White supremacy isn't harmless. But many Americans like to pretend it is. 11/2018

[lunasun]

https://iamishena.com/2018/11/14/white-supremacy-isnt-harmless-but-many-americans-like-to-pretend-it-is/

My hypothesis is that, loathe as we are to admit it, the belief that whiteness inherently deserves precedence lies within many across this country. To acknowledge that that belief cannot be divorced from it’s logical ending throughout all of history: that non-whites should be subjugated, given less opportunities, brutalized, and their numbers regularly culled, forces the low-level racist to own their support of an ideology that is fundamentally evil. To have their cake and eat it too, to hold that white supremacy is just an alternative view, or even more disingenuously, a form of high-level comedy (or low-level, according to the ‘boys will be boys’ crowd) allows those who sympathize with racist beliefs to tell themselves they are separate from the deadly consequences of it.

But they aren’t blind to the fact that non-white people don’t get to escape the bullets of the men whose vile views they indulge, make excuses for, and rationalize away. They’re getting the end result they wanted—the terrorizing of minorities who arrogantly believe they have the right to equal opportunity and freedom from discrimination, to ascend to the schools, jobs, and neighborhoods that racists believe to be their birthright—while getting to pretend all they want is a safe space for white identity politics to be heard. They just want a little separate but equal, is that such a crime?

But white supremacy isn’t benign. It never has been, and never will be. It is invariably coupled with cowardice, and so its most pathetic proponents are driven to distance themselves from its inherently violent conclusions to convince themselves that they aren’t tacitly supporting attacks on humanity.

What those sympathetic bystanders fail to realize is that the race violence they stoke, wink at, and then disingenuously downplay won’t fit within clearly defined lines when it’s ready to devour whatever it needs to quench it’s thirst. It’s a little like Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when he sets a bewitched blaze to a room in hopes of harming those he deems lesser, and then almost loses his life in the flames himself. When the conflagration of radicalized, unhinged white rage takes its final shape of America, we’re all at risk for getting burnt.
Even those who saw it coming and welcomed it with their silence.