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.
It’s also crazy because some people just automatically add you into a “club” of actual racists… I was being hired for a job and during the interview the guy actually said “you know it’s hard to find just a clean cut white guy for the job, we don’t want some Dominican guy in a hoodie going into a customers store with our logo on.”
…yeah… I can’t get behind that one… Sorry my skin color made you think I was also a racist…
I feel like someone who drops that shit in an interview knows exactly what they’re doing. They want to work with other racists, so they are going to put their chips down and scare off anyone who gives a shit about humanity as a whole
Not sure if that is worse than them being racist as fuck, but just not revealing it in interviews. I once worked for a boss who would throw out any resumes if the name on them wasn’t white enough. He claimed it was “because we wouldn’t be able to understand them” (pretending it was a language barrier thing) but it was always just off hand, before any interview or anything to confirm that. Just pure racism.
That was also a job where I had a coworker who both threatened me with violence for not knowing everything instantly in my first week(not even fucking anything up, just not knowing how to do something I’d never done before), and also that guy ending up in prison. Not to mention my other coworkers who were either massive creeps or stoners who thought that getting high made them better at their job (it didn’t). But yeah, it was the non-whites who were the problem, for sure, that place would’ve fallen into absolute chaos if they hired anyone who had any melanin.
This shit drives me up a fucking wall. Every white person that isn’t very clearly a leftist makes me uneasy until I get an idea of where they are politically.
Everyone’s white uncle saying the same shit when their team’s black QB gets replaced by a white one.