How Some BIPOC Writers Uphold White Supremacy

Warning. May contain controversy.

If you spent any time in the politics or racism tags on Medium in 2020, you’d be hard pushed to find a story that wasn’t either race-baiting or praise-baiting. Some did exist, but they were few and far between. Those people providing balanced, insightful and nuanced views were drowned out in a sea of anger and circular applause.

The race-baiting was largely done by BIPOC writers, the praise-bating done by white writers desperate to get some sort of approval for their reforming worldview.

I get it. Anger sells. Contrition sells. The angry voices got angrier, the contrite voices ever more ingratiating and irritating. It was a little faux-liberal-love in, where everyone got to ‘learn something’ or at least demonstrate they were committed to the process.

The teachers rode high on the algorithm, providing article after article that extolling the suffering of BIPOC and the guilt of all white people. That was the learning. If you’re white, you’re guilty. It’s still the learning.

The human propensity to applaud something we agree with and switch our brains off must be carefully watched. This is, in part, what dopamine is for, an indicator from our internal system we’re on the right track and making progress.

The trouble is, the chemical is utterly amoral. You consciously make the decision about the direction of travel and then you are rewarded for progress towards your internalised goal. Whatever that goal may be.

This amorality is more important than most people realise.

That same feeling of internal reward applied equally to every society in history. The belief they were following the right path, fuelled by their fallible brains, is what led German citizenry to the Holocaust. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t a small group of malevolent actors who brainwashed the population.

It was a country of people who brainwashed themselves.

Aren’t all BIPOC writers against White Supremacy?

Sure they are, and plenty write very angry pieces on this platform — I could throw a metaphorical stone half a metre in any imagined direction and hit an angry BIPOC writer who makes a sizeable income denigrating white people for the amusement of other white people.

Counter-intuitively, I don’t have a problem with this. Dress prejudice up as empowerment with rhetorical devices and lipstick-pig the whole thing if you want to. Go ahead. Slam whomever you like, I’m a liberal and this a liberal society — but let’s not make the mistake of pretending this is progress.

Let’s not pretend this will solve the problem you’re presenting.

These people write what they know people will agree with — and haven’t considered the consequences of doing so. So here’s the question, are they doing this to make the world a better place? Or are they doing this because it’s a superbly profitable niche on this social media site?

I think it’s a mix.

There are some excellent writers on this platform who take complicated stories about racism and turn them into learning points. They aren’t insanely popular. In the meantime the collective hive mind consistently lauds a never-ending diatribe of how awful white people are.

Pieces which are heavy on the rousing sentiment, but offering little in the way of forward thinking. Don’t get me wrong, as a writer on Medium you’re not expected to solve racism on your own — but at the very least, you shouldn’t be adding to the problem.

If I was looking for an analogy of these popular pieces, I’d say in many cases they are similar to a pre-battle speech. Mel Gibson a la Braveheart, every version of Henry V ever. That comparison should make you stop and think.

Which brings me on to race-baiting.

When demagoguery on the issue of race becomes monetised, the populist message will win out. It’s a short term win. It appeals to angry voices, it appeals to contrite white folks. But there are only so many ways you can say ‘white people are awful’ before everyone stops listening.

And the whole point is that you want people to keep listening!

And in early 2021 when it became evident Medium wouldn’t be pushing social justice stories in this vein quite so much — or at the very least curating a wider political spectrum — some of those high profile writers departed for pastures new.

Why might that be?

Could it be their commitment to their ideology was dependent on the high financial reward it entailed? Possibly. I’d like to think not, but you can never underestimate the human capacity for self-interest.

Now that some of those voices have been cleared, or at least aren’t being pushed quite so heavily, space is being given to BIPOC writers who provide insight and analysis rather than monetised rage.

I’d like to consider racism a sort of metaphorical and psychological fog which affects the human race. In many ways it doesn’t matter what direction you pull people in, eventually you’ll get out of it.

There’s nothing wrong with intelligent disagreement about which direction to go in. There’s everything wrong with the unfettered agreement of idiots encouraging everyone to stand still.

Many BIPOC writers stand still, point at the fog, tell everyone this is how the world is. There’s no direction. There’s no plan. Only fog.

How these authors make things worse

First of all, anger is not the best way to get people to change their behaviour. I suspect you know that intuitively. When has anger ever been a motivation for change in your life? When has someone shouting at you in rage ever really caused you to rethink your behaviour or position on anything?

