. Punk rock SHOULDN’T appeal to the mass market. It should be scary, challenging, threatening to the status quo because the status quo is bad and needs to be shaken up.

But you CAN make punk rock palatable. You just have to make it “safe.” Instead of Black Flag screaming about police brutality, you get Green Day crooning about how girls make them sad. Not that there isn’t space for that, but it takes the strength and value of punk away.

Once the art is made “safe,” it suffocates out the challenging, uncomfortable voices. We saw this with punk in the early 90s. The safe voices drowned out the honestly, and otherwise successful voices went silent.

In popular media, LGBT representation has to be aspirational and uplifting. It has to be Queer Eye. Queer Eye looks NOTHING like my experiences. It looks like the guys at Pride org meetings who call the cops on trans POC because they “have to keep the movement positive.”

So when we’re celebrating voices like Queer Eye, it furthers the silencing of voices that might make the status quo uncomfortable. We’re working AGAINST real representation and inclusion. It makes it harder for people speaking truth to power.

So let me pose it like this: Captain Marvel is good social justice because it made more than Joker. Which is to say, the short film made by a queer woman of color that doesn’t recoup its $5,000 budget is bad social justice.

To make a billion dollars, you need bigots’ money. Period. Bigots bought Captain Marvel tickets. Despite what you hear on Twitter, shitty white men went to these movies, because they were presented as “safe” enough for them.

It’s easy to assume there’s a line in the sand with popular media if your entire engagement is Twitter. You might see a hundred “ethics in games journalism” guys say they won’t see (insert massive blockbuster.) But that’s not actually a popular voice. Just a sensational one.

Representation, on the surface, is valuable. But we have to acknowledge power dynamics and class. The Queer Eye guys have more in common with wealthy reactionaries than they have with me. Brie Larson has more in common with Bob Iger than she has with me.

Providence: Walking in the city. A white woman in a Wonder Woman shirt just physically grabbed her 8~ year old son’s head and covered his eyes as she passed me on the street. #representation