Artist Spotlight #5: Sophie Williams
U.K.-based activist and author doesn't consider herself as an artist, but her trademark black and pink graphics coupled with her punchy words have taken Instagram by storm.
Sophie Williams is a leading anti-racism advocate, activist, and author based in the United Kingdom.
Better known as “Official Millennial Black” on Instagram, her account began to gain international traction after she posted her iconic, pink and black colored “Being an Anti-Racist” slideshow after the murder of George Floyd.
Sophie is the author of two upcoming books published by HQ (Harper Collins), both of which are centered around anti-racism work, in the context of intersectional identities. Anti-Racist Ally: An Introduction to Activism and Action is a pocket-sized paperback introduction to allyship at home, work, and in the community, while also touching upon topics of sexism, classism, ableism, oppression, and white supremacy. It launched in the U.K. in October 2020, and will launch in the U.S. in February 2021. Her second book, Millennial Black, is an exploration of Blackness and womxnness in the workplace, of how the intersection of race and gender has created unique challenges at work, and what can be done to overcome them. It will be released everywhere in April 2021, with pending launch dates in the U.S. and Canada. Her other writings have appeared in publications such as The Guardian, Bustle and Cosmopolitan.
Sophie is also a regular panelist, speaker, consultant and workshop facilitator with a focus on anti-racism, and Diversity and Inclusion.
Before she started writing, she had a career in London’s advertising agencies, where she has worked as a Project Manager, Creative film and photography Producer, Operations Director, and most recently Chief Operating Officer.
Pixelated Revolution interviewed Sophie in August, before Anti-Racist Ally was released.
Pixelated Revolution: And in general, how would you describe your work and your aim as an artist?
Sophie: It's interesting because I wouldn't classify myself as an artist. So I am a racial justice activist and an author. Previous to this, I worked in advertising where I was the Chief Operating Officer of a social media agency. So I guess I classify the work that I do as a whole as racial justice and racial activism.
What issues in the world do you care most about?
Racial justice is the work that I do, and the thing that touches me most. But I think what I care most about is equality. So whether that is LGBTQIA people, whether that is a myriad of people, it's just about equality for me.
What do you think Instagram brings to the table that other social media outlets don’t necessarily have?
I wouldn't have imagined ever wanting to do this on Facebook. I don't have Twitter because Twitter seems quite a scary, intimidating place. I feel like Instagram is sort of a nicer community in my experience. But I say that because it's the one that I'm most engaged with. I'm pretty interested as to how Instagram has sort of come into force in the last few months in this activism conversation, because I think previously, it was about a nice sunset or a fun boomerang. I think that's even caught Instagram by surprise. I think when particularly Black women first started getting the uplift, and the engagement that we were seeing starting in the end of May, a lot of us got flagged as spam or flagged as bots because they just weren't used to, or ready to see that sort of level of engagement in those communities. I don't know what's next for Instagram, but I think, at the moment, it’s been really useful for sharing digestible pieces of information with the caveat that people have to do more work. They have to look deeper because it's restricted in as much as you can only fit in a certain amount of information in the tile space that you have. And so it's a starting space with people, but I don't want it to be the end space for people.
Do you have any activist-driven artists that you follow on Instagram?
There's someone who does really great informative illustrations. One account I think is really great is The Conscious Kid for news information. And there’s The Fake Pan. They're an artist, and that sort of ability to visualize things really opens up that conversation in a much more engaging and grounded way.
I'm curious as to how you got your distinct style, of why you chose pink and black as your aesthetic?
A long time before I started this Instagram, I started on my books. I had already pitched and sold and basically finished writing Millennial Black before the murder of George Floyd. I had the Official Millennial Black handle, and I was just a debut author who was just like, okay, I spent lots of time working for clients when I was working in advertising. Working for clients like Netflix, building up fandoms. Just knowing that if you have a title coming out in however long, you just need to get that handle because you need to build that community around it. And so, Millennial Black, the Instagram page, was only ever made and to be sort of a page for that particular book title. The book is called Millennial Black, which is a joke about millennial pink. It has to be pink and black. I sort of tied myself into that with the title, and now I'm trapped with that for the rest of my career.