Don’t you just dig your heels in? Or at the very least comply but build resentment?

In an excellent article by The Garrulous Glasweigen, she makes the same point about women who choose to write anti-men articles. I’m sure she’ll forgive me for quoting her;

“If you want to trade that chance for material, positive change, you’re going to have to write in a way that emotionally engages men — or at least does not hand them on a silver platter a pretext to be offended and stomp off.”

And when you swap the word ‘men’ for the words ‘white people’ you see the problem with race-baiting articles.

I’d argue race-baiting articles suffer from survival bias — a logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process while overlooking those that did not. You don’t have to win over the people that are already ideologically committed and make them jump through an escalating set of batshit crazy hoops or act contrite for your bollocking-of-the-day.

You need to win over the people who aren’t self-selecting and you need to do this by using arguments that appeal to their worldview. You paraphrase GG, you can’t give them the silver platter excuse they need to dismiss you.

The people clicking through to those pieces, clapping and leaving supportive comments have already self-selected. It gives the writer the impression that everyone agrees with them. It’s a form of selection bias.

If getting a bunch of liberals to agree not to be racist was the answer to racism, we’d have this done by tea-time and could all go to the pub for a group hug.

You mean engage with racists?

Holy fuck Penguin, you mean we need to appeal to racists? Sure. How else do you intend to reduce racism? But racists don’t want to listen! No, some don’t, and those people are a lost cause who will use all your words against you.

Shouting at the moderates ‘you’re all as bad as the racists!’ isn’t an ideal strategy either. So change the strategy.

Consider employing an economic argument with a Conservative. Racism via the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) being one of the main reasons U.S. workers lack the power of unions and collective bargaining of most highly developed nations. It was passed off the back of conflation between racism and communism.

You’ve got a white middle manager who recently took a pay-cut and who doesn’t give racism much thought. Tell him the history. As someone who comes from a country with a national minimum wage and universal health care and who finds tipping an odd way to secure an economy, I think this lack of foresight was a grievous error on the part of racist white Americans three generations ago.

TLDR: Your white ass got a pay cut and there’s nothing you can do about it because your cracker ancestors were shortsightedly racist.

Will this appeal work? Maybe, maybe not. It’s a simplistic argument but it’ll be a lot more effective than screaming ‘you’re responsible for all the racism everyone has ever suffered ever’ at them ad infinitum.

Most fair-minded Conservative people agree with the statement that black lives matter, but disagree with the ideology of the organisation Black Lives Matter.

The conflation of the two, particularly by left-wing writers on this platform is problematic. You can’t win over Conservatives by appealing to their inner Marxist, they don’t have one. But US history has people like Mrs C J Walker — so instead talk about how to generate wealth and jobs and how empowerment of everyone is a route to economic success for all.

You definitely don’t want a committed Marxist with a $3million dollar real-estate portfolio and a loosey-goosey approach to financial management. This is exactly what Conservatives think corrupt socialism is all about.

Racism has moved from being an issue about what’s right and wrong, to what’s Right and Left.

Combatting racism requires conversation not broadcast

Repeatedly reading about BIPOC suffering doesn’t have the effect most people think it does. While it may act as a call to action in some cases, in many cases it simply reinforces existing internalised negative beliefs.

In short, writing about how BIPOC are consistently disadvantaged fuels the feelings of disadvantage. In some cases, this is absolutely legitimate. In others, it is questionable. I debated with one such writer who had ‘hang-gliding’ and ‘globe-trotting’ listed as her hobbies but who felt she may have been more oppressed than some of the white heroin addicts at the soup kitchen I cook at.

She may have been right, but it’s a tough and counter-intuitive argument to make. The pieces she was writing and reading primed thoughts that exist at a subconscious level about her self-worth.

It primed her interaction with the world.

If you’re repeatedly reading that the world is a dangerous place and that everyone in the world is out to get you — you’re going to internalise this exact thought. Anyone arguing that a marginalised group in a wealthy liberal democracy is the ‘most oppressed’ needs to explore the other options available around the world.

Readers and writers of these pieces encourage and condition each other to interpret the world as perpetually oppressive. What was once benign or at least neutral is now a ‘micro-aggression’ and becomes self-selected evidence for a nihilistic worldview.

A micro-aggression is not the same as an aggression — you can’t mitigate against the former in law. We can stop hate crime because we can legislate against it. We can tackle racism and rebalance the world using social engineering — we can’t tackle how other people make you feel in a shared space.

