Speaking of Normal
The trouble is, normal was never normal, or neutral.
Some, if not every, part of me still reaches for the measuring tape of my grandparents when it comes to how I perceive what is rude, what is right, what is vulgar, what is lady-like. What makes for an eloquent speech, what determines whether an institution is effective. Emails should be responded to in 24 hours. Wedding invitations should not be sent by text, but by postal service, as are thank you letters. Always look someone in the eye when you shake their hand, stand up straight when you speak, don’t say ‘ah’ and ‘um’, or ask someone what they do. Pay taxes. Volunteer. Vote. Treat people as you would like them to treat your mother. It’s a long list, good for every situation, and it covers my manners, my taste, and even my politics. But that measuring tape has become a relic in a place that hasn’t recognized the authority of relics in decades. Which is the trouble with “normal.”
Normal isn’t, and has never been neutral. It has grandparents, a race, a gender, a neighborhood, a realtor, a banker, a police precinct, a newsroom, a school board, a lunch counter, a mortgage application, a union card, a beauty standard, a church hat, a front page, and a file somewhere with your name spelled wrong. And that’s not half the list. The day after Trayvon Martin was murdered and I pitched it to be covered on our national morning broadcast, normal had a standard that deemed my pitch ‘too local.’ Which, as I understood it, meant the manner in which Trayvon died was not abnormal and thus not worthy of being told on a national stage.
The standards many of us were taught as civic baseline came from institutions that were never equally decent to everyone. Some people experienced those standards as order, and others experienced them as exclusion. Which is a large part of why I am in the media industry at all, and I think this is true for most Black journalists and storytellers. At some point, we saw something inherently flawed and unfair in the way our communities were portrayed as problems to be explained. These same institutions still want to rule by family relic, and see the post-Trump world where institutions fail as abnormal.
But institutionals already failed. Everyone. Everywhere. Not equally or for the same reasons and with the same consequences, but consistently. For Black people, the failure showed up as extraction, criminalization, erasure, neglect dressed up as objectivity. Normal, hasn’t always been normal, and it certainly didn’t always feel normal. Normal hasn’t always felt right, or just. And it still doesn’t. If words are just symbols to communicate an idea, the word normal is no longer where X marks the spot. And if history tells us anything, it never was.
Institutions, which is to say newsrooms, and governments, politicians, religious leaders and churches, not only failed to protect everyone historically, they continue to fail to protect everyone. And now the room is on fire, and political journalism is still arguing over the dress code.
Now to my larger point on meme culture. I have a million group chats where sometimes language is barely language anymore. Someone drops an Elmo gif and the whole room understands the mood. A friend quotes a stand-up routine from 2017 and everyone knows exactly what kind of emotional emergency is underway. A girlfriend need only text a gif of Annalise Keating grabbing her purse and I know it is time to pack up and leave the party.
That is not frivolous. That is shared language.
Meme culture has become one of the places where a public that no longer trusts institutional speech learns a new emotional grammar. It is where people signal belonging, contempt, suspicion, grief, exhaustion, loyalty, and permission without having to explain themselves in the language of a press release.
A meme can quietly teach people who deserves sympathy and who deserves mockery. It can turn humiliation into belonging. It can make cruelty feel like common sense before anyone has to defend it as policy. It can give people the thrill of saying what institutions told them not to say, while letting them retreat into “it’s just a joke” the second anyone objects.
Meanwhile political journalism keeps missing the depth of the thing and are spinning their wheels fact checking 6-7 posts from The White House X/Twitter account instead of asking better questions. Yes we need to know whether things are true, but why did 6.5 million people share it? Who is being ridiculed for objecting? Why is it funny and to whom?
Legacy media struggles to ask those questions because it still treats social media as the kids’ table. For years, the people who understood how meaning was moving online were asked to cut clips, write captions, post links, resize graphics, chase trends, and explain the backlash to senior editors who considered all of this vaguely embarrassing but necessary. It’s mind-boggling.
That normal still treats social as the recycling bin for journalism once the smart people are done. We must have our relics and heirlooms, you know, because they mean so much, and they came from such important people and places. And now that the truth is made plain, we see the same institutions whose standard of normal left people behind and gaslit communities, are trying to “pivot to TikTok” with the energy of a mother asking her teenager whether the cool kids are still saying “slay.” All because the numbers finally gave way, not because they understand or value it. Not even a younger staff will help some of these places because they just don’t respect different forms of intelligence.
The Five W’s and one H still matter. They are just no longer sufficient.
Newsroom need people inside, whom they respect, who understand not only what happened, but how people will metabolize it, remix it, weaponize it, joke about it, and use it to decide who belongs, and they are only willing to listen to people with the same standard of normal.
Nothing about politics today is normal. And politics’ old haunts and hiding spaces are no longer relegated to school board meetings, or policy briefings, or 500-page case-studies and 11th hour House floor speech. Politics is happening in the jokes people repeat before they know what they believe. It is happening in the images they share before they can defend the premise. It is happening in the small permissions that pile up until something once shameful becomes ordinary.
And we brought a fact-checker to the party.
Stag.
I still believe in much of what my grandparents taught me, and live my life by it. I believe in dignity, and restraint, and the power of well-placed verb. I believe there is a difference between truth-telling and cruelty. I believe adults should be embarrassed when they behave like boys kicking the back of your seat on a bus.
But I no longer think my inherited sense of normal can be the argument. It can only be the beginning of the investigation.
Otherwise, we will keep mistaking the violation of old manners for the story itself, while the country learns a new political language in jokes, edits, captions, and memes we are still treating as background noise.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser