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This article is trash, and a lie that white parents in the suburbs tell themselves. Trump didn't make Hudson Valley kids racist/sexist. Your kids were already that way, but you don't listen to Black kids, so you don't know that.
NY State is Blacker than the US overall, but Hudson Valley is much whiter than the US overall. Ask a Black New Yorker why that is.
And stop pretending that manly men are conservative. Again: Black men are more masculine + more progressive.
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@mekkaokereke Abandoning kids to the algorithms pushing extremism and to shtbags like Andrew Tate & his ilk have done enormous damage.
Black kids are online *a lot* more than white kids.
And yet, most Black boys think Tate is a loser, and that his fans are even bigger losers. Before the news became common knowledge, I explained what most Black men think of Tate. (CW: Discussion of Tate. It's bad. You really don't have to read this.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109621372212531350 )
The NY Times' trash crime coverage, and copaganda shows like "Law and Order" have done much more to encourage racism in these kids than social media has.
@mekkaokereke @wendinoakland The algorithm shows different kids different stuff.
IMO, the tell in the original story is the dieting. That's always been a really niche idea, but selling diet pills to healthy people is literally the business of right-wing radio.
You don't think Black kids and girls of all races get shown Tate videos too? They do. The difference is who responds to it, likes it, searches for more, favorites, shares, comments positively on, Tate videos. I'll tell you who: losers that hate women and girls.
Recommendation systems don't magically know what you like before you've interacted.
The whole fitness industry sells stuff! But again, not everyone sporty goes fash. It's not fitness, or sports, or masculinity.
@tob@hachyderm.io@mekkaokereke @wendinoakland I think you're being too reductive. These kids don't start out fascist.
I'm not trying to give them excuses. They are making conscious choices based on the media that's presented to them.
If we get out of this, we're going to have to seriously grapple with the challenge to society of giving anyone with an internet connection unfettered access to our brains.
No, I am not being too reductive.
Kids of all races, genders, religions, countries of origins, etc, are all exposed to the same fascist nonsense online. Almost all of them reject it, except the kids brought up in a culture that conditions them to expect a superior place in society because they're white.
It doesn't matter if they like physical sports or video games. If they are boys or girls. Rich or poor.
The only US folk where a majority support fascism, are white.
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People don't want to believe that "acceptance of racism" is the common denominator of these viewpoints. So they stay surprised when they learn that most white women support it.
Or they pretend that it is "evangelicalism and religion." Even though Black kids are more church going than white, Latin or Asian kids, and still reject fascism.
Or pretend that it's "economic anxiety," even though Black folk have the most economic anxiety, and still reject fascism.
Any excuse.
@mekkaokereke @wendinoakland You can say you're being deliberately reductive, but "they were hopeless racists all along" is your argument.
It's possible to be reductivist and also correct, and maybe you are.
But if so, isn't the implication of your argument that it's impossible to have a anti-racist society because the whites will keep screwing it up?
America is systemically racist. Those who want to enshrine the systems of racism haven't been sitting around idle.
What?
No. You're confusing yourself trying to paraphrase what I said.
Yes, those kids were racist. And as I've said before, racist men don't care about your reproductive rights.
If you want these kids to not act like that, it's easy! Or at least it should be. Because you only have to do 2 things:
1) Stop trying to make every silly excuse but the real one: that racism underlies many of these views
2) Address that racism
There is no step 3.
@mekkaokereke @tob @wendinoakland The people who go “all religion is bad and encourages bigotry” are talking about white Evangelical religion and they think all religious expression is like that.
@MisuseCase @mekkaokereke @tob @wendinoakland As with the Nazi bar analogy, other religions who keep treating them like valid beliefs are going to get dragged down to their level.
@rupert @mekkaokereke @tob @wendinoakland This sounds a lot like “Muslims need to condemn Islamist terrorism.”
Which, by the way, no they don’t.
@MisuseCase @mekkaokereke @tob @wendinoakland I am agnostic, and my stance is that I don't particularly care _how_ they justify their actions, only what they actually do.
Shitty people will always find a rationalization. But some religious groups - such as White Evangelicism - seem to attract a particularly large number of shitty people, and that's worth looking at. However, that does not mean that _all_ Christian groups are like that.
And the same approach should be taken with all the other major religions of this world. In the end, most of them boil down to advice on how to navigate this confusing world we find yourself in, and much of this advice is centuries out of date. How to adapt this to the modern world is a question for believers, but I only have a problem with that if they use it as an excuse to harass and oppress others.