There’s no legal or social recourse to ‘micro-aggression’ because it’s a subjective experience.

And an experience of a micro-aggression may also be a coin toss between meeting someone who holds a genuine dislike for you and your brain interpreting their benign or neutral actions according to your bias. I think you can see the problem?

A bias in part sustained from reading ‘all white people are malevolent’ for the five-thousandth time this week. You want to live at that level of anxiety? Go ahead — but I think it’s damaging for easily influenced readers and for interactions between members of society.

To really begin to combat racism, we need people of all skin colours to mix together without fear and as part of a genuine commitment towards making the world better.

That isn’t performative action, and can’t only be done by performative allies. I’d argue it’s better if it’s not done by performative allies — they have a tendency to over-compensate, get into apology spirals, confuse the narrative and fuck it up.

It needs to be done by bold people moving into spaces they don’t feel comfortable. Ignoring micro-aggressions and speaking out anyway. I have no doubt I’m going to get lambasted for this article, doesn’t mean I’m not going to say it. There are real occasions when people get in touch because they’re beginning to reject the powder keg mentality of progressivism at all costs.

But the mindset is spreading

And now we have StopAsianHate. Not something I disagree with at all, it seems like a great plan, but already falling into the same Sisyphian trap of providing anecdotal race-baiting rather than solutions.

#StopAsianHate is now a more complex form of the game being played in the oppression olympics.I think a great many Asian writers will find themselves monetised for taking a particularly strong stance against racism perpetrated by black people.

I’ll let your cynicism work out why this might be the case.

I read an excellent article by Jessica Trésor about black people committing hate crimes against Asians. I was amused to see black commenters making exactly the sort of statements white people make under similar circumstances. Lashings of denial and a side order of obfuscation.

Not at the contrite acceptance stage yet it would seem.

I don’t think Jessica will agree with my article and nor should she. She may be right. I may be wrong, the important thing is to read a wide variety of views. I think with her back against the wall, she’ll likely be in the camp that any race-hate between two people will ultimately be the fault of white people.

I’m in the Avenue Q camp. Racism is a by-product of human psychology rather than a problem with melanin levels.

Oh I get it, you’re a penguin white supremacist

I get a lot of people accusing me of promoting white supremacy. I haven’t decided what that is yet and I’m sort of with John McWhorter that the term is rapidly becoming Godwin’s Law reimagined. You can’t accuse benign liberals of being ‘fascist racists’, mostly because they aren’t and doing so often makes you look unhinged.

So instead writers (including penguins) who question are ‘upholding white supremacy’ — A linguistic backhand slap which implies racist without explicitly stating it.

Personally, I think the reverse is true. I think white supremacy (in any country where white people are the majority) can only be upheld by those causing a deterioration in the ability of white people and BIPOC to interact free from apprehension.

The hordes of white people who are ‘blessed’ to receive the blathering of an angry race-baiter do little more than monetise the easy position. The impressionable readers and subsequent writers who germinate their own sprawling versions of ‘how everyone in my office is a white supremacist’ perpetuate it.

I’ll indulge writers a little bit of race-baiting when it’s part of a stronger push towards a solution. To be fair to BIPOC writers, it is long overdue in many respects — so be really fucking angry if you want. But, I’m under no illusion that this is moving the discussion forward. It may be cathartic, but it isn’t progressing anything anywhere.

The solution, I’d suggest is a push towards a greater individual psychology and honest conversations between people about why they think the things they do. Even if those things are racist, especially if those things are racist or racially prejudiced.

It means reading what people say in context. It means considering the effect of the message over time and not just the emotional response of the message itself in the present. It means drawing some difficult conclusions — like the one I’ve drawn on this issue. Some BIPOC writers, unintentionally perpetuate the problem they purport to solve either unknowingly, or out of a vested interest in protecting an individual income.

This will do more damage than good in the fullness of time. The oppression olympics will begin anew with every niche race group and fatigue will set in across the demos. Moderate conservatives, the white working class and individual voices subject to sustained ideological attack will move to the political right, pointing out increasing hysteria as a direct cause.

And we’ll have a very right, very white, backlash government in power as a result. I’d be prepared to call that ‘white supremacy’. You read it here first.

Thanks for coming to my controversial TED talk. Feel free to kick off in the comments. :o)

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