Jamiles Lartey is a political journalist with Guardian US, and like many others on social media, he expressed his sadness and grief at the heinous attacks on Paris on Friday night.
Lartey brought attention to the trend of grief-shaming that occurred following the outpour of solidarity for Paris and the lack of support for those lives lost in Lebanon, Syria and other parts of the world.
“People should be permitted to grieve, and seek redress for specific violence and suffer without being redirected or corrected”, he tweeted.
“You can raise attention to underconsidered suffering without guilting and judging people for being upset by the wrong things [sic]”.
Lartey made reference to the neuroscientifical research that explains why the human brain reacts to grief differently.
Some commentators today honestly sound like tragedy hipsters, “Bro- I care about suffering and death that you’ve never even heard of”
— Jamiles Lartey (@JamilesLartey) November 14, 2015
His comments on ‘tragedy hipsters’ resonated with many and to anyone who is using their personal social networks to commentate on conflicts throughout the world – the people that changed their profile photo on Facebook to the French flag and those who opposed it – this Twitter stream is a must read.
