I’ve mentioned this one before, but it’s worth retelling.
I briefly knew a guy, absolute hick ass trailer trash, who said a large number of incredibly dumb things to me, but this one stands out. He once told me that Southern Baptist was the one true religion, because, and this is a direct quote, “His name is John the Baptist, not John the Catholic!”
I was at a trailer park party once as a non-white person in the south.
Apropos of nothing, I was approached by probably the skinniest human on the planet. Like, he was so skinny you couldn’t tell if you were looking directly at his bones, or if his skin was actually a paper thin covering over his bones. He was so skinny, he could have performed in some sort of advertisement explaining how the price of a cup of coffee could help feed the starving southerners.
As I was scanning my periphery to see if I could identify the Necromancer that was animating this creature, this person told me, of their own volition, that in church they had learned that white people were made by God and therefore had souls and black people evolved from monkeys and therefore did not have souls.
In his mind, this was a way of reconciling the truth of evolution with the faith of his church.
He had no idea that he had just lobbed the most racist thought that I had ever been exposed to in my entire life at me.
This is extremely close to what the Mormon church told their followers for a long time. Cain slew Abel. God found out, marked Cain, and cast him out of the garden… The Book of Mormon states that the Canaanites (Cain’s children) were cursed by a “blackness” descending upon them. Yes, that was interpreted in the most racist way possible.
The Mormon church used to officially preach that Cain was marked by being turned black. So black people were descendants of Cain, and therefore couldn’t officially be part of the church. Black people being accepted into the church is still a relatively recent thing, and only because of massive amounts of external pressure. The church didn’t disavow their racist teachings until 2013. Literally less than 20 years ago. There are fucking middle schoolers who have been alive longer than black people have been in the Mormon church.
This really makes me wonder what would make a black person want to join the Mormon church. Like… these people had to be pressured for decades into accepting that you even have a soul… and you what to join them?
the most racist thought that I had ever been exposed to in my entire life
Damn, the white southerners have started behaving themselves since I left a couple of decades ago if that’s the worst you heard! Barely even joking, I’ve met so many people where I live now who are from the south that say ‘I just had to get the fuck out’. Gorgeous places, tiny clusters of great people, and vast swathes of shit straight out of Deliverance.
Oh, they can throw in a lot more racist stereotypes and racial slurs! Not doing that to your face is what we’ve been conditioned to accept as progress for the south.
On one hand, I think what makes it so deeply racist is how genuine it is. It doesn’t sound like he’s saying it with an explicit intention to hurt, but just as a “matter of fact” that he thinks this.
On the other hand, that could also be a bit redeeming: If he honestly believes what he said (I can’t even make myself repeat it), but doesn’t hate black people for it, is he then truly racist or just deeply misinformed? To be fair, there’s a decent overlap between the two. I’m arguing from a “don’t attribute to malice what can accurately be explained by stupidity” standpoint.
The thing about it to me that is racist is that it is specifically black people. Like, I was not emotionally equipped to ask him what his church thought about Indians like me and Asians.
Or what happens when a white person and a black person have a child? Does the child have half a soul? Like, if somebody is predominantly white but 17 generations ago, there was a black person in their family, do they have like a piece missing from their soul?
Or what if they got it wrong? What if white people evolved from monkeys and black people were made by God and so white people don’t have souls?
After all, genetically, the only pure humans with no Neanderthal or Denisovian or other hominid ancestor genetics in it are black people.
How do you test for soul? How can you evaluate the soul percentages?
It’s so beyond the pale that I was stunlocked. I honestly wish I could go back and ask these questions.
First of all, to be perfectly clear, I have no intention of defending this person. As far as I can tell from your description, they’re probably a raging racist.
Regardless, I think the discussion around where the line between stupidity and racism goes is an interesting one. In my mind, racism requires malice: It requires that you actually see some group as less worth than others, or otherwise dislike or hate them. The counter-example (which I’ve actually met in the wild once) is a person that genuinely believes that some group is less adept in some way, but that still argues that they have the same inherent worth as others.
To put it bluntly, it’s not controversial to say that some people are smarter/taller/stronger/faster etc. than others, while still acknowledging that all human life has the same inherent value. Does it make someone a racist if they hold that stance, combined with a belief that <insert group> is less adept at <insert skill/property>? I would argue not, because (as previously stated) in my mind racism implies that you believe some people are inherently worth more than others, and that belief is not really tied to any measurable property. Basically, I think a true racist uses “they don’t have a soul/ are less intelligent / etc.” as a post-hoc justification for a hatred they already hold.
I experienced both benevolent and antagonistic racism as a brown kid in the south.
