chapotraphouse

This is something I have felt for a long time, but with everything going on with that dead fascist, it seems to be really top of mind right now. I am white, for the record.

White society operates on plausible deniability of racism within itself. The number of times in my life when my fellow white people have said something that everyone would agree is definitely racist is actually fairly small, and concentrated into the time I was a teen or so. And not like people were ever afraid of saying it around me, I was very non-confrontational growing up and never really pushed back on anything bad someone said.

The idea is to never say anything openly racist that someone could call you out on. You don't say "I think black people are naturally violent", you say "I only go downtown for sports events, it's to dangerous there". You don't say you don't want to live in a neighborhood with a lot of minorities. You just... naturally end up in the lily-white suburbs. You will say you are open to dating people of other races, but just a coincidence that it's never happened. You agree that slavery was evil but you also get really worked up when your kids learn about slavery in history class.

Maybe these aren't even the best examples. I don't even like citing specific examples because it's an entire ecosystem. It's all about never saying enough that someone - even a fellow white person - could call you out on. I think a lot of the time, it's about lying to yourself as much as it's lying to everyone else. Because white folks have this notion that racism is "bad", and no one thinks they are a bad person... but at the same time we live in a fundamentally white supremacist society where NOT being anti-racist fundamentally says something about you anyway.

And Charlie Kirk was as good at this as any white person. I explained to someone the other day what Kirk said about black pilots. And this person responded with "well that's not racist, he wasn't saying black pilots aren't competent he is saying you can't know because of eeeeevil DEI!" You can take all the comments he ever said about race and pretend like he wasn't racist (according to white society) because he never said the exact words "I believe white people are superior to other races", because according to white people that is literally the only form of racism that can exist. Hell, some will even defend the statement "I just like being around my fellow white people" as not racist but just a form of personal preference.

And once you see all this, it can make you feel crazy. You can see so much racism among all your fellow whiteys, and yet everyone denies it. Everyone has an excuse, everyone has a reason it's not racist. Not looking for sympathy or anything, just describing what it's like.