Racism does not have a particular political ideology

AKA: It’s possible for the Left to be super racist, too.

Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash

Everyone knows the standard characterization of a racist. He’s white, southern, uneducated and largely pathetic. He’s poor and voting against his own best interests. Religious, as long as that religion is the hatred-flavored distillation of Christianity. He has Fox news blaring out of his television set and hate speech spewing from his social media profiles.

If you’ve got a very vivid (or particularly vicious) imagination, you probably give him an old porch dog with sagging jowls, a few rusting cars half-hidden in the tall, unmowed grass his front yard, and a nasty drinking habit. He’s got a confederate flag bumper sticker and a pair of truck nutz wafting in the breeze. His racism is as pungent as the sweat stains underneath his arm pits.

Or maybe your favorite flavor of racist is the #AlliterationAnnie trope: the super-entitled, pinched faced, narrow-eyed white woman that carries a mental checklist of ways to be offended, hurt, frightened, or threatened by the existence of Black people. #AlliterationAnnie can’t wait to play the victim, and loves to call the cops on unsuspecting POC who are minding their own business.

She’s loud, pushy, rude, super-entitled and lets her ugly little dog take a massive dump in your front yard without picking it up. She’s mastered the art of weaponizing her tears in every situation from being forced to wait her turn at the checkout line to having her kids picked last for little league. All of her circumstances are special circumstances, and she just doesn’t see why everyone’s so mad at her for being a terrible person.

Both of these examples are so explicitly made of concentrated trashwater that they don’t even bear examining. And it’s white people’s willingness to limit the definition of racism to these exaggerated examples that makes it easy for them to miss the more prevalent, covert racism they practice every single day.

It’s the kind of racism that “votes Blue” in every election, volunteers in the soup kitchens, and makes donations to “underprivileged” youth, but never wants to share the benefits of white privilege or even acknowledge that it exists.

They want a “diversified” workforce, but your 10 years of hands on experience in Project Management isn’t going to triumph over their friend from 3rd grade, Peggy McWhitesalot, who just got her PMP certification three weeks ago. She’s a better culture fit, y’know.

They “feel so bad for the poor Mexican children” but don’t want any brown families driving down the property values in their carefully-curated, all-white neighborhoods. Blue. Liberal. NIMBYs.

It’s dangerous, because it’s insidious. It’s built upon actions so subtle they leave you questioning whether an interaction was racist or whether it was all in your own head. It’s elite-level gaslighting with an unhealthy dose of culpable deniability.

“Be reasonable,” the Liberal racist says, while simultaneously stripping away our humanity.

These repeated calls for “civility” and “forgiveness” in the face of continued brutality are just another face in the familiar portrait of violence against Black and Brown people. There is a subset of individuals who are confused about how so many good, liberal white people can claim to be “allies” but still think we should let people like Sarah Sanders dine in peace. There’s nothing hypocritical about it; it’s just more racism.

Racists, no matter how Liberal they are, no matter how Democratic they vote, no matter how many pussy hats they knit or Negro spirituals they memorize, will always default to holding up white supremacy at any cost. Whites on the Left look at the lily white skin of the Conservative racist and see a comrade, because they are comrades.

That white skin equals humanity to the Left, and only white skin is given fully-realized empathy versus convenient platitudes.

Whereas the “ugly” racists see gorillas and monkeys when they look at Black and Brown people, the hidden racist sees a child or a perpetual dependent. Each Black or Brown person the liberal racist meets is another lost soul that doesn’t know any better than to self-destruct. (But someone that might yet be saved with a little good, old-fashioned white paternalism and colonialist-thinking.)

The Left and the Right aren’t arguing over whether or not Black and Brown people are fully-realized and capable human beings deserving of rights and protections. They’re arguing about what to do with people that neither side thinks of as fully-realized and capable human beings. Ugly racists want to “send ’em all back to Africa”. Hidden racists want to give them “opportunities” that don’t interfere with the agenda and tuck them into out of the way communities except for a few standout exceptions.

The end result is this ability of the Left to ask for “civility” when white cops are killing Black children, when ICE still has 2000 wailing children stripped from their parents, when Muslims are fearful of going to visit family overseas because they might not be able to return home.

Racism is not some strange, outlying character defect held by only a few. It is a pervasive, insidious mindset layered in from birth, nurtured and supported by every institution of American life. Until we as a nation (and white people specifically) learn to look deeper than the overt reactions to see what might be supporting the reasoning behind them, we will never escape this cycle.

Instead of asking us to be more reasonable, whites on the Left would be better served by being less racist, and ensuring their conservative counterparts to do the same.

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