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I’m not arguing with racists any more
I used to argue with racist trolls. I spent a lot of time on Facebook in 2016 (when our racist president was installed), refuting their racist arguments. It’s a waste of time, of course. Because, they know that they’re saying ignorant and hurtful things. They are not working toward some collective understanding. They are speaking from their white supremacist convictions, based on their own white experience and the rantings of other (usually more charismatic and articulate) racists. These are cruel people and the anger that they’re evoking isn’t some byproduct of a dialectical process — it’s the point of what they’re trying to do.
On Medium, a lot of these racists have taken to following racism and white privilege tags and advancing their tedious arguments as responses to Black authors. These writers are working to shed light on the racism built in to the core of our society. When Black people try to communicate with us, to make us understand what their lived experience has been like (not the sanitized, idealized version of race relations put forward by the likes of Tucker Carlson), that is a gift. We wypipo need to read, to learn, to understand, and to act on the knowledge conferred by that gift.
Instead, these emissaries from a people that we have oppressed for centuries are attacked as racist…because “they’re speaking about race and generalizing about white people.” Like that’s somehow unwarranted in a land where 10% of the population has 1% of the…