Friend Infected With Right Wing Brain Worms - What to Do?

the commentary is off but the spectacle of a bunch of photojournalists clustering around a small number of neo-nazis isn't wrong. nobody's clamoring for coverage a bunch of people dressed normally standing around counterprotesting unless there's a hook

the thing that's not stated is that coverage and unmasking has diminished the number of alt-right/outright nazi people willing to show up to these things. it's been on a steep downward decline

this story didn't ring true to me at all. the bit about how "the reporters and the nazis needed each other" struck me as especially bogus.

lol this is the most believable part

oh i believe the description of the reporters' behavior but not the way the writer turns it into an Important Moment and a Turning Point:

“Did you see that?” I asked, too overwhelmed to offer my gloss on the situation. I was prepared to let it go if he hadn’t interpreted it as I had.

“Yeah,” he answered. Even though that was all he said, his eyes were shining and I could see he was filing away the encounter.

OTM, the whole thing is bollocks.

Even though that was all he said, his eyes were shining and I could see he was filing away the encounter.

before i got to the end i earnestly read this as the kid realizing that if he openly acted like a nazi he could get on tv

To me it sounded like a pretty realistic description of how a relatively smart young person could get sucked up into the right-wing media bubble. It had some overly-florid writing, but I could also see how scary and agonizing it would be if my son got caught up in all that mess, and how that might inspire some overwrought prose.

I'd like to think my kids are insusceptible to brain worms, but I'm not sure. A couple of kids at my son's school reported that they thought he was being bullied. When I asked him about it, my kid responded, "well, some kids give me shit for being white, but I guess I deserve it." :/

It worries me that he's having to deal with this, but it also makes we nervous that he will discover some online community that will use that ostracization to infect him with brain worms.

yo that's fucked up

"well, some kids give me shit for being white, but I guess I deserve it." <<- this part, not the fear that he'll be radicalized because of it. it's bad right now that he's being bullied on the basis of the color of his skin even if he's never radicalized that sucks.

like everyone else, kids would benefit from a way of understanding history and society and racism that is neither the vague apologetic libism of "i guess i deserve shit for being white" nor its probable successor "fuck this i'm a nazi"

^

fortunately, school administrators are there to fill the slack

on further review, i guess i could picture some school admin reading an article on metoo and deciding to just go on a warpath.

i think kids should be discouraged from seeing their daily lives as part of some larger culture war. maybe in high school they can start to unpack their white male privilege, but at an early age i think that message is more confusing than the classic "treat everyone equally and with respect and, if you don't, you're suspended."

oh i meant make em communists

i guess that's what you said

It must be nice to live a life where you can choose whether you are aware of race or not.

i am suggesting choosing a more complete awareness of race, one where white kids have a more complete idea of where it came from and a better chance of helping to redress what it's done

so long as the parents get sent to the same camp

well, yeah

i think kids can be taught about race without being taught original sin. teach them "this is a fallacious + superficial way of dividing people that leads to cruelty and hatred and no one should be judged on the basis of the color of their skin."

I am responding directly to Treeship's dumbass, dangerous opinion here:

i think kids should be discouraged from seeing their daily lives as part of some larger culture war. maybe in high school they can start to unpack their white male privilege, but at an early age i think that message is more confusing than the classic "treat everyone equally and with respect and, if you don't, you're suspended."

1. Kids who belong to minority groups do not have the luxury of living lives where they are not pulled into some aspect of the culture war. Whether on a gross macro level or through a series of neverending microaggressions, you are going to be marked out as the "other" and treated differently regardless of your actual behavior. When you ask "why did I get into trouble for X/Y/Z when my friend (who is white) never does" or the even more classic "why did I get blamed for something my white friend did", you are told how the world works. Your parents do this because it is integral to your survival. There isn't an option.

Meanwhile, well-meaning white families are busy instructing their kids not to see color, which means glossing over/actively ignoring all of the differences in the baseline ways people of different races are treated in various scenarios. Then, when they encounter someone of color, the thing that has been teaching them how to evaluate that person is the racist society that has been feeding them caricature after caricature since they were infants. Unsurprisingly, this feeds directly into the perpetuation of the culture war.

I don't have patience for that bullshit or anyone who even hints at it.

Then they go home to parents who repeat the garbled MLK quote about a color blind society and watch the news complaining about affirmative action and men dressed as women hiding in bathrhooms

xpost

Kids who belong to minority groups do not have the luxury of living lives where they are not pulled into some aspect of the culture war

so otm, aka my life

“Identity politics is bad!” scream the people demonising kids and their families on the basis of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality...

yes, i agree (xps). i 100% grew up taught the "it's original sin / unfortunate natural prejudice, just try to overcome it personally, ignore color" white lib approach to racism and apart from anything else i think it is defenseless against the hard right.

