Instagram has been invaded by women, either featured or not, posting black-and-white photographs of themselves with the caption “Challenge Accepted”.
There doesn’t seem to be much motivation for the photographic challenge. This is possibly intentional.
Celebrities such as Gabrielle Union, Kristen Bell and Kerry Washington have accepted the “challenge,” which turns out to involve publishing a black-and-white symbol of oneself as a demonstration of women’s emancipation. There is no apparent social justice here, other than encouraging women to take percentages of themselves when they feel safe.
It works like this: women call each other to demonstrate a monochromatic symbol of themselves that they presumably like. Percentage of your photo, with the caption “Challenge Accepted” and the hashtag #womensupportingwomen, and identify other women to post yours.
This is reminiscent of the Dolly Parton Challenge, which encouraged users to post 4 other photographs of themselves that they would use as hypothetical portraits for social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Tinder (a study photo for LinkedIn; a more sultanate photo for Tinder). Basically, this worked as a way for users to post 4 flattering photos of themselves at once.
Ava Duvernay discussed it in her article on the “accepted challenge.” The director of “Selma” shared a striking black-and-white portrait and said she ‘she’s pretty sure it’s a great excuse to post photos,” but gave in at the request of her friends.
Other celebrities interpreted the challenge as a demonstration of brotherly support. Oscar-nominated Taraji P. Henson shared a selfie and wrote, “It’s NOT a challenge to love my sisters, but it’s a gift and bond that we have and appreciate as we walk on this earth.”
Critics of the challenge called it a meaningless gesture that obstructed social media flows, the dual crisis of protests against racism, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Participants protect the photographic challenge as an innocent way to help their friends and breathe those crises.
So others tried to incorporate racial justice into their messages. After sharing a symbol of herself, Padma Lakshmi, host of Hulu’s “Top Chef” and “Taste the Nation,” included 4 symbols of black women killed or after interactions with the police, adding Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland, as well as data on their stories and the prestige of officials involved in their deaths.
Many other non-famous people also post their own “challenge accepted” images; this word has been used more than four million times on Instagram. But the hashtag comes back from time to time. Recently, foreign Instagram users used the hashtag with images to show that they were staying at home to prevent it from spreading the coronavirus.
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