The antagonistic racism was never so much like, get out of here, you darky, or calling me names or anything, although I have been called a “plains n-word” by an old white fuck in South Dakota, so there’s that.
But the antagonistic racism I most commonly experienced was being followed around stores.
So much so that it gave me a complex. It happened so often that I would go to a grocery store, or to some retailer, and I would be browsing around, and the people that worked there, which were always white people, would check in on me constantly, always watching me, following me around, staying six to ten feet away from me at times throughout my entire sojourn through the establishment.
But I, being a young kid, didn’t find any malice in this. I just thought, oh, maybe, I don’t know, maybe they’re time travelers, and I’m gonna be so awesome in the future that this is their opportunity to see me without changing the timeline.
But getting away from the south and magically the following me around in the stores thing completely and totally stopped so abruptly that it made me reevaluate what was going on. I’m like, oh no, they were watching the darkie because they thought he was gonna steal shit from them.
But on the flip side, I also got benevolent racism where they thought I was better than them because I was a Native American. They would ask me things like, can you actually talk to horses? And what’s it like being able to control the wind?
And what sucks is I’m really good with animals, so to some degree I could talk to horses and they would just sort of get me, but it’s not like I could understand what they were saying.
And the very first time I ever fired a bow and arrow I hit a bullseye.
So the instructor was like, if you do it one time, it’s luck, you do it two times, it’s skill, so I fired again and I hit another bullseye.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about. I’m sorry for the crap you experienced, and I think it’s good of you to be able to recognise the naive and/or positively loaded presuppositions people have for what they are. Honestly, I think it’s way too common that people will interpret others in the worst possible way, and see slights where none was intended. It looks like you’ve been able to do the opposite, and interpret others in the best possible way, and I think that makes the world a far better place!
At first I was gonna write “Why didn’t you explain to him why Baptist church is called like that?”, but then I remembered cases when people say something so profoundly stupid to me, that I judge they’re too far gone to warrant any explanation. If it was someone with a half-working-brain I’d still try in a friendly way to give them some more context and expand their thinking, but there also such people (especially if they are some blowhard personality) that you just put a mental note to stay very far away from them out of caution.
I’ve mentioned this one before, but it’s worth retelling.
I briefly knew a guy, absolute hick ass trailer trash, who said a large number of incredibly dumb things to me, but this one stands out. He once told me that Southern Baptist was the one true religion, because, and this is a direct quote, “His name is John the Baptist, not John the Catholic!”
And for him that was a QED moment.
Dumbest motherfucker I’ve ever encountered.
I was at a trailer park party once as a non-white person in the south.
Apropos of nothing, I was approached by probably the skinniest human on the planet. Like, he was so skinny you couldn’t tell if you were looking directly at his bones, or if his skin was actually a paper thin covering over his bones. He was so skinny, he could have performed in some sort of advertisement explaining how the price of a cup of coffee could help feed the starving southerners.
As I was scanning my periphery to see if I could identify the Necromancer that was animating this creature, this person told me, of their own volition, that in church they had learned that white people were made by God and therefore had souls and black people evolved from monkeys and therefore did not have souls.
In his mind, this was a way of reconciling the truth of evolution with the faith of his church.
He had no idea that he had just lobbed the most racist thought that I had ever been exposed to in my entire life at me.
In his head, you are now the non-white friend he can claim he has to prove he’s not racist.
(Also, username checks out…?)
I did pick that name for a reason.
This is extremely close to what the Mormon church told their followers for a long time. Cain slew Abel. God found out, marked Cain, and cast him out of the garden… The Book of Mormon states that the Canaanites (Cain’s children) were cursed by a “blackness” descending upon them. Yes, that was interpreted in the most racist way possible.
The Mormon church used to officially preach that Cain was marked by being turned black. So black people were descendants of Cain, and therefore couldn’t officially be part of the church. Black people being accepted into the church is still a relatively recent thing, and only because of massive amounts of external pressure. The church didn’t disavow their racist teachings until 2013. Literally less than 20 years ago. There are fucking middle schoolers who have been alive longer than black people have been in the Mormon church.
This really makes me wonder what would make a black person want to join the Mormon church. Like… these people had to be pressured for decades into accepting that you even have a soul… and you what to join them?
Hasa deega Ebowai
Damn, the white southerners have started behaving themselves since I left a couple of decades ago if that’s the worst you heard! Barely even joking, I’ve met so many people where I live now who are from the south that say ‘I just had to get the fuck out’. Gorgeous places, tiny clusters of great people, and vast swathes of shit straight out of Deliverance.
I am struggling to think of anything a human being could say that would be more racist than:
“This entire group of people are soulless homunculi, p-noid zombies, there is nothing going on behind their eyes, when they die they just die.”
