Brooke Schofield Drama and What It Shows Us About Racism and Society

Last month, cancel culture found a new bullseye. Surprise! It is yet another white influencer has been exposed for racist tweets on social media: Brooke Schofield (and also Alix Earle who faced her demise in the exact same week). 

Brooke’s honestly disgusting racist and prejudiced tweets barely surprised me. She’s a white woman who hangs out with other white women and barely surrounds herself with any people of color. She’s been linked to problematic people in the past before. It’s no surprise that she herself is a product of her environment (as she expressed multiple times in her apology video).

Brooke went on to - like any other influencer caught in the heat of a public cancellation - make an apology video with tears. She went on and on about her upbringing and how the conservative thinking and racial bias that was shown in her tweets was the fault of her environment. Her grandparents, by the way, weren’t racist. They were just “less progressive”. “Conservative.” She claims to know better now, and that she had done the work to reform her ways and “change”. That’s a word that you’ll hear a million times in this endless cycle. “Change”. With glassy eyes, she wrote off the tweets as a harmful mistake that she made when she was a young girl who didn’t know any better. She was actually about seventeen or eighteen, near the same age that Trayvon Martin was when he was shot and killed. She apologized to “whoever she hurt” with her comments and it confused me why she wouldn’t just apologize to the Black community,people of color who she harmed, and those communities overall. 

Her audience’s response barely surprised me either. After all, she directed her apology to “whoever she hurt”, so non-Black fans of Schofield, or more specifically her white fans, flocked to the comment section to forgive her for her comments when they were not the the target of her previous actions. However, they were probably the target of her apology. Brooke wanted to seem remorseful for her actions and knew that her predominantly white audience accept her apology on behalf of the communities she targeted and scroll. They gaslit themselves into thinking that she had truly changed and now, Brooke seems to be on the up and up. She’s back on her podcast with Tana Mongeau, and she’s continuing to make money and content; the controversy seems to be behind her. 

The only thing that doesn’t confuse me, rather upsets me, is why the controversy is being put behind her. 

The public consciousness does have a short memory. One scandal happens and it’s all people can talk about for a few weeks, maybe even a few days, before everything returns back to normal. However, to me and tons of other Black people, this isn’t just a scandal. This is a part of a never-ending loop where white influencers and celebrities are constantly able to get away with racism.  

Let’s face it. Racism is still acceptable in our society no matter how progressive everyone claims our society has become. White fans found it easy to forgive Brooke for her racism because they still don’t see that racism is unacceptable. They are shielded by the negative mental effects of racism by their own privilege, so they find it easy to forgive. They still think it’s a phase that every person can go through and grow out of. They don’t understand that to be racist throughout your developmental years, you are taught a distinct lack of human empathy for certain groups of people. You have to be trained to look at a person and think, “they don’t deserve to live on the same Earth as me, they don’t deserve to breathe the same air.” Also, Brooke was about seventeen or eighteen years old at the time. Looking at the tweets, she definitely knew better and these were definitely intentionally harmful or at the very least willfully ignorant to some capacity. 

Additionally, is anyone thinking about the people who were most likely affected by Brooke’s racist past? Black classmates in school, peers in the industry or anyone else in the Black community that was surrounded by her discriminatory beliefs. Did anyone stop to think about how the only minority in the room behind her felt when she was spewing hate speech? The Martin family that was already dealing with the grief of losing their son to a hate crime and in addition, a windfall of media suggesting that their son was the cause of his own death despite clear evidence proving otherwise. Brooke was only adding more to that pain by being another naysayer of George Zimmerman’s guilt. White influencers who are caught for their racist pasts do not understand the gravity of the things that they said and did. They never will because they don’t experience the type of microaggressions and macroaggressions people of color do on a daily basis. They don’t understand how those comments and actions stay with you for years and eat you alive inside. This sentiment is true of society in general. We think a lot about the big things that happened to Black people in history. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Black Lives Matter movement. But still, we neglect thinking about how little actions hurt people and add to generational trauma. These ignorant “mistakes” and harmful actions that these people made when they were “young and dumb” actually hurt people. And the harm that they caused doesn’t go away just because they got on TikTok and said that they had grown and changed. It’s especially not true when we’ve seen no proof of any growth from them. 

Not to mention, if they truly changed their ways and decided that their previous actions were wrong a long time ago, why didn’t they delete the tweets? Why didn’t they get rid of the incriminating evidence? If they truly believed that what they said was wrong and that it was harmful, why would they allow it to continue existing on the internet? Why wouldn’t they come forward and apologize for it without having it being exposed? Perhaps those tweets were never wiped because what is in those tweets is actually what they believe. Maybe because, deep down, they knew that they wouldn’t be punished. 

In conclusion, as a society, we need to start holding people, especially white people, accountable for their actions. Forgiveness is great and an important part of life, but only when a person proves that they’re actually sorry. Not when they are only saying sorry to save their career or just because it is what is expected of them. As a society, we need to start re-examining our view on cancel culture and racism as a social construct. Racism isn’t okay, and even if it happened a year ago, ten years ago or a century ago, it will never be okay. And people deserved to be canceled for it, especially when they are not sorry.