a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  1328 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying.

Not sure which sobriquet I prefer, Y'allQaeda or Vanilla ISIS.

I've had a patch on my hooligan bag since December 2016:

Nobody wants to talk about it, but the modern Klan is largely a Hollywood construct. DW Griffith made it cool to run around in white hoods burning crosses to protect the master race, so a bunch of white racists put on white hoods and burned crosses and terrorized Black people. Woodrow Fucking Wilson screened Birth of a Nation at the White House. It did $100m at the box office, back when a Duesenberg SSJ was five thousand dollars.

We had a great run where screaming white men with torches were simply not tolerated outside of primal scream therapy. That all changed with Birtherism and the media both-sidesing the issue. Now here we are with brodozers and bear spray.

Lawn darts went away. 3-wheel ATVs went away. Hoverboards went away. 4Loko went away. All were mourned by their proponents. I grew up with a bunch of racists. Literal skinheads. They were, almost to a man, "woo hoo!" racists as opposed to "let me share with you my highlighted copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" racists and frankly, in an environment that condemns the performance of racism they were largely fine. Hung out with native americans, hung out with hispanics, were forced to be polite to the handful of african americans that were about.

Shit gets dangerous when you let them 1-up each other in performative racism. Before too long some asshole is driving a Dodge Challenger through a crowd.

In no way do I mean to diminish the very real problem of latent racism. But the problems of latent racism are less immediate than the problems of active racism. And an environment that is hostile to active racism has less of it than an environment that isn't.