I mean, I struggle not to think that about conservatives.
Oh, they can throw in a lot more racist stereotypes and racial slurs! Not doing that to your face is what we’ve been conditioned to accept as progress for the south.
On one hand, I think what makes it so deeply racist is how genuine it is. It doesn’t sound like he’s saying it with an explicit intention to hurt, but just as a “matter of fact” that he thinks this.
On the other hand, that could also be a bit redeeming: If he honestly believes what he said (I can’t even make myself repeat it), but doesn’t hate black people for it, is he then truly racist or just deeply misinformed? To be fair, there’s a decent overlap between the two. I’m arguing from a “don’t attribute to malice what can accurately be explained by stupidity” standpoint.
The thing about it to me that is racist is that it is specifically black people. Like, I was not emotionally equipped to ask him what his church thought about Indians like me and Asians.
Or what happens when a white person and a black person have a child? Does the child have half a soul? Like, if somebody is predominantly white but 17 generations ago, there was a black person in their family, do they have like a piece missing from their soul?
Or what if they got it wrong? What if white people evolved from monkeys and black people were made by God and so white people don’t have souls?
After all, genetically, the only pure humans with no Neanderthal or Denisovian or other hominid ancestor genetics in it are black people.
How do you test for soul? How can you evaluate the soul percentages?
It’s so beyond the pale that I was stunlocked. I honestly wish I could go back and ask these questions.
First of all, to be perfectly clear, I have no intention of defending this person. As far as I can tell from your description, they’re probably a raging racist.
Regardless, I think the discussion around where the line between stupidity and racism goes is an interesting one. In my mind, racism requires malice: It requires that you actually see some group as less worth than others, or otherwise dislike or hate them. The counter-example (which I’ve actually met in the wild once) is a person that genuinely believes that some group is less adept in some way, but that still argues that they have the same inherent worth as others.
To put it bluntly, it’s not controversial to say that some people are smarter/taller/stronger/faster etc. than others, while still acknowledging that all human life has the same inherent value. Does it make someone a racist if they hold that stance, combined with a belief that <insert group> is less adept at <insert skill/property>? I would argue not, because (as previously stated) in my mind racism implies that you believe some people are inherently worth more than others, and that belief is not really tied to any measurable property. Basically, I think a true racist uses “they don’t have a soul/ are less intelligent / etc.” as a post-hoc justification for a hatred they already hold.
I experienced both benevolent and antagonistic racism as a brown kid in the south.
The antagonistic racism was never so much like, get out of here, you darky, or calling me names or anything, although I have been called a “plains n-word” by an old white fuck in South Dakota, so there’s that.
But the antagonistic racism I most commonly experienced was being followed around stores.
So much so that it gave me a complex. It happened so often that I would go to a grocery store, or to some retailer, and I would be browsing around, and the people that worked there, which were always white people, would check in on me constantly, always watching me, following me around, staying six to ten feet away from me at times throughout my entire sojourn through the establishment.
But I, being a young kid, didn’t find any malice in this. I just thought, oh, maybe, I don’t know, maybe they’re time travelers, and I’m gonna be so awesome in the future that this is their opportunity to see me without changing the timeline.
But getting away from the south and magically the following me around in the stores thing completely and totally stopped so abruptly that it made me reevaluate what was going on. I’m like, oh no, they were watching the darkie because they thought he was gonna steal shit from them.
But on the flip side, I also got benevolent racism where they thought I was better than them because I was a Native American. They would ask me things like, can you actually talk to horses? And what’s it like being able to control the wind?
And what sucks is I’m really good with animals, so to some degree I could talk to horses and they would just sort of get me, but it’s not like I could understand what they were saying.
And the very first time I ever fired a bow and arrow I hit a bullseye.
So the instructor was like, if you do it one time, it’s luck, you do it two times, it’s skill, so I fired again and I hit another bullseye.
So you know, I’m doing my ancestors proud.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about. I’m sorry for the crap you experienced, and I think it’s good of you to be able to recognise the naive and/or positively loaded presuppositions people have for what they are. Honestly, I think it’s way too common that people will interpret others in the worst possible way, and see slights where none was intended. It looks like you’ve been able to do the opposite, and interpret others in the best possible way, and I think that makes the world a far better place!
“If I heard it in church, it can’t be bad, it can’t be wrong.”
At first I was gonna write “Why didn’t you explain to him why Baptist church is called like that?”, but then I remembered cases when people say something so profoundly stupid to me, that I judge they’re too far gone to warrant any explanation. If it was someone with a half-working-brain I’d still try in a friendly way to give them some more context and expand their thinking, but there also such people (especially if they are some blowhard personality) that you just put a mental note to stay very far away from them out of caution.