Can you talk more about how Millennial Black and Anti-Racist Ally came to be?
I already had finished writing Millennial Black when George Floyd was murdered. And I had those handles, and that was sort of with Harper Collins’ imprint called HQ in the UK. That is a book very much focused on Black women in the workplace, what their particular experiences are, and what businesses need to do to be able to sort of level out that playing field, and that's because I am a black woman and I was working in an industry that was very, very heavily white, male, and middle-class.
Although I was the COO or the Chief Operating Officer, there weren't many other people in the industry that looked like me. People would come in for meetings, people come into interviews, and they wouldn't sort of know what to do with me. They would presume that I was much more junior as a person who was there to make notes or make coffees despite being the person who was effectively running the business day to day. So I was like, well, this is bullshit. I need to read a book about it. Maybe I'm not asserting myself properly. Maybe it’s me. Because I think that's the first thing a lot of us think, what am I doing wrong here?
And so there are lots of books that are about women in the workplace and women in leadership, but none that I could find, at least none here in the U.K., that look at that intersection of race and gender, and how they play together. I always use Lean In as an example, even though I think the book is a really good data source because they do lots of research. You can use Lean In as a really great example, unless you're from a marginalized group who is classified as being angry or aggressive when they speak up for themselves, in which case it's quite dangerous advice. That's where Millennial Black came from. I wanted to look at the obstacles that Black women face, and then not say to them, here's how you have to change. But to say to the business leaders, here are the things that you need to do to even this playing field, and here are sort of the business and economic advantages to you of doing that. So that's Millennial Black.
And then George Floyd was murdered. I made a post on what was meant to be like a nothing Instagram account, just to sort of, you know, build a slow fandom. It's really annoying that I don't know what the middle bit of that story is, but it's just, and then something happens. My followers bloomed overnight. I went from like a couple of hundred to oh, I'm going to get 10,000. I think I'm going to be able to do a swipe up, imagine that. And then it sort of kept going and going. So that was not long ago. That was at the end of May.
And I'm always saying to people that sharing things online is not activism, sharing things online is a start, but not an end. When I started looking for ways to pay that compensation offline, I approached my publisher and said, I want to write a book about allyship. I want it to be affordable. I want people to be able to share it in the same way they would share social posts with people who aren't engaging on social in that way. And so, Anti-Racist Ally came, so now my second book is coming out before my first, which is a surprise. But it's interesting. Exciting.
What impression or impact do you hope your work leaves its audience?
I've actually been really interested in Instagram, because the books aren't out, so it's really hard to see what the impression or the engagement or the reaction to those is. But what I do have constantly evolving data on is Instagram, and what that looks like. What I found really interesting is that people from all over the world have engaged. These posts have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Icelandic, Mandarin. I think that it is interesting to see that people all around the world want to have this same conversation, because a lot of people who just see me on Instagram presume that I'm American. And they perceive that this is an American-only issue, an American-only conversation. And it's absolutely not. It's a global issue, and people in different places in the world are impacted in different ways, and different groups of people are marginalized. You know, the LGBTQIA conversation in Poland is probably the most pressing conversation there compared to the race conversation in America.
There's all kinds of different nuances, but what I'm really struck by is how global it is. How many people are saying, I never talked about this before, which I think as nonwhite people is really surprising because I think we think about all the time. I think we're always put into situations where we have no choice, but it turns out that white people are not in those situations, having those same sort of thoughts and those same conversations. The number of people that said I've signed my first ever petition. I've gone to my first-ever protest. I've made my first-ever donation. That to me, it's what I am proud of, and what I hope people continue to do.
That's why every Sunday I ask people, what have you done this week to be an ally? I really want to push people to take this as an action, and not think that it's not about self-improvement. It's not about being a better person. It's not about changing your beliefs. It's about using your privileges to do something. And I always share a screen recording, every single response I get, because I want to be transparent. I want to say, this is exactly how many people engage with it this week. You can see how many people engaged with it last week. It's the momentum I want people to see, and be aware of and inspired by other people, but also be motivated to keep the conversation going.
