I almost- almost- got to bed on time tonight. I just wanted to post one little tidbit to SRS before bed, but no. No. I had to wander into this shitstorm and spend an extra hour parsing it and coming up with some remarks.

This entire r/videos thread about a white man who was allegedly beaten my a group of black men for dating a black woman is already a sad and somehwhat controversial story. Unfortunately for the human race, Reddit is getting awfully close to full parity of any modern white nationalist movement so this thread completely skips the ‘well hey- maybe race relations in the United States are completely messed up’ phase and goes straight into a circlejerk about how completely, utterly awful black people are. I hope you’re happy about keeping me up you piece of shit Redditors.

First let’s look at what was said and then we’ll talk about what it means.

Act 1: Stormfront

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Act II: Racists Know Best

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Act III: Inevitable Consequences

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Act IV: My Penis!

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Before we start, this commenter needs to get the fuck in.

So what did we learn? Well, for starters (Act IV notwithstanding) this is a pretty good look into the escalation of the racist mindset. First, racists create a narrative in which members of minorities, in this case blacks, are overwhelmingly likely to resort to violent criminal acts and conspire with other minority members in positions of power to avoid consequences; a privilege that they do not feel white people have access to. Second, racists dismiss criticism of their narrative by attacking white, suburban liberal ‘naivete’. This is a particularly insidious tactic because of the way that it frames their narrative. It discounts any non-white perspective out of hand and paints those who object as the privileged ones because of their perceived wealth and distance from the narrative. In essence it attempts to play kyriarchical guilt against against itself. Essentially, because you benefit from an unfair system of class, you have no right to criticize an unfair system of race. This, of course, misses completely that the two are related. Finally, the racist narrative culminates in the advocacy of violence against minorities. This is completely intentional. The racist narrative is meant to plant that suggestion that minorities are dangerous and not to be trusted in the minds of their audience (again, white people) and that extreme acts of violence can be justified against them as a precautionary measure.

To be clear I’m not arguing at all that there was any collaboration between any of these commenters, but instead that the racists mindsets of Redditors and frankly society at large, implicit or explicit, create settings for this type of racist dialogue to thrive, particularly because there is absolutely no examination of the underlying assumptions of privilege inherent in those conversations.This process is completely organic.

I can already see the aSRS lurkers posting this on their sad little subreddit, so let me just head them off at the pass. Obviously, violence can and is perpetrated on whites by minorities and vice-versa. This post isn’t meant to diminish that. Instead, what I would like for you to take away isn’t the violence itself, but Reddit’s reaction to it.

EDIT: Apparently sleepy me is bad at punctuation. I corrected some of it, but I understand that some of it is still bad. I did get some mail though.