Candace Owens’ Controversial Online Presence

As technology becomes more prominent in our society, more and more people are starting to use various social media platforms to promote themselves, their beliefs, and to spread awareness. Many are successful, building a large following and having influence on a lot of people. But not all influences are good, and there are people out there that intentionally get a large platform and promote harmful things to their large audience. Candace Owens is a Black American conservative political commentator, author, activist, and television presenter. Owens has a pretty prominent social media presence. She has 5.2 million followers on Instagram, 5 million followers on Twitter/X, and 3.19 million subscribers on YouTube. On top of that she’s had many videos of her go viral, mostly from her speaking appearances. She has visited many universities around the United States, taking questions from students and answering on the spot. Owens’ content is mainly political and is full of her promoting her controversial conservative views on popular issues of today. As a black woman in America, she shocks a lot of people with her opinions and responses to hot topics of today. But I think what shocks people more is the anti black rhetoric she promotes in the content she produces.

For as long as Candace Owens has had a platform, she has spent her time spewing anti black rhetoric and not only completely invalidating black experiences and issues, more often than not she defends the white perspective and consistently validates white experiences over black ones. For example, in a tweet that user @JordanUhl shared, “The House is having a hearing on white supremacy and the Republicans invited Candace Owens who used her time to say it isn't actually an issue, that it wouldn't even rank in her top 100 issues and that the real issue is black-on-black crime & lack of masculinity in men.” The tweet featured a video of Candace Owens speaking at the House of Representatives. This behavior is incredibly harmful for people to witness, especially people who have actually been a victim of racism or have faced blatant white supremacy. I can’t even imagine how people whose grandparents were sharecroppers must feel hearing what Candace has to say. With Owen’s harmful anti black rhetoric being so widespread, this gives conservative white people reassurance to invalidate Black stories. This also gives them a stepping stone to invade Black spaces. Since Owens is a Black woman, she has access to spaces some white people don’t. But with the rhetoric that Owens spread, it’s almost like she’s promoting white supremist rhetoric. Behaviors like this make it seem like Owens is dealing with dueling consciousness. Ibram Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” explains dueling consciousness kind of like white identities fighting black identities. Kendi states, “The Black body is instructed to become an American body. The American body is the White body. The Black body strives to assimilate into the American body. The American body rejects the Black body. The Black body separates from the American body” (Kendi 2019). Because of how the United States came to be, beginning with White colonizers taking what’s not theirs and keeping themselves in power, we are unfortunately left with a view of what an American should look and act like. Kendi simply puts it as an American body is a White body. Andre Brock also touches on this in his article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation”. Brock states, “American identity is bounded and extended by negative stereotypes of Black identity. Giroux adds that,‘‘whiteness represents itself as a universal marker for being civilized and in doing so posits the Other within the language of pathology, fear, madness, and degeneration’’(Brock pg. 5). With the content that Candace Owens puts out it almost seems like she’s agreeing with this view of what an “American identity” should look like, validating the anti black views conservative white people have on Black Americans, rejecting that view, and assimilating with the white American identity. It seems like she’s doing that instead of rejecting that obviously wrong perspective of Black people and correcting it while addressing issues the Black community faces from within such as black on black crime among other things. Until she faces the reality that assimilating to white Americans is probably not the move, her views will remain problematic and anti black.