@juergen_hubert @MisuseCase @tob @wendinoakland
Thinking of Christian nationalism or white evangelicism as a religion will get you very confused.
It leads to all sorts of questions like, "How are there atheist Christian nationalists?" and "Why do they like Trump?" And "Why do Black and white evangelicals vote in opposite directions?" And "Why did the KKK burn crosses while they murdered innocent people?"
This trailer is for a documentary that unconfuses a lot of this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6WYseVO29ZU
@mekkaokereke @MisuseCase @tob @wendinoakland
I guess I should read up on that. "White Evangelicals" aren't a major public force in Germany, but we _do_ have some rich and influential religious arch-reactionaries who seem to know all the wrong people on both sides of the Atlantic (the Alito - Thurn und Taxis connection being just one example). And they don't hesitate to support our homegrown fascists.
@tob If the kids were brought up to be anti-racist they'd think racism is stupid. If they'd been brought up to treat girls as equals they'd treat girls as equals and think sexism is stupid. These are values that are learned at home. @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland
@fifilamoura @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland "Anti-racism" is a pretty recent term of art. (c. 2020, as far as I can tell) Of course, the principles go back centuries.
Sure. It's likely the parents fault that their kids are assholes. But imo, isn't the issue that the kids (and the parents, presumably) are assholes?
How do we get them to not be assholes?
I suspect connecting them to a network of assholes and letting them mainline assholerty until their eyes bleed isn't the way.
@fifilamoura @tob @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland I don’t think it’s that simple. I have a 9 year old that I’ve spent 9 years trying to do the right thing but he still gets Tate Jr content pushed to him and his friends online. We’ve had to have a lot of conversations about what he repeats because he doesn’t even realize that it’s racist and sexist dog whistles. It’s a full time job. Social media absolutely targets kids and subtly pushes this bullshit on them
@tas50 I'm not saying social media doesn't push it on kids, it's about how we innoculate kids so they recognize bigoty when exposed to it and don't get sucked in. If you have female and non-White friends as a man and model healthy masculinity then you're actively modeling embracing equality, being antiracist and being feminist.
And I don't have kids, though I talk to kids I love about these things, so I'm not here to lecture you. Obviously you're an engaged parent and you've countered what they're mimicking that they see online. Deconstructing and explaining why those dog whistles are racist/sexist/homophobic is part of educating your kid if they haven't already learned that and it's also teaching them to think critically and to be anti-racist and feminist. Feminism is also for boys because it's essentially just humanism at its core. @tob @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland
@tas50 @tob How we reach kids whose parents are bigots or who don't care to pay attention is a different issue. Some of those kids simply educate themselves once they get out into the world and meet a more diverse range of people. White supremacists hate multiculturalism because it erodes White supremacy. Sexists hate feminism because it erodes sexism. In some ways it really is that simple. @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland
@tas50 Do it right and your kids will be calling you out on your unconscious racism 
Hopefully we are all helping each other deconstruct our harmful beliefs whatever our age. @tob @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland
@tas50 @fifilamoura @tob @wendinoakland
Were talking about two different things.
1) Does your kid ever see this stuff?
2) Does your kid internalize this stuff and repeat the hate out into the world?
How often does your 9 year old interact with positive Black men role models? Weekly? Monthly? Are there 5 or 6 Black men that are part of your close community? I'm guessing no.
Because that's probably the easiest way to innoculate your kid from thinking that Tate is cool.
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@tas50 @fifilamoura @tob @wendinoakland
Wait, I don't need to do a mini thread on this. Fifi already said it!
Innoculation is a great metaphor here. One useful way of looking at facism, misogyny, nativism, transphobia etc are as diseases that we're all susceptible to, to a greater or lesser extent. Of course it's not an exact model -- in particular unlike impersonal diseases that happen to us, bigotry is a choice, so I'm not absolving anybody from personal responsibility. But it's still useful.
From a public health perspective, the people in power collectively benefit from the pervasiveness of these diseases. So they refuse to do the obvious things to reduce the conditions for these diseases to spread. Instead, they actively try to spread them.
In aid of this they've gotten extremely good at targeting propaganda to leverage and magnify existing bigotry. It's not just social media, it's also Fox News, talk radio and podcasts, Sinclair media, the so-called "liberal" media, etc etc etc -- and their interactions, using social media to promote propagnda from other media.