What do you think is your responsibility as someone that has suddenly gotten such a huge following, and as an advocate and an activist in the age of social media?
I don't really think about it in terms of responsibility. I think about it in terms of what I want to do, and what I want to do is to use this platform that I've been given to have the best and most meaningful and impactful conversations I can have. I started a web shop but at the same time as I'm pitching this Anti-Racist book because I wanted to turn people's engagement in this into money, and a hundred percent of the profits from that donated to anti-racism charities. I worked with a billboard company to get billboards back in London. So I guess I see my responsibility as taking this conversation into as many different avenues as I can to keep it going and to engage people. But I'm aware that when you are talking to people on your Instagram, though the people have opted into that conversation, you're kind of preaching to the choir. If I can take the conversation offline, and take it into many different spaces as I can, that's what I want to do. But I don't know if it's responsibility.
What do you think is the current relationship between social media, this kind of activist driven art, and how it will evolve in the future?
I don't think any of us know how it's going to evolve in the future. I don't think any of us could have anticipated what's happening now. None of us saw this coming, I don't think.
Like I said before, I don't think Instagram saw itself coming. I don't think they saw the platform being used in this way. And I don't know. I don't know if the engagement stays. I don't know if it completely goes away. I don't know if you can take it to a different platform. I don't know what that looks like. I mean, the work isn't online, it's in our day to day lives. For the most part, I do think that because I suddenly have this big following, I hope that some of the work I do in making and sharing free resources is part of the work, and because I feel like I have enough of a platform, and enough of an ability, not through art, but through my writing, which I'm able to do on Instagram. I think I essentially found a way to like hack Instagram, because previously more than 20% text gets really sort of penalized. And that doesn't seem to be happening now. So I found a way to use a platform that was primarily visual and art based, and apply my skills as a writer to that, but because that's so new, I don't know what that looks like a month from now, even.
Do you have any activist-driven resources, initiatives, or events that your support, or we should know about?
I presume that people who read this will be in America, any events would be UK, so there wouldn't be sort of applicable. I mean, I just really want people to read more. I really want people to turn what they're reading into actions. I think one thing about my account is it's very gentle in a way. It's sort of a lot of people's fast access point. And what I really want is to essentially work on getting more direct with my message. I feel like I had to meet people where they were. But hopefully going forward, we can sort of evolve from that, but then I also want them to follow other activists like that. I want them to follow Rachel Cargle, for example, who is not going to take any shit. I want them to graduate from needing to have their hands held, to being people who are willing to be called out and to have those difficult conversations, and to understand when they are not doing the right thing. The starting is great, but evolving is essential.
Any parting thoughts?
The broader thing for me is for people to not feel satisfied, not feel that they have done enough to not feel that either, they've done and made enough change, and they can stop now, or they tried their hardest, and it was hard and it didn't work, and now, what else can they do? And that gives them a reason to stop. I want people to understand that this is a lifelong commitment.
When you're from a marginalized group, you will have had these conversations your whole lives with your parents, your grandparents. None of us have stopped because it was hard, and none of us have stopped because it didn't work. None of us have stopped because people said this isn't the right thing to do because we know it is. And that's what I need people who are engaging for the first time now to understand. It will not always work and it will not always go your way. And that's when you double down, that's not when you stop.
To support Sophie, you can follow her on Instagram, and order or pre-order Anti-Racist Ally and Millennial Black, if available in your country. You can also check out her website for more updates.
Pixelated Revolution is a bi-weekly newsletter that features the graphic designers and illustrators of color behind some of the most engaging and viral activist-driven graphics on social media that touches upon issues of systemic oppression, race, gender, and sexuality politics.
The newsletter is created and edited by Margaret Guzman, an arts and culture journalist and documentary filmmaker based in New York City.
For activist-minded artists who want to be featured, we would love to interview you. Just email me at mmg591@nyu.edu
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