"Meanwhile, well-meaning white families are busy instructing their kids not to see color, which means glossing over/actively ignoring all of the differences in the baseline ways people of different races are treated in various scenarios."

We aspire to have a society where people do not see color. In the meanwhile many people in our society do treat others cruelly on the basis of their color. Those two things are not in contradiction and in fact our aspirations are tied to the latter fact.

Seeing color and sexuality and gender are good. I encourage it! I also encourage a rigorous enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This Pareene piece is much better than that "my kid turned into an alt-right psycho asshole, but he's all better now, thanks" thing.

"Seeing color" isn't the opposite of colorblindness. When people talk about colorblindness they mean don't treat or judge people on the basis of their color. It doesn't mean that you don't notice physical difference (which is insane - how could you just not notice that people look different? we notice hair color, how much more so skin color - but just like hair color shouldn't inform what you think about someone's character or abilities similarly skin color should not prejudice you).

https://lithub.com/science-the-colorblind-approach-to-racism-doesnt-work/
https://psychologybenefits.org/2018/06/29/children-are-not-colorblind-4-ways-to-talk-to-young-children-about-race/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/05/white-parents-teach-their-children-be-colorblind-heres-why-thats-bad-everyone/?utm_term=.fbc840810002
https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/may2018/teaching-learning-race-and-racism
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/15/margaret-a-hagerman-interview-colorblindness-racism
https://www.leeandlow.com/imprints/tu-books/articles/the-opposite-of-colorblind-why-it-s-essential-to-talk-to-children-about-race
https://www.tolerance.org/professional-development/color-blindness

You have some reading to do.

xps to mordy: yeah but then you're like, wait why is everything the way it is? why does treating people differently on the basis of their skin color slot so comfortably into the arrangement of my society? isn't it the very same people telling me not to see color who are responsible for the maintenance of this civilization that clearly does? how did that happen? are they just Bad Inside and trying not to be? how do they know their inner badness is really bad and not just a harsh truth they'd rather not face? couldn't i, paradoxically, feel much more comfortable and much more like a tough guy if i just relaxed into what are clearly the actual operating rules of my society? then one day you're walking past a dark alley and a guy in a cool uniform is like psst kid, wanna feel good?

I mean, I have black children in a fairly integrated pre-K with more-lefty-than-lefty teachers and my sons have already unbidden had gems like "I don't like black guys, they're lazy" come out of their mouths. That's certainly not coming from us.

And, to be clear, I don't think it's coming from their teachers, either. It's coming from the patterns our society accepts as defaults. If you don't identify them and name them as bullshit, they're going to be accepted as gospel "this is how the world is" information.

^^^

I'll repeat this once but it's so simple I feel like a fool for having to say it:

Teaching about the historical and current existence of bigotry (whether on the basis of race, gender, religion, etc) and teaching that we aspire to a society where people are not judged negatively on those characteristics are not only not inconsistent but they are complementary. There is no point to teaching the former unless you're trying to get to the latter. It doesn't mean not seeing those things as being important (either qua themselves or qua their treatment in society), nor does it mean pretending like bigotry doesn't exist.

If you're opposed to the aspiration to a society where people are not judged discriminatorily on the basis of those immutable biological traits (or even non-immutable group differences like religion or culture) then you're doing something but it's not an anti-racist agenda. There's no contradiction between teaches kids about the reality of bigotry and teaching them that we don't believe it's our value and we would like to eradicate it from society. It's bizarre that anyone might think there is a contradiction here between the two. Since it's Yom Hazikaran tonight it's worth pointing out that there are two takeaways you can have from "never again." You can say "never again" will we allow people to be marginalized and massacred on the basis of their group identity (this is the liberal takeaway from the Shoah). It's a bit naive and lacking but it's consistent with liberal values. You can also say, "never again" will we, Jews, be vulnerable to genocide again, and we will do so by becoming strong and powerful so we can defend ourselves. This is more practical and has become fulfilled but it is not necessarily consistent with liberal values (as anyone can see). Worth thinking about if you're parsing this issue.

