Gabriel Foster has She has been a One Direction fan since she was 11 years old.
“We all come from different backgrounds. We all bond for Harry, but we don’t personally know what’s going on in each other’s lives,” she told me. “I just wish everyone had more representation.” Foster, now in her early twenties, is one of Twitter’s most famous “Black Harriss” as she was one of the first groups to try to win with “Black Harris” One of the Black Harris Styles fans of the Open Alliance of the Fate Movement.
This took longer than many people seem to remember. In the fall of 2017, a fan threw a Black Lives Matter flag onto the stage at a Styles concert in London, but Styles ignored it. His fan base has grown accustomed to him taking pride flags and dancing with them on stage, as well as delivering his opening monologue about how much he values female support. It seemed no accident that he left the flag untouched on the floor, even as part of the crowd held signs that read “Black Lives Matter.”he notice Things like that – he would often read signs in the audience and joke with people who wrote weird signs. Many fans responded angrily. “Use your fucking platform,” one person tweeted afterward. “You’re fueling hypocrisy.” Others are deeply hurt. “I love Harry, he is my safest place yet I feel so isolated and so unsupported,” another wrote. Some mocked him with his own lyrics, from the (horrible) song “Women”: “You bloom, your feast” to “You bloom, you white feminist.”
Young people who have grown to understand network effects reflexively talk about the power of having a large following and a central cultural status or platform, not so much a stable object or trait as a privilege conferred by an interconnected group real people, so should be used wisely. Black fans of Harry Styles aren’t arguing that he should support Black Lives Matter, just because it would be a personal affirmation; they see it as his moral duty as someone with a high public profile. But many white fans joining the conversation only suggested that black fans were asking for too much, Harry couldn’t support every political cause, and the concert was not a protest. After the initial uproar, Stiles posted black-and-white photos of some of the signs on his Instagram with the caption “Love.” For white fans, this gesture should be enough. In June 2018, when Gabrielle organized a mass-printed paper sign display at a fair in Hershey, Pennsylvania, white fans tweeted at her, bewildered. This is solved, isn’t it?
“The projects we put into the whole tour start to feel hopeless at some point,” she told me. “It’s a constant attack on black fans; we’ve been attacked and we can’t get Harry’s approval.” Gabriel attended a second concert in Washington, D.C., and splurged in a living room on the edge of the stage Bought a ticket. She brought a Black Lives Matter flag and was going to throw it at Styles to see if he would pick it up. “I’m hopeful,” she told me. “He was right in front of me, talking to someone near me. I threw it at his feet, he looked down, stepped on it, and walked away. So it broke me.” Her mood took a turn for the worse when some of the girls in the surrounding crowd insisted that she was solely responsible for the disappointment. They told her she kept crumpling the flag so he couldn’t see it for the entire show and then she got mad at him for not noticing that moment? She shot back that she had kept the flag open at the edge of the barricade for hours. The night was so ruined, she went home angrily. “I was really upset at that moment,” she said. “I had a picture of him standing on the flag and I was pissed. I even considered taking it off completely because it was so bad. I cheated.”
After driving back to Virginia, she calmed down a bit and checked her Twitter feed. Many of her friends in Styles sent her clips of another Black Lives Matter flag on Jumbotron at another show, or Styles holding a flag in Boston, and one of them shouted, “I love each of you. . . . if you’re black, if you’re white . . . whoever you are . . . I’m rooting for you.” Ultimately, she thinks Styles does care. But she never completely forgot the despair of that moment. “I wish he did something sooner,” she told me. “To this day, other fans still throw it in the faces of black fans. Well, your favorite person won’t even be holding the flag, or something similar. “
there is one Never criticize their lovers, never hold them accountable for anything, always pamper their fans like every day they were born. It’s “cupcakes,” and there are many Harry Styles fans. It also has what black fans call “KKK Harries” – white fans who refuse to give up any turf in the fandom, preferring to pretend they’re the only ones there.
