Time has designated frontline health workers – and racial justice organizers – as ‘guardians of the year,’ though lockdown-violating BLM protesters would seem to fly in the face of doctors’ guilt-inducing order to ‘stay home.’
Apparently trying to have its cake and eat it too, Time named “frontline health workers” – a crowd-pleasing category – and “racial justice organizers” as “guardians of the year,” a newly-devised category for its coveted “person of the year” selection.
I get that the person of the year stuff is Time’s big thing, but creating a secondary “guardian of the year” *and* awarding it to two different entire categories of people seems a bit overboard pic.twitter.com/0VETHEVRT8
However, the magazine’s selections served up a decidedly mixed message, as a video clip representing the health workers reminded the audience that “frontline workers are risking their lives to help save ours” and a voiceover chided Americans for sending hospitals pizzas and other goodies: “what we need is for you to stop exposing us.”
Frontline health workers are risking their lives to help save ours. “Doctors, nurses, housekeeping, the clerks, we are the closest to your family right now. And we’re going to take care of them” #TIMEPOY” pic.twitter.com/RdVHIhP88O
Yet Black Lives Matter initially reemerged in a series of lockdown-violating protests back in May following the killing of Minneapolis man George Floyd and has somehow received special dispensation – from the media, if not always from authorities – to carry on in cities across the US even as other protests are quashed and demonized.
While the frontline health workers were a popular pick, some couldn’t help but notice that the underpaid and often under-appreciated members of that category could use more concrete assistance than a splashy magazine cover.
#TIMEPOYpic.twitter.com/n66Jq3qNao
And others observed that the ever-broadening range of “people of the year” diluted the purpose of the awards.
Porche Bennett-Bey: “My purpose is the future, making sure that our children and their children and their children never have to keep going through these generational curses. You want to break those chains” #TIMEPOYhttps://t.co/eLYVITCMRBpic.twitter.com/Uck7kDAcab
The two “racial justice organizers” named by the magazine were bafflingly obscure. Porche Bennett-Bey, whose big day was apparently taking the mic at a town hall in Kenosha, Wisconsin for then-presidential-candidate Joe Biden and calling for more understanding of the plight of the black community, scarcely appears in a Google search. Assa Traoré, a French activist whose brother died in police custody in 2016, is somewhat better known but barely appears in Time’s hagiographic writeup.
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