{"id":1236,"date":"2017-02-27T10:19:39","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T15:19:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=1236"},"modified":"2017-02-27T10:48:28","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T15:48:28","slug":"white-supremacy-the-purge-and-the-least-racist-person-youll-ever-meet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2017\/02\/white-supremacy-the-purge-and-the-least-racist-person-youll-ever-meet\/","title":{"rendered":"White Supremacy, THE PURGE, and &#8220;the least racist person you&#8217;ll ever meet&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\">A couple summers back my wife and I watched <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Purge#Plot\"><i>THE PURGE<\/i><\/a> on Netflix.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>We weren&#8217;t expecting great chops as either sci-fi or horror (it&#8217;s sort of the lazier ends of both), but we were both sorta taken aback by how bafflingly racist the whole thing was.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/K0LLaybEuzA\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Just to be super-duper clear: I&#8217;m not saying that the filmmaker is racist (I don&#8217;t really have any clue who the guy is; he looks white-ish in pictures, but who knows\u2014or really cares\u2014what his identity is).<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I&#8217;m not saying the actors are racist.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I&#8217;m not saying that <i>any<\/i> aspect of the conscious intent of the film is racist. In fact, it sorta goes out of its way to be tokenishly multicultural and non-racist (the only totally morally uncompromised primary character is the nameless black male, one of the more prominent secondary characters is a black woman, there&#8217;s an Asian man in the mix, and all of the villains are white and explicitly upper-class)\u2014which what was precisely what made it so baffling: even though the film worked to be formally racially progressive, both my wife and I (nominally white people) found ourselves queasy with some of the lines these actors were obliged to say (specifically constantly and exclusively referring to the black man as a &#8220;pig&#8221;) and found ourselves almost simultaneously asking aloud mid-film:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\"><b><i>&#8220;Jeez!<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>How the hell would a black person feel watching this?&#8221;<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\">Or, more to the point, <i>how would a black person feel watching this film <\/i><b><i>knowing what I know<\/i><\/b><i>?<\/i><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Because, through a crazy coincidence, I happened to know something about this film not immediately apperent to average viewers, but certainly known to the filmmakers:<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">The film opens with a montage of <i>faux<\/i> surveillance cam footage of various violent crimes, establishing the cultural mood of this near-future dystopia (you see some of this montage at around the 26sec mark in the trailer embedded above).<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The sort of things you&#8217;d expect: Liquor store robberies, riots, a woman getting held up at an ATM, a black man with a sawed off shotgun jumping a police station lobby counter and firing at police officers, etc.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">But here&#8217;s the catch: I recognized that last piece of footage, which I&#8217;d stumbled across in 2013 doing research for a client.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>It was not <i>faux<\/i> anything; it was actual CCTV footage from a Detroit police station.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The black man with the shotgun was <a href=\"http:\/\/detroit.cbslocal.com\/2011\/01\/28\/police-release-the-video-of-precinct-shooting\/\">38 year-old Lamar Moore<\/a>, his motive is still unknown, and he died during that attack. In fact, he was fatally shot just <i>after<\/i> the piece of footage used in <i>THE PURGE<\/i>&#8216;s mood-setting montage.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">The final, violent minutes of a black man&#8217;s life were used to set the mood for a mediocre Ethan Hawke vehicle.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Someone found that footage and edited it in.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Someone made sure the rights were cleared, so they wouldn&#8217;t get stung on copyright infringement later.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>And that someone didn&#8217;t seem to think, in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin, that this might plausibly be a sore spot for anyone\u00a0(for example, 37 million Americans).<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">This, for me, finally highlighted the bright line difference between &#8220;racism&#8221; and &#8220;white supremacy.&#8221;<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><i>Racism<\/i> is really about a conscious framework, a deeply seated belief that people of color or Jews or immigrants or whoever\u00a0have certain essential characteristics that make them unfit.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><i>White supremacy<\/i> is assigning the interests of white people primacy&#8211;generally in complete ignorance of the experience of non-Whites, in much the same way that you probably never think about the impact patching a hole in your eaves has on the squirrels who&#8217;d set up house in your attic.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><b>A <i>racist<\/i> thinks black people are lazy and Jews are greedy cheats <\/b>(or whatever)<b>, while the vast majority of rank-and-file <i>white supremacists<\/i> probably don&#8217;t think about them at all.