Shafiqah Hudson was job hunting in early June 2014, switching between Twitter and email, when she noticed a strange hashtag trending on the social media platform: #EndFathersDay.
The posters claimed to be black feminists but had ridiculous handles like @NayNayCan’tStop and @CisHate and @LatrineWatts. they stated that they wanted to abolish Father’s Day because it was a symbol of patriarchy and oppression, among other nonsense.
They didn’t look like real people, thought Mrs. Hudson, but parodies of black women, spouting ridiculous sentences. As Ms Hudson told Forbes magazine in 2018, “Anyone with half the sense that God gave a cold bowl of oatmeal could see that these were not feminist sentiments.”
But the hashtag continued to trend, upsetting the Twitter community, and conservative media picked up on it, citing it as an example of feminism gone seriously off the rails and “a clear illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism,” as Dan McLaughlin, senior writer at National Review, he tweeted at that time. Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment of his show to promoting it.
So Ms. Hudson set out to fight what she quickly realized was a concerted effort by trolls. She created her own hashtag, #YourSlipIsShowing, a Southernism that seemed especially useful, to call out someone who thinks they’re showing off.
He started collating the trollers’ posts under it and encouraged others to do so and block the fake accounts. Her Twitter community took to task, including black feminists and scholars like I’Nasah Crockett, who did some research of her own and discovered that #EndFathersDay was a hoax, she told Slate in 2019, organized on 4chan. the dark web forum community brought together by right wing hate groups.
Twitter, Ms. Hudson and others said, was largely unresponsive. However, their actions were effective. #EndFathersDay was pretty much silenced within weeks, though fake accounts continued to pop up over the years and Ms. Hudson continued to call them out, like a never-ending game of Whac-a-Mole.
However, #EndFathersDay, it turned out, was more than just a silly joke. It was a well-structured disinformation campaign, a trial balloon of sorts, as Bridget Todd, a digital activist who interviewed Ms. Hudson in 2020 for her podcast, “There Are No Girls on the Internet,” put it for subsequent actions. particularly the election disruption campaigns that began in 2016 with tactics that were replicated, as Senate hearings have shown, by Russian agents. In retrospect, Ms. Hudson’s efforts provided an early and effective bulwark against what continue to be threats to democracy.
“It should be validation,” Ms. Hudson told Slate. “But instead it was upsetting and disturbing. No one wants to be right about the real danger we all face, even if you saw it coming.”
Ms. Hudson, a freelance writer who had worked for nonprofits but since 2014 devoted herself to Twitter activism, died on Feb. 15 at an extended-stay hotel in Portland, Ore. He was 46 years old.
Her brother, Salih Hudson, confirmed her death but did not know the cause. He suffered from Crohn’s disease, he said, and respiratory ailments. Her followers, however, knew from her posts that she had long had Covid and had recently been diagnosed with cancer. And that he had no money to pay for her care. Many rushed to help.
In her death, her community mourned their lossand expressed frustration and anger that Ms. Hudson had never been paid by the tech companies whose platforms she policed or properly credited by scholars and news organizations reporting on #YourSlipIsShowing, and that she had not received the health care she so desperately needed.
“The world owed Fiqah more than it gave her,” Mikki Kendall, cultural critic and author of “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot” (2020), said by phone. Ms Kendall is one of many black feminists who have taken up Ms Hudson’s mission and befriended her on Twitter, now called X. “The world owes it to Fiqah to never allow this to happen to anyone else. Sadly, she is in a long tradition of black women activists dying impoverished. Who die sick and alone and afraid. Because we love an activist until he needs something.”
Shafiqah Amatullah Hudson was born on January 10, 1978, in Columbia, SC. Her father, Caldwell Hudson, was a martial arts instructor and author. Her mother, Geraldine (Thompson) Hudson, was a computer engineer. The couple divorced in 1986, and Shafiqah grew up with her mother and brother, mostly in Florida, where she attended the Palm Beach County School of the Arts, a magnet school.
Shafiqah earned a bachelor’s degree from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York in 2000, majoring in Africana studies with a minor in political science. After graduation, she moved to New York and worked at various non-profit organizations.
She was new in town and lonely. He found community on blogs and social networking sites, including Twitter, which he joined in 2009. (She chose as her avatar an image of Edna Mode, the haughty fashion maven from “The Incredibles.”) And like many black women on this platform, she was mocked and harassed. She received rape and death threats, she told Mrs. Todd.
In addition to her brother, Mrs. Hudson is survived by her father and sisters, Kali Newnan, Charity Jones and Mosinah Hudson; Geraldine Hudson died in 2019.
In the final months of her life, Ms Hudson published about her declining health and her fears of not being able to pay for her care or housing. She could not work because of her disabilities.
She had moved to Portland, her brother said, because the climate was better for her respiratory ailments. But he was unable to secure health insurance. Doctors had discovered the painful fibroids she was suffering from were cancerous. He needed money for more biopsies and for transport to the hospital. Her Twitter community chipped in, as always. She didn’t ask her family for help.
“She was very private and very proud,” Margaret Haynes, a cousin, said by telephone, adding that she had spoken to Mrs. Hudson a few weeks before her death. “He told me, ‘I’m fine. If I need anything, you’ll be the first to know.”
However, on February 9, she told her followers: “I feel like I’m meowing into the void. And it’s raining. And I’m just trying not to drown.”
February 7th was a difficult day. Ms. Hudson was dizzy and in pain, she wrote. She felt her own mortality and publicized her decision to be single and childless — “to be an aunt(ie) and not a mom,” as she put it, recalling a conversation she had with a young family member, and attributing it to characteristic intelligence.
“Say that life at a certain level of existence is dinner at a restaurant,” he explained, continuing, “Let’s say the life that Auntie (me) chose is the choice of salad. A life without a partner or children of my own. Let’s say the Soup option comes with Littles, and maybe a partner. But you can only choose one. Like. If you choose the Family Soup, you cannot have the Singularity Autonomy Salad. “
He dropped a little in that vein, then concluded, “Aunt Fiqah chose the salad. Because she kind of likes Soup. And no one can ever convince her that she REALLY likes Soup. Or will come to. Or that it should. Soup should be enjoyed with love and enthusiasm. If it can’t? Eat the salad.”
Mrs. Hudson died eight days later.
Alain Delaquerière contributed to the research.