Like all public health issues, we really need collective solutions ... but that's not on the table, in the short term. What we can do, individualy and as part of families and organizations, is to try to inocculate ourselves and others against this to some extent.
I agree with Mekka that Black parents are generally a lot more effective at inocculating their kids against the white manosphere -- and other forms of racism -- than white parents. White people collectively need to get better at innoculating white people against racism: themselves, their families and friend groups, their colleagues, and to the extent they have influence their orgnaizations.
Including here on the fediverse, by the way!
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke great resource Jon! Thanks for putting together!
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke And Mekka, your threads are always full of great insights! Big thanks!
@dgodon@mastodon.online glad it's useful ... and my pleasure! Ally work FTW :)
@jdp23 I had to lookup what “anti-black” actually meant because, as a white guy who is striving to be non-racist, I honestly still had no idea what it meant specifically…
“Anti-black racism is the specific exclusion and prejudice against people visibly (or perceived to be) of African descent – what most of us would commonly call black people,’ says senior policy officer Kim McIntosh.
Kim says anti-blackness goes beyond bad feelings, negative attitudes or stereotypes.
‘Anti-black racism is a toxic cocktail that mixes these beliefs with how people with power make decisions, how government policies are made, or how state services are delivered,’ she adds. ‘It prevents us from enjoying or exercising fundamental freedoms on an equal footing – like the freedom to live and work free from discrimination or abuse.’”
https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/20/what-is-anti-blackness-12279678/
@GuyDudeman@beige.party that's a really good article, thanks! wow i can't believe that it's in Metro of all places. I'll add a link to it article in the first footnote.
I too am a white guy striving to be anti-racist (not just non-racist) ... I went with the definition
Anti-Blackness – beliefs, attitudes, actions, practices, and behaviors of individuals, institutions, software, and systems that devalue, minimize, and marginalize the full participation of Black people across the world
because it's got academic cred. I double-checked it with a couple of Black experts and they thought it was solid.
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke Treating knife crime as a quasi-epidemic was remarkably effective in Scotland. It's really exciting to consider that other social ills could be treated the same way!
Yeah. Another good metaphor for the information aspects is toxicity and pollution - https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21020284/whitney-phillips-fake-news-misinformation-disinformation-you-are-here-book-interview is a good intro to Whitney Phillips' work on that front.
Unfortunately, "could be treated" is a lot different from "are being treated", but fedi is as well placed as anybody to change that. Which doesn't mean it'll happen but still.
@jackeric@beige.party @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
Thinking about this more ... this need for inocculation generalizes to other dimensions. Guys need to get better at inocculating themselves and others against sexism. Cis people need to get better at inocculating themselves and others (INCLUDING CENTRIST DEMOCRATS, oh sorry didn't mean to shout, it's just at top of mind) against anti-trans bigotry. People born in the US need to get better at inocculating themselves and others against nativism. People who aren't Muslims, people who aren't Jews, people who arent't disabled ... etc etc etc.
And back to my point in the previous thread about how fascists have gotten really good at precise targeting: trans people are in general resistant to the white manosphere, so that's not an effective vector for spreading racism to trans people. But racist non-Black trans people are a vector that's very well tuned for spreading racism with trans people!
Similarly the Black, Latino, and Asian manospheres are vectors tuned for spreading misogyny and anti-trans bigotry (and also specific forms of racism) to the audiences that will be most receptive. And there are nativist organizations and networks that are similarly tuned for spreading anti-immigrant bigotry in those communities.
So we really need intersectional inocculation. It's really really really frustrating that the white supremacists understand how to exploit intersectional dynamics to drive wedges and magnify bigotry so much better than white progressives understand how to leverage intersectional dynamics to resist being exploited ... and yet here we are.
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe @tob@hachyderm.io @wendinoakland@beige.party
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke @fifilamoura @tob That’s a lot of reductive assumption for one post.
what do you see as reductive? @wendinoakland@beige.party @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe @tob@hachyderm.io
@jdp23 @mekkaokereke @fifilamoura @tob You’re making very big assumptions about large groups. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful.
@wendinoakland What do you think would be constructive and helpful? How would you approach this? @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob
@fifilamoura @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob There are generalizations made about minority communities without any examination. Even the vileness of whyte peoples’racism is too broad to boil down succinctly. And yes, sure inoculation would be fantastic, but we are vulnerable as youngsters to the predispositions of our parents and elders. We, each of us, has work to do, reckoning, reading, retraining ourselves.