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><\/b>While all white racists are implicitly white supremacists, not all white supremacists are necessarily racist.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Do the makers of <i>THE PURGE<\/i> think ill of black people?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I don&#8217;t <i>think<\/i> so&#8211;but I also don&#8217;t think they honestly considered the existence of black viewers as sentient entities who might view this film and think &#8220;What the fuck are you people doing?!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And this, right here, brings me to the President, and why it makes me insane to hear him <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/2017\/02\/16\/3c39adec-f48b-11e6-a9b0-ecee7ce475fc_story.html?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.ae0f7bce84ff\">get all huffy about being &#8220;the least anti-Semitic person that you\u2019ve ever seen in your entire life&#8221; and &#8220;the least racist person.&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">&#8217;cause Donald Trump is the guy who&#8217;s says stuff like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\"><b>\u201c<\/b><a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/trumps-courtship-of-black-voters-hampered-by-decades-of-race-controversies\/2016\/07\/19\/d9822250-4d2e-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html?utm_term=.0b4a216da565\"><b>Black guys counting my money<\/b><\/a><b>! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. \u2026 I think that the guy is lazy. And it\u2019s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It\u2019s not anything they can control.\u201d <\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\">Meanwhile, I&#8217;m a Jew, and even if I&#8217;d never met another Jew in my life, I&#8217;ve still met me.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>And earlier today I was hanging out with Brian, and he&#8217;s black, and he&#8211;likewise&#8211;has met himself (as well as his sister, his children, his parents, etc., etc., etc.)<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Obviously, we&#8217;ve met each other.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">And I really and sincerely do not believe that Donald Trump is so tremendously stupid or naive that he honestly believes that he is less anti-Semitic than <i>every<\/i> living Jew <i>and<\/i> less racist than <i>every<\/i> living African American.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">As such, the only possible way that he could believe the sentence <em>&#8220;I&#8217;m the least anti-Semitic\/racist person that you\u2019ve ever seen in your entire life&#8221;<\/em> is if he either doesn&#8217;t conceive of Brian and me as being part of the &#8220;you&#8221; he is speaking to (which is weird, since I heard him say that in a live presser, and therefore literarily <i>was<\/i> part of that &#8220;you&#8221; at the very moment he spoke) or he does not conceive of us as being &#8220;people.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Does this make him a racist or an anti-Semite?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>No, not at all; he&#8217;s a white supremacist, and he really and honestly doesn&#8217;t even think about me and Brian existing at all, nor how his words and silences impact our lives.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Meanwhile, as I write this, the wave of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers continues: There was one two hours ago in New Orleans, on top of the 11 on Monday, bringing us to a total of more than 70 this year.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2017\/02\/the-math-i-should-not-have-done\/\">For comparison, a &#8220;normal&#8221; year might see two dozen bomb threats targeting JCCs and synagogues total for the entire year<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">I imagine some of you are getting damn tired of hearing this, all this whining and &#8220;identity politics&#8221; that &#8220;divide America&#8221; by &#8220;drawing attention to our differences&#8221; because, after all, we&#8217;re all the same underneath. \u00a0I hear you, and I understand. \u00a0But I&#8217;m absolutely terrified that, in the absence of me saying this stuff, then you aren&#8217;t thinking about the fact that I exist at all, and might just do things\u2014or fail to do things\u2014that get me and my children killed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><strong>UPDATE<\/strong>: Exactly twenty minutes after posting this I got an email telling me that a bomb threat had been called into my daughter&#8217;s daycare at 9:10 AM. \u00a0They&#8217;ve evacuated the building, and my daughter is currently being hidden someplace secure, someplace I do not know where she is,\u00a0while they sweep the building.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">So here we are. \u00a0This is my day. \u00a0This is America in 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple summers back my wife and I watched THE PURGE on Netflix.\u00a0 We weren&#8217;t expecting great chops as either sci-fi or horror (it&#8217;s sort of the lazier ends of both), but we were both sorta taken aback by how bafflingly racist the whole thing was. Just to be super-duper clear: I&#8217;m not saying that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2017\/02\/white-supremacy-the-purge-and-the-least-racist-person-youll-ever-meet\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;White Supremacy, THE PURGE, and &#8220;the least racist person you&#8217;ll ever meet&#8221;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[11],"tags":[30,83,36,53,43,56],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1236"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1242,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236\/revisions\/1242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}