How Racism Really Works

In the wake of the election, in which His Fraudulency (to borrow the title bestowed on Rutherford B. Hayes) won the electoral college while losing the popular vote in dramatic fashion, I wrote a thread on twitter about racism and how it actually works. I thought it was particularly apropos since His Fraudulency ascended to his golden throne by explicitly invoking and inciting neo-nazis and other deeply racist segments. However, many of his white votes came from segments that, strangely, do not consider themselves racist, including white evangelicals. Since the latter only exist due to explicit racism, that’s a little odd. Perhaps they even believed their recent disavowals of their racist roots. This election laid those roots bare, however, for the world to see, even if white evangelicals have eyes, but cannot see, and ears, but cannot hear. They have mouths and can speak, but those mouths are the mouths of vipers.

At at any rate, I wrote this thread for those honorable souls who believe they are not racist despite voting in overwhelming numbers for his Fraudulency, the Donald. It received a fair amount of attention on twitter, so I storified it.

This is the twitter thread for those who want to read it in its original form and the interaction it received. The storify is below. All my fellow whites, including the white women who especially let us all down, know that I’m speaking to you. If you voted for Trump, you are racist, at least in the structural and systemic sense, and this thread definitely applies to you. You are no less culpable than the whites who benefited from apartheid in South Africa, even if they didn’t explicitly support the regime. And if you didn’t vote for Trump? You still probably have a racist thread or two permeating your thoughts. It really is the air we breathe. It requires constant vigilance and effort to combat. If you aren’t fighting it, then you’ve succumbed.