@wendinoakland I'm not sure what you're actually proposing here. "we all have to retrain ourselves" isn't really proposing any real concrete action, particularly in regards to people who don't think they're bigots (which is most people, including ones who act like bigots). It's also individualizing the problem and that's how we got here. We actually need each other to deconstruct our bigotries because we usually can't see them in ourselves or our words or actions. @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob
@fifilamoura @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob Sorry, I should probably back out now. I’m not sure what we can do but educate each other, try to understand that we need to change the way we see our fellow humans — that we need to SEE all our fellow humans as we see ourselves. But I don’t have an answer.
@wendinoakland I appreciate the honesty and everyone's at their own stage of deconstructing harmful beliefs and trying to figure out a way forward. A lot of us are also feeling pretty raw right now. Take care. @jdp23 @mekkaokereke @tob
@fifilamoura @tob @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland
And these are also values they learn in the church.
@tob @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland They may not "start out fascist" but they definitely grew up in an environment that didn't push back against it hard enough, so that field was fertile for evil plants to grow. All it takes is one pro-racism friend to turn a whole group of racism-curious white teen boys into a pack of cruel peer-pressure followers.
Ask me how I know.
@louis @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland the "pro-racism friend" is YouTube and Twitter.
@tob @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland It can be. But the point is, there must already be fertile ground for that seed to grow. Without it, the person rejects such evil ideas outright.
@louis @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland It's pretty damn obvious that the US has lots of fertile ground.
At the risk of belaboring the metaphor, I'm not saying don't address the fertile ground problem. I'm saying maybe we need to reconsider the giant seed planting device.
@tob @mekkaokereke @wendinoakland Then you also kill the seeds of love, acceptance, diversity, and resistance.
Speech is subjective. Try to eliminate the parts you don't like and you hand the fascists the tool they need to eliminate the parts you do like.
Instead, we just need to educate our children to make them not be fertile to fascist and racist rhetoric. We need to teach them to see it for what it is.
No it's not.
That's an excuse that white people make that don't want to accept that their kids were racist little twerps before social media even existed.
And don't want to accept that white people are *less* racist since the introduction of YouTube and Twitter.
And don't want to accept that Black kids use YouTube and Twitter *much more* than white kids, but don't accept fashy nonsense.
And don't want to accept that newspapers and TV news push much more racism.
@mekkaokereke @tob @louis That racism was baked into my white, liberal Manhattan, NYC upbringing makes no sense whatsoever, yet the amount of work I’ve had to do dismantling it suggests a structure much stronger than something I had much power to avoid. Back then it wasn’t youtube, it was everything — it was attitude, all around, a subtle legacy of othering, maintaining a system of unfairness, never recognizing we were racists. The lessons are deep and early and tragic.
@mekkaokereke @louis @wendinoakland I know you have this sore-spot/blindspot and I'm not going to push.
I seems your suggesting that America's progress on racial animus from the 1960s to the 2020s is thanks to social media.
I disagree.
@tob @mekkaokereke @louis Since “social media” has only been pervasive since the late 1990s, I’m going to push back.
@mekkaokereke @tob @louis @wendinoakland It's so tiring to continually hear white folks born and raised in the US proclaim they didn't realize or don't believe they are racist. Their entire existence is based on their privilege and indoctrinated superiority derived from being a white person. It starts with some perceived inherent human difference besides cultural. As Toni Morrison said, once that is taken away, what have you got?
@venitamathias @mekkaokereke @tob @louis Once that’s taken away, you have so much more! We can only do the work - reading, listening, watching - and learn. It’s hard, but it’s worth it! And it’s ongoing - a constant reappraisal of the self and the world.
I don’t mean to refute you at all — I’m horrified. I hope we’ll change, as much as possible.
@wendinoakland @mekkaokereke @tob @louis
Good luck on your journey. I don't need white folks to listen to me. This is ya'lls shit. Always has been.
@venitamathias @mekkaokereke @tob @louis Understood - we have work to do. I’m so sorry. Thanks for taking time.
@wendinoakland @mekkaokereke @tob @louis Take care and enjoy the day.
@venitamathias @mekkaokereke @tob @wendinoakland "Indoctrinated" is exactly right. Most of us grow up in an environment so pervasively steeped in racism that it takes a shock to our system from an external source to even question it, much less do the hard work to reverse the basis of our worldview.