Race is fake. Racism is real.
Ah, yes. The furious fallout from the “election” of America’s first openly fascist president, Vladimir Putin Donald Trump continues. All across my social media feeds, my stunned and demoralized progressive (and moderate) friends are suddenly expressing horror at the U.S. news media’s “normalizing” of our neo-Nazi commander in queef chief. The 60 Minutes interview with Eva Braun Melanoma Drumpf Melania Trump the rest of the goat-mouthed new first family. The CNN ticker questioning whether Jews are, you know, actual people. The coverage of Trump’s high level Alt-Right Nazi cabinet appointments – and, no, this is not hyperbole.
But here’s the thing. This normalizing of the unthinkable and the obscene by the so-called news media? This making-seem-normal of the atrociously abnormal, this calm presenting-as-fact of non-facts? This making palatable of oligarchical poison? That sh*t has been going on for a very, very long time, yo – in ways that were either too subtle or too deeply ingrained in mainstream American belief systems to draw much attention.
Fact is, the U.S. news media’s normalizing of “race” itself is exactly how and why the United States has seemingly overnight ended up with a looming Mexican Auschwitz and a probable Muslim Registry in the first f*cking place.
While it might surprise most Americans to hear this, race doesn’t exist. Racism exists, yes. That stupidity exists, as a direct byproduct of the normalizing of the outrageous and disgusting concept of distinct human races, a normalizing that continues unquestioned and unabated as we speak.
Race as an idea is a complete human fabrication, utterly un-provable by science. In less gracious but more clear terms: It isn’t f*cking true, bitches. Science is clear about this. There is only one “race” of people, and it is, for better or worse, all 7 billion of us.
Nonetheless, the U.S. news media, the U.S. census bureau, hospitals, schools, marketing departments, movie studios, and probably all your friends still continue to go around talking about race anyway. We all seem to think it’s actually a thing. Many of us, in fact, are so attached to our “racial” identity that the very thought that it might be as fake as a backyard chupacabra makes us want to punch someone in the throat. Tsk tsk.
What’s at work here is something called The Thomas Theorem. Put forth by a couple of social scientists, both named Thomas (because why not?) in 1928, The Thomas Theorem says that “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequence.” Read that again. Better yet, let me translate: If we think something is true, it doesn’t f*cking matter if it is, because we’re all gonna act like that nonsense is real anyway. Dangerous, dangerous territory, and most easily inhabitable by an uneducated, uninformed populace.
This is how it is that we live in a f*cked up nation where, even though race is fake as a Kardashian, racism is realer than Kanye’s narcissism – because the news media, academia and your drunk grandma all believe this enormous and outrageous lie that was created in order to justify the Holy Trinity of America’s Imperialist and Colonialist history: dehumanization, genocide and slavery. Que nice.
So, yes, quit normalizing the extreme racist views of Emperor Putin President Trump. But don’t pretend for a single second that you yourself haven’t been complicit in making the big gilded rotating waka-waka waterbed he and his klan brothers cabinet plan to use to f*ck rape the nation insensate.
Every time you have read or watched a news story about “race” without losing your mind, or checked off “race” boxes on a form without giving in to moral outrage, or accepted statements like “the (blank) community” without feeling even a little bit sick, or assumed someone was radically different from you because of their “race,” you, America, picked up a sickle hammer and wholeheartedly participated in building this mother*cking nightmare.