A few weeks ago, mom Candace Payne posted a video on her Youtube channel of her donning a Chewbacca face mask and laughing hysterically at the funny sound effects that the mask produced. The video quickly went viral and she received publicity and gifts from Disney, Facebook, and Kohl’s (where she bought mask.) Her whole family even received full scholarships to Southeastern University, a private Christian liberal arts college in Florida. All of these accolades didn’t come without their fair share of criticism of course. One in particular stood out as so ridiculous, you might think it’s satire (it’s not.) “What Chewbacca Mom’s rise to fame tells us about race in this country” from digital media blog The Daily Dot and cross-posted on MSN took this temporary fame entirely too seriously. The author of the article, Gillian Branstetter contends that the only reason “Chewbacca Mom” gained her fame was because...she’s white.

Branstetter writes:

It’s true, free tuition is an oversized prize for such easily begotten fame. It’s also true that the real rewards typically reaped for online success tend to heavily favor insta-celebrities who are white. Content derived from black users of Twitter, Vine, or Snapchat is often sidelined as part of a monolithic Black Twitter.

We have to pause and sigh here because Branstetter’s “argument” devolves into a scatterbrained tirade about “Black Twitter” (whatever that is) worthy of academia’s highest praises, a grade “A” for “asinine.”

Black social media use is not inherently different than that of white or Hispanic or Asian or other social media use—it generates content that benefits marketers and the platforms themselves. What is different, however, is the degree to which these users get credit for their creations. Black Twitter as a term itself is harmful to this process—it homogenizes a vast and active user base and condenses it for mass consumption, essentially dehumanizing the real people behind the content….

What? Wait, there's more!

Black people use Twitter at a higher rate than white people and are far more active, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Yet it’s far more often Black Twitter is treated as a separate entity from the rest of Twitter, even when trends, jokes, and hashtags that start mainly among black users expand to include a variety of demographics. The genesis of these viral moments are not, as there were with the Chewbacca Mom, typically examined down to the individual who generated them. They are signed off as Black Twitter and the everyone else moves on.

The long and short of it, is that Branstetter thinks Payne only got these accolades because of “white privilege.” Yet Branstetter clearly didn’t do her research before launching into her whining.

As explained by various media outlets including USA Today, Payne is an outspoken Christian. It is a common practice for private Christian universities to give out scholarships to those who are open about their faith, as Payne has been in her online presence and in various interviews. Second, one of the school’s top administration faculty members founded and formerly led the same church Payne attends. So race has nothing to do with it, but her faith and the school’s connection to her church surely does.

But instead of being happy for a complete stranger being blessed with something good by a private party, liberals first instinct is to look for something nefarious to gripe about.