When people talk about colorblindness they mean don't treat or judge people on the basis of their color.

yeah, this is an idea that doesn't always work in practice. I asked a guy at the bar -- last week, even! -- who was getting change if it was for one of the places down the street. my thought was "oh, he's probably working the door at the music venue that's owned by the same people, they get change or trade liquor between venues all the time"

it took me a moment to realize the way it was received was as if I was implying he should be at a different venue because he was black

@ mordy - but is the issue a desire to fight bigotry, or determining whether "not seeing color" is a useful framework for fighting structural racism? see also DJP's links above. it's been really clarifying for me as a white person to listen to black people expressing their frustration with the "color-blind" paradigm i grew up with, as in "if you don't see my color, you don't see *me* and what i actually live with in this racist society." if we want to get kids to the point where they're really fighting racism and not just repeating boomer feeling-good-but-not-dealing-with-it talking points, we should grapple with this.

none of which directly bears on the anonymous story which i agree is complete bullshit that reads like it was crowdsourced on 4chan. and I am someone who was repeatedly and infuriatingly sent to the office for nonsensical kafkaesque bullshit in high school. it's all just too tidy and perfect! reminds me of those political cartoon fantasy school districts where teachers are flunking any student who questions evolution or w/e. it's particularly insidious since in reality if secondary education has any ideological bias it's conservative! it's a right-wing-brain-worm dystopian construction.

yeah, this is an idea that doesn't always work in practice.

I will go a step further and say this is an idea that never works in practice, as the most racist people I interact with are the ones who loudly and incessantly claim they "don't see color" when interacting with others, by which they think they mean they treat everyone the same regardless of their ethnic background but in practice actually means they internalized a whole bunch of bullshit stereotypes about the way people are and are very comfortable talking shit about anyone and everyone on every ethnic axis imaginable and never, ever seem to know or associate with more than 1-2 non-white people.

I will also say, Mordy, that what you are grasping for is exactly what all of the literature I posted says parents should talk about. You need to recognize/acknowledge differences so that they can be categorized as "not a big deal" and not a reason for you to default to treating someone poorly. It is the exact opposite of "colorblindness" and it's very weird that you are super-invested in calling it that.

I read this this morning as well and I think the writing of it makes it seem more false than I suspect it is; that is, it's overly written in a creative-non-fiction manner. It's detailed enough in weird ways though that I don't really think the core story of it is untrue. The presentation doesn't do it any favors though.

in next week's episode, I undoubtedly make some offhanded "the restrooms here are terrible, huh?" comment to a trans person who just returned from the toilet

it helps to pay attention to how other people might experience the world, is all I'm saying

btw DJP thanks for compiling those links, really good to have these in one place and i'm encountering some really cool/thought-provoking proposals.

xpost mh, when I was at my last consulting job in nyc I was introduced to some guy who looked maybe hispanic and I said "Hola!" and then I was horrified and overexplained myself that I usually live in a spanish speaking country and just flew in the day before. My coworker who introduced us was dying laughing.

Also DJP OTM as usual

anyway this story did resonate with me. My son is almost 13. He spends too much time online. I did get onto his instagram once and he was following a number of stupid meme accounts which would sprinkle in some pretty insidious shit among the other dumb crap they posted. I kind of read him the riot act on that. But I could never tell what he thought about things. LIke he suddenly would say "Ben Shapiro is the smartest person in the world!" but he was clearly trying to be funny. But there's a line there where you think you're giving someone shit but at the same time you're paying too much attention to them...dunno. One of his friends who is sullen, white, and a dork was posting what I just felt were quite blatnatly racist and sexist memes. I haven't been into his instagram account in some time because he changed his password and now I can't get into it on my phone (he'd logged into it there at some point and forgot to log out, which is why I even had access for six months). He doesn't really discuss politics and seems uninterested. We live in Berkeley and he goes to the middle school that was very widely derided by the alt-right for having a teacher on staff who hit some neo-nazis in SF (something that is actually way more complicated than it seemed to outsiders, because she's actually a completely shit teacher who never comes to work, and seriously does spend her time indoctrinating and trying to attract kids to BAM, which I think doesn't belong in the school and I seriously wish they'd just fire her), and yes, there is a shitload of left-wing talk in Berkeley public schools...the only thing I worry about there is that there's so much of it, and some kids are so inherently reactionary, that having that present might exacerbate contrarian behaviors because kids want to rebel. Anyway. We try to remind him he's 1/4 middle eastern, 1/4 Oglala Sioux and a registered member of the tribe and hope for the best.

(sorry, teacher hit neo-nazis in Sacramento, in case anyone cares)

hola, Yerac!

my take on speaking with people from a variety of backgrounds is if you never feel mortified by something you've said you're either an amazing cultural polyglot or you've probably missed something

btw DJP thanks for compiling those links, really good to have these in one place and i'm encountering some really cool/thought-provoking proposals.

I'd just like to point out that I typed "colorblind study children racism" into Google and posted most of the links on the first page of search results; if you are interested in finding this information, it isn't exactly hidden.