The Road To Hate: For Six Young Men, Charlottesville Is Only The Beginning
This is bad.
We had this stuff minimized. It'll never go away entirely--it's stupid to aim or hope for that. But we had it minimized for a decent stretch of time, and now it's back, and with a purpose.
None of this part surprises me:
That radicalization was rooted, he said, in his own feelings of alienation, which intensified when he went to Indiana University and confronted an elite he soon came to disdain. “They made fun of my accent and overbite and they called me white trash and hillbilly,” Parrott said. “I was never able to identify with a single person.”
The biggest mistake is letting this stuff start up again. It's gone from being comatose to being back on its feet and filled with hope and purpose. It would have been easier to keep it comatose. It may very well be difficult to contain at this point.
We screwed up, and now we've got another problem.
posted by Winston Smith at
6:13 AM
5 Comments:
The thing that should worry you the most about this is that almost none of that article is blind hate. There are serious grievances being made here, from the removal of economic opportunity to "otherization" in powerful universities that determine the trajectory of people's lives and racial violence directed towards them by blacks. They are being radicalized by the events in their lives, not the propagation of hate. And if they were not white and were making those claims, the left would be falling all over themselves to excuse Charlottesville, and they know this.
Other thing, one of the guys had Asperber's. It is an open secret that a ton of the people on places like 4Chan's /pol/ are on the spectrum. Everything about PC speech codes grates on these people. So there is mental disability in play as well.
This is all part of the point about the known evil not being the genuine risk. Mass hysteria about Nazis brings 40,000 people onto the street now. Everyone knows what Nazism and the Klan can bring, and it will be rejected with ease. But if identity politics as it is currently structured keeps categorizing legitimate grievances as hate (because the people bringing them up are white), then things will get bad and the people ratcheting it up will never know what they have been summoning until it is far too late.
What happens when these guys learn to repackage their grievances without the trollish Nazi imagery? What happens when American identity politics is practiced when white identity as a distinct faction in the political arena? It's going to happen.
Yeah, that's a big part of what *does* worry me--in particular the turn toward identity politics, and the anti-white racism that's crept into academia and popular culture. First, it's fucking stupid. And Racism is racism. But, second, it's playing with fire. The demonization of "whiteness" in the academy doesn't bother people like *me* at a personal, gut level--it just annoys me that it's another moronic aspect of general popomo idiocy. But I expect a lot of that is getting out and getting seen by white power types...and they're reaction is going to be different.
Popular culture worries me more. The not-quite-mainstream media (places like e.g. Salon) are filled with stuff like "The Ten Stupidest / Grosses Things About White Guys." I just roll my eyes at stuff like that...but imagine that you're a down-and-out white guy who's already, already with virtually no (as they say) self-esteem, say (to some extent justifiably) mad about affirmative action. How hard is it to believe that if a thousand such guys see a story like that, a handful of them are going to be pushed a bit in a bad direction? The double standard with respect to that sort of thing about race...it's real, but if anyone (white) says anything about it, they're a racist. I would be *so goddamn easy* not to do that sort of thing. It's pointless, stupid snark for clicks, and it's playing with fire.
But it's a bit too late. The beast has already been revived...and now we've got to deal with it.
And, one level up, nobody knows how to talk about this stuff, so when somebody brings it up, the response, again, is "you're racist." which is not only dishonest and wrong, but it adds to the problem. It's perfectly reasonable to be mad about being called a racist in response to a perfectly reasonable question.
I remember people raising the question "if a black student union, why not a white one?" Of course they were called racists...and...uh...actually, a lot of them were...but the question itself is not an inherently dumb or racist question. I think there's an answer to it--but you have to be willing to be more honest than we've been willing to be about it.
"But I expect a lot of that is getting out and getting seen by white power types...and they're reaction is going to be different."
There is a different chronology on this though. I think a lot of it is getting out and creating white power types.
I mean, I think there is a really simple way to make this point. If you think white nationalism is a monstrous evil, don't go out of your way to prove white nationalists right. A ton of the media and academy seem so inconceivably, provincially stupid that they have begun make that their strategy of "fighting" white nationalism.
I agree, and I suppose I got off the thought.
The casual, anti-white racism, especially when combined with the very stringent liberal social norms against anything even vaguely in the vicinity of racism against non-whites, combined with the denial that this is true, combined with accusations of racism for even acknowledging that it is...it's actually a pretty strong foundation for creating white racists, if that's what you're into.
It should go without saying that I don't think this is anywhere near what black Americans have had to put up with...but that doesn't mean it isn't a mess in its own right.
And, while we're on the subject, it also seems to be a pretty good recipe for instilling anti-white racism *in non-whites*--not just white liberals. The former possible consequence I take to be accidental. This latter one...I'm not sure.
"And, while we're on the subject, it also seems to be a pretty good recipe for instilling anti-white racism *in non-whites*--not just white liberals. The former possible consequence I take to be accidental. This latter one...I'm not sure."
Good point. The pomo nonsense was probably what was driving that, making race the new focus of the old material dialectic, which never works.
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