I
f you’ve used Instagram even casually in the last 48 hours, you’ve seen them by now. Black-and-white selfies of women accompanied by the words “Challenge accepted,” along with the hashtags #womenempowerment and #womensupportingwomen.
On initially encountering these images yesterday—especially with zero context—it was hard for me to fathom what the “challenge” was exactly. So I clicked on the hashtags in an attempt to find out, only to have my confusion compounded. I took the time to scroll through hundreds of tagged photos. And the only thing I felt challenged by was the narrowness of representation on display.
Occasionally Instagram’s algorithm would permit me to see a woman over a size 8 or the age of 45—but they were few and far between. There were some women of color featured, but overwhelmingly, it was a sea of whiteness. I counted only a few trans women and exactly zero with any visible disabilities. All of which sent a very unfortunate message about what kind of women deserve “support.”
![More from the #womensupportingwomen hashtag.](https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/07/BeFunky-collage-2-800x743.jpg)
Then this morning it became apparent that it wasn’t just diversity that had been buried on my Instagram feed—the more meaningful origins of the black-and-white challenge had been erased too. What is now a light-hearted expression of female solidarity in America was originally, in Turkey, a campaign inspired by both the soaring rates of violence against women and the brutal murder of a 27-year-old student named Pinar Gültekin.