The bad news: talking politics ruins friendships with your fellow white people. The good news: observing insecure white people’s huffiness from a distance is quite trippy.
The history books will say, “2019: the year that Nazis and measles made their comeback.”
Also posted at chrismaley.com.
Today, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to offer five scientific findings to you.
Before proceeding further though, I need to offer a disclaimer and state that I am a writer and not a scientist.
So…ummm…yeah.
If the thought of a non-scientist discussing his scientific experiments sounds bothersome, or at least worrisome, just be thankful that I sit in front of a computer when I do my scientific thinking and I don’t work in a lab with chemicals and burners and solvents and such.
I wouldn’t trust me in that kind of place, either.
Since we’re all busy here, drum roll please…my as-scientific-as-a-writer-can-be-findings about whites who proudly do not discuss politics:
Years ago, after I got too appalled at the venomous hate expressed after our nation elected Barack Hussein Obama as president, I started to run my mouth. (Yeah! Some white dude ran his mouth on social media. Gooooooo him.) Back then, I still believed that the Right wanted dialogue and I approached them diplomatically.
I reasoned arguments through beforehand so I felt sure about my points. After all, I figured, we are all adults here and adults think about their words.
The airing of those feelings got met with a backlash that I never expected.
Only this backlash did not come from overt or even semi-overt racists, but seemingly-moderate folks. Many shocked me with their figurative ability to put both hands over their ears and scream “La-La-La-La” every time a discussion about the economy or racism began. (Actually, not every person does this figuratively. Some literally put their hands over their ears and screamed like a little kid.)
America’s safest demographic — people who make good money and have all of the possessions that society tells us makes this person an adult — nothing triggers their immaturity like a discussion about systemic inequality and their own privilege.
These individuals shared one trait. By “trait” I mean “white skin”.
Since thinking more about the world in a way that made me want to discuss politics, I’ve never once encountered “it’s rude to discuss politics!” hostility from a person of color. My experience does not mirror everyone’s, but only white people have ever gotten torqued at me for political discussions.
The current online dialogue about how different American citizens view America and its opportunities needed to happen long ago. Which explains a portion of the stress level — this shit’s been on the burner for a while now.
Mankind didn’t have a mass communication tool like social media before. We can share thoughts in threads, where a conversation lives on after the words get exchanged, unlike face-to-face talks. A person needs to do more than slacktivism. And I do. But I also do slacktivisim…run my mouth on the web. I do so as a response to the supremacists’ normalization agenda: they flood social media pages with hate because they want social media to look like it is dominated by hate, that supremacy is the majority viewpoint. Unfortunately for the cross-burners, comments that disagree with theirs exist on that thread just like their hate does. So, if a person scans down a thread, messages against racism and sexism work against normalization.
In the process of telling budding Nazis that they are budding Nazis, I learned a lot about being white. I learned about my fellow white people.
Mainly, I discovered real answers to questions about certain types of white people that I’ve had all my life. Before our world got tense, a certain type of white person always creeped me out. Now, I’ve seen this person offer too many rationalizations for supremacy and these new insights help the old feelings make more sense. Those people embrace fascism…at the very least, they see nothing wrong with the idea as long as they stay insulated from it.
Their fascist-friendliness existed back in the days when less-extreme juju floated in the air. These folks tended to pride themselves on their smugness and extreme judgmentalism — sorry, the diplomatic term for this worldview is “common sense”.
Their dead-eyed smirkiness and lack of curiosity about our universe annoyed me before. Their willful ignorance didn’t make sense. But, these days, it seems like the same type of people still flash the same dead-eyed smirk, only they now say things like, “Nazi? Define ‘nazi’…”
It’s eerie how pretty much every person who used to bother me on some level gravitated towards this modern mutation of a sad, old message.
Will America survive? I could give a fuck. America would rather enrich billionaires than pay to fix Flint’s water pipes. I care more about Earth.
To be continued. Also posted at chrismaley.com. I blog about stuff that also inspires my fiction writing.
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