Candace Owens is a threat to the digital spaces Black people have created for themselves. Especially on platforms like twitter/X and specifically in Black twitter. In 2023 on Juneteenth, a popular holiday for Black Americans, Owens tweeted “Juneteenth is still ghetto and made up. Hope everyone enjoys it!” What is supposed to be a safe digital space for Black Americans to share things with each other including celebrating holidays was tainted with Owens’ comments. A great aspect about having an online space such as black twitter is that it allows users to spread awareness about major issues and to participate in discourse revolving around what can be done to fix said issues. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement. This movement has been around for years now, but in 2020 after the murder of George Floyed and Breyonna Taylor came to light, the Black Lives Matter movement got more attention than ever. This movement has become such a notable part of how Black people used their digital space. Stories regarding police brutality or unjust treatment were being shared, everyone began recording any interactions they had with police, posts were shared everyday saying any victims names, it was a huge deal. This obviously sparked some backlash from conservative people. Black people using their voice and their space to advocate for victims of racism and police brutality caused a counter movement to arise, Blue Lives Matter. The blue lives in question represent police, and it was the conservative’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement. No one ever said that police’s lives don’t matter, not a single person said that. Yet it got turned into something that is pretty much making people choose sides. Anyway, Candace Owens was not a stranger to this discourse and this is what she had to say on twitter/X, “Black Lives Matter supports criminals. #BLEXIT supports Police Officers. We are working on building out a fund that will go live tomorrow for officers that are unjustly terminated. Can someone please get me the name of the officer that was fired for #RayshardBrooks incident?” Owens not only completely disregards the purpose of the Black Lives Matter movement and the severity of the events that happened, but she desecrates the movement as a whole. Stating that the Black Lives Matter movement supports criminals is defaming and ludicrous. She takes it a step further and comes up with #BLEXIT which is supposed to be a word that means black + exit and inquires about the officer who murdered Rayshard Brook because she wants to bring him “justice”. What? Sarah Hae-in Idzik’s journal “Nothing More Divisive than Politics” does a good job at summarizing what Candace Owen’s tweet embodies. Idzik talks about how when it comes to discourse that directly addresses anti black topics, there is something called “the “color-line logic of the racial contract”, shoring up the American white supremacist project of Black exclusion and supporting anti-Black violence as “a constitutive practice of [America’s ways] and its people” (Idzik 2022). When it comes to the Black Lives Matter movement and the events that caused it to become a thing, Candace Owens participates in Black exclusion and seemingly defends the perpetrators.

  One’s racial and ethnic identity is one of the most important things, it’s what makes you you and it also can determine what spaces you become a part of in your day to day life and digitally. As Black American woman, Candace Owens has access to many black spaces such as BlackTok, Black twitter, and different communities than white people in general. But her consistent invalidation of Black experiences and desecration of things Black activists have tried to build feels almost like she’s rejecting all of the spaces she’s allowed in and forcing herself to assimilate to majority White spaces. In Tiffany Yip’s journal “Ethnic/Racial Identity—A Double-Edged Sword? Associations With Discrimination and Psychological Outcomes” she says, “A strong sense of commitment to one’s identity confers protection against the negative effects of discrimination, while high levels of identity exploration are associated with increased vulnerability” (Yip 2018). Owens is not only not committing to her perceived identity as a Black American woman, but she’s flat out rejecting it and desecrating it at times. She does not want to subject herself to what the perceived Black American experience is like. So she assimilates to the White conservative identity. In Sarah Ahmed’s “A phenomenology of whiteness” she stated, “When someone’s whiteness is in dispute,  then they come under ‘stress’” (Ahmed pg. 12). When someone threatens Owens’ controversial and antiblack views, she claps back fast. Even when someone doesn’t threaten her but the Black community is doing something for themselves, she becomes threatened and attacks for no reason as seen on Juneteenth. Candace Owens rhetoric is extremely harmful to Black activists, families, and victims all over. It’s okay for her to have her conservative views and to believe what she wants, but to promote so much anti-blackness and to invalidate so many people’s experiences on such a large platform is so uncalled for and wrong.

Having a large social media following in today’s day gives you the power to talk to an enormous amount of people with very little effort. This power allows you to share virtually whatever you want. Whether it’s your beliefs, your personal brand, your political views, anything really, having a large platform allows you to share all of that and possibly influence a lot of people. Candace Owens has used her large platforms to promote harmful views to anyone who listens. She provokes people with her anti black rhetoric, using the point that she is a black woman to push her points further. She is not afraid to speak about her controversial takes and is quick to snap back at someone trying to challenge her beliefs, sometimes not letting whoever she’s talking to finish what they’re saying. Having risen to become a popular conservative public speaker, Candace Owens knows the power that her platform holds and she continues to promote harmful views to anyone who listens.