When Misinformation Rewrites History: Oroma Elewa's Story
Earlier this morning I did something I told myself I should stop doing. I immediately opened my eyes and logged into Instagram. Anyhow, right before I caught myself, and proceeded to exit the app, I came across a very interesting post.
The post, since deleted, was from writer and visual performance artist Orma Elewa. And it stated that her words,
“I am own muse. The subject I know best. The subject I want to know better,”
had been stolen from her and credited to the iconic Frida Kahlo. The story quickly spun out of control, and up and down a spiral of narratives and agendas that both praised, and attacked Elewa.
Many came to her rescue by retweeting or bringing awareness to her work via their social accounts. While others accused the artist of hypocrisy, stating that she herself is guilty of “stealing from other black artist”.
In an ongoing effort to rectify the issue, Elewa reached out to every known publication that used the quote, and let them know that they had in fact misquoted Mrs. Kahlo, while simultaneously “erasing her [Elewa] from history.” And although Elewa and this issue have been gaining attention, as she stated on her Twitter account; at best, most of the syndications will simply edit or delete it versus actually addressing the issue. Which, if you still don’t understand, is the fact that someone (intentionally or mistakingly) disseminated fake news.
It is unknown where, how, or why this started. But the takeaway is that it happened at all. Sadly, we live in a world where you have to know and trust your sources of information, and still take it with a grain of salt.
We all love the Internet because of the vast amount of information, and how easy it is to access it, but as a creative and an entrepreneur, it is disheartening when things like this happen. In today’s climate, there is just as much misinformation as there is factual information on the internet, and that’s scary! It’s even scarier to know that a lot of times major syndications, ones that have gained our undying trust and accreditation, are the ones who disseminate this information….or misinformation, if you will.
Beyond Elewa having to fight for her legacy, no matter how trivial the issue, perhaps the real tragedy is that things like this happen far too often. Elewa has a little over 50K Instagram followers, and her story is still low on the radar - so imagine being an artist with less than 1K followers, and how easy it could be for someone to steal your work and pass it off as their own.
There are so many lessons to be learned from this story. I personally found that it is imperative for independent artist to build stronger communities so that we may prevent things like this from happening. What is your takeaway? Has something like this happened to you before? Share your thoughts and / or stories below!