These days, most people know me as a fiercely passionate, outspoken social justice advocate, laying down truth on my MTV show Decoded or popping up as a commentator on cable news. I soon quit my job to pursue acting and internetting full-time. Within a couple of hours of uploading “SWGSTBG,” I was officially the new (sh)it girl. That video was “Shit White Girls Say… to Black Girls,” and it was right on brand for the kind of social commentary I’d been begging people to watch on my YouTube channel and would soon be known for. So I did the only thing I knew how to do moderately well: I put my frustrations into a video.Īnd before I knew it, my life got turned upside down, Fresh Prince style. I was frustrated by the same tired conversations I kept having with friends and acquaintances I had known for decades, the head patting, the hair yanking, and the gently racist observations that seem to just roll off the tongue after a few drinks. You could say it all happened because my high school’s alumni Christmas party left me sick of white people’s shit. I’m talking supermassive, mainstream-news viral-an unstoppable contagion, if contagions also had some good side effects. Then, one day, it actually happened-every YouTuber’s not-so-secret dream: One of my videos went viral. My comment section generally broke down into three categories: I’d spend hours each week filming and editing videos after work-and sometimes during work, when no one was paying attention-but I never had a very big audience. (A sample: “Went off to school to get my education / Little did I know debt was part of the equation”-I know, I’m good.) I spent the next six years making YouTube videos in my spare time, just for fun the topics spanned everything from hairstyle tutorials to informational discussions about safe sex to original songs about student loan debt. I kept that up through college before making the leap to video in 2006, one year after YouTube was founded. In high school I bought my own domain name,, and started blogging about my life before it was actually called blogging. When I’m super famous and my long-lost internet boyfriend inevitably comes out of the woodwork and releases that photo to the press, I have a statement ready: “That low-res mess of pixels is not recognizable as a human breast.” Smartphones and digital cameras didn’t exist back then, so our late-’90s version of sexting was me taking a Polaroid of my nipple and scanning it. My first boyfriend was a kid I met in an AOL chatroom. I built my first website in middle school after spending the summer at computer camp learning how to code. I have a long and complicated history with the internet. I know the exact date I went from being a nobody, minding my own business in my corporate retail job, to being “internet famous”-and inadvertently making a lot of girls cry. INTRODUCTION GIRL WALKS INTO THE COMMENTS SECTION With sharp humor and her trademark candor, Ramsey shows readers we can have tough conversations that move the dialogue forward, rather than backward, if we just approach them in the right way. Well, that Escalated Quickly includes Ramsey’s advice on dealing with internet trolls and low-key racists, confessions about being a former online hater herself, and her personal hits and misses in activist debates with everyone from bigoted Facebook friends and misguided relatives to mainstream celebrities and YouTube influencers. In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other–from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet. After a crash course in social justice and more than a few foot-in-mouth moments, she realized she had a unique talent and passion for breaking down injustice in America in ways that could make people listen and engage. Faced with an avalanche of media requests, fan letters, and hate mail, she had two choices: Jump in and make her voice heard or step back and let others frame the conversation. But then her YouTube video “What White Girls Say. Or a commentator on identity, race, and culture, really. A sharp and timely exploration of race, online activism, and real communication in the age of social media rants, trolls, and call-out wars, from veteran video blogger and star of MTV’s Decoded Franchesca Ramsey.įranchesca Ramsey didn’t set out to be an activist.
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