re: #33 Vicious Babushka

A special sort of racist.

There really does seem to exist a fear in some people that blacks are going to one day wreak their revenge and start lynching white people. These videos Drudge puts up about these attacks by blacks, to me, that’s just a projected fear that black people are really fucking angry and how badly they’ve been treated.

The reason why this is such a special sort of racism is it’s actually kind of close to empathy. It’s acknowledging, in a way, that black people are angry about mistreatment. But this kind of racist posits that anger as misplaced, at something that blacks should just get over because racism has been solved and they’re the new racists now. It’s a white person absolving them of white guilt because slavery happened in the past.

I don’t like collective responsibility at all. If we were in an equitable society, I wouldn’t feel at all bad about being ‘white’ (or at least identified as white by most of the population, thought a lot of them my Jew-ness outweighs my white-ness), but we’re not. Because I speak with an educated white accent, because I look and dress mainstream ‘white’, because my name is ‘white’ sounding, I’ve benefited from all sorts of invisible privilege. Nobody’s ever tossed my resume for having a black-sounding name. Nobody’s ever asked if I was an affirmative action choice —-which is fucking bizarre, because being a white person is like being on affirmative action all the time. You’re always the first choice.

So I think that I, as a member of a privileged group, have the responsibility to help tear down that privilege. And I’d rather put it in those terms rather than say paternalistically white people should ‘help’, blacks. White people should stop preferentially helping other white people, and fix the structures in our society that do that automatically.

But then fucks like this can’t take a minute to think about shit like that. Instead they let that fear of the black man bubble up in them and just act like scared little whiny idiots.