I try to explain this phenomenon like this: for them racist just means “something absolutely bad which is not allowed”. So when they see someone they like or themself say something racist it can’t be racist because they are not bad and/or they are saying it without bursting in flames.
for them racist just means “something absolutely bad which is not allowed”
Which is where you get “Self-Hating Jews” and “Anti-White Racism” and “Men are the Real Victims” rhetoric.
In the end, its just another form of censorship (increasingly state-authorized), where “Racist” is a thing you can say to shut someone up, regardless of the actual content of the message.
And, in a way, they’re right. “Racism” is a political term with the ultimate intent to silence words and ideas that are distasteful and destructive to the social fabric. But then Being Racist is also a political act, intended to silence words and ideas that are distasteful and destructive to a racist polity.
it can’t be racist because they are not bad
“It’s not racism, its race realism” was the trope back in the '00s.
Before that, you had Charles Murray and “The Bell Curve”, which intended to re-introduce scientific racism through sociology and statistics.
Institutionalizing and propagandizing racism has been an ongoing project within the conservative movement straight back to the Plantation Era. Hell, back to the early Colonial Era. Racism as a heuristic and a rationalization for eugenics has been on the books for centuries. Worked great when the majority always qualified as “white” and you could paper over holes in your theory by importing new kinds of “white” people (Irish, Germans, Slavs, East Asian anti-communists, Cuban refugees) into the zeitgeist.
The big hang-up that modern white nationalists face is that they’re not the biggest swinging dicks on the global stage anymore. So how do you explain your racial superiority when Old World Europe has collapsed, the American economy is thick with non-white plutocrats, and the whitest corners of the country are increasingly mired in extreme poverty?
MAGA is the white nationalist’s effort to reinvent their corrupt failed electoral strategy as a fascist activist movement.
I live in a very gentrified part of my city and some security guards will still follow me around while they let white people freely walk around. And yet they always act shocked and insulted when I call out their racism. They couldn’t possibly be racists — not them!
I try to explain this phenomenon like this: for them racist just means “something absolutely bad which is not allowed”. So when they see someone they like or themself say something racist it can’t be racist because they are not bad and/or they are saying it without bursting in flames.
Which is where you get “Self-Hating Jews” and “Anti-White Racism” and “Men are the Real Victims” rhetoric.
In the end, its just another form of censorship (increasingly state-authorized), where “Racist” is a thing you can say to shut someone up, regardless of the actual content of the message.
And, in a way, they’re right. “Racism” is a political term with the ultimate intent to silence words and ideas that are distasteful and destructive to the social fabric. But then Being Racist is also a political act, intended to silence words and ideas that are distasteful and destructive to a racist polity.
“It’s not racism, its race realism” was the trope back in the '00s.
Before that, you had Charles Murray and “The Bell Curve”, which intended to re-introduce scientific racism through sociology and statistics.
Institutionalizing and propagandizing racism has been an ongoing project within the conservative movement straight back to the Plantation Era. Hell, back to the early Colonial Era. Racism as a heuristic and a rationalization for eugenics has been on the books for centuries. Worked great when the majority always qualified as “white” and you could paper over holes in your theory by importing new kinds of “white” people (Irish, Germans, Slavs, East Asian anti-communists, Cuban refugees) into the zeitgeist.
The big hang-up that modern white nationalists face is that they’re not the biggest swinging dicks on the global stage anymore. So how do you explain your racial superiority when Old World Europe has collapsed, the American economy is thick with non-white plutocrats, and the whitest corners of the country are increasingly mired in extreme poverty?
MAGA is the white nationalist’s effort to reinvent their corrupt failed electoral strategy as a fascist activist movement.
I live in a very gentrified part of my city and some security guards will still follow me around while they let white people freely walk around. And yet they always act shocked and insulted when I call out their racism. They couldn’t possibly be racists — not them!
If those things are racist then it means they were wrong and it could also mean they are a bad person for supporting such things.
That’s enough for the human to animorph into an ostrich.