Transcripts / America: Still Racist
Introduction
If you want to have an honest conversation about race on the Internet here’s what you do: you set your computer on fire, you flee to the forest, you drink a mimosa laced with toad venom, and you simply wait for the wolverines to eat your legs.
Trust me you’re better off that way because if you look for videos on YouTube about race, well here’s what you get: you get fascism, racist pseudoscience, racists debate fascists– tag-team title match tonight at 9, or if you’re lucky you get this:
“So perhaps our legal system isn’t going around willy-nilly convicting innocent Black people of crimes they didn’t commit. Perhaps individuals who happen to be Black are making bad choices for which they have to deal with the consequences.”
“Racism isn’t the explanation for everything bad that happens to Black people. If Blacks are getting shot and going to jail more, it’s their fault for committing crimes.”
That’s right, racial inequality in America exists because Black people simply decide to commit more crimes for no reason. I guess he’s probably gonna blame the rap music, or deadbeat dads with their sagging pants. I’d say that this is the most common right-wing view of race in America. It’s not outright fascism or race-realism, but simply the “classical liberal” view that racial inequality is the product not of injustice but of… Black people simply deciding to make bad choices.
Usually this idea gets whipped out as a way to wave away the indisputable facts of racial inequality and dismiss those pesky protesters always complaining about things. Ugh they make me uncomfortable and I don’t like it. This is what I’m gonna argue against in this video, we’re gonna take a break from talking about fascism. In the past I’ve focused too much on the Alt-Right, I think we all have. I mean don’t get me wrong, it definitely is a dangerous movement, but it’s just not the most consequential kind of white supremacy that exists in America.
In this video I want to talk about the real root of racial inequality in America, which is the structural injustice that disadvantages many people of color. And from now on I’m gonna try not to get so distracted by this circus sideshow of Pepes, and racist Odinists, and neo-Nazi LARPers. All that stuff, it’s very last season. I’m kind of over it– [knocking] Oh goddamn it.
Freya: Hallo Leute.
Natalie: Fritz get the hell out of here, no one cares about you anymore.
Freya [German]: No, I'm not called Fritz anymore. Call me Freya.
Natalie: What?
Freya [German]: I'm a woman now.
Natalie: Great. Get out.
Freya: Well don‘t you want to hear about my transition?
Natalie: No. I don‘t care, no one cares. You‘re still a Nazi, get out.
Freya: But I‘m trans! How could I possibly be a Nazi?
Natalie: That‘s a good question. It‘s almost as if you‘re an irrational person and your worldview makes no sense. Get out.
Freya: She calls me a Nazi, and yet she‘s the one trying to silence my free speech, an excellent example of how truly fascist the left has become. Look if your ideas stand up to rational scrutiny, why aren‘t you willing to discuss them in the free marketplace of ideas.
Natalie: Well I‘m going to discuss them in the free marketplace of ideas as soon as you get out of my room. Mom, get out of my life!
Freya: Well can we at least talk about the Jewish question?
Natalie: No.
Freya: It‘s just ideas, what are you afraid of?
Natalie: I‘m afraid that I‘m going to have to blow the Tabby whistle if you don‘t get out of here in ten seconds. Ten, nine…
Freya: Aw baby, come on! I thought you liked debate! You used to whisper to me so sweetly.
Natalie: Well not anymore.
Freya: Well do you at least want to buy some Vitalimax?
Natalie: *hissing* 😾
Freya: Okay, Jesus.
I don‘t like doing this, I prefer to have conversations about disagreements. I don‘t enjoy waving a bat around and hissing like a cat. But it‘s these people, they just give you no choice. Where were we? Right, so racial injustice.
When I talk to people about this issue, they often claim to have this experience that leftists react to them in two ways: One, by saying “You’re racist!” and two, by saying “It’s not my job to educate you”. And I’m sure this isn’t as universal as people say it is, but it does seem to be an experience a lot of people have. And that’s not good, because most people are pretty ignorant about this– no offense– and there’s no shortage of fascists, “race realists”, and “classical liberals”, who are more than happy to educate people in their own special way.
So as I see it, the left needs to step it up. Now to be fair, if you’re bothering random people of color on Twitter to demand they explain racism to you, you’re being kind of an asshole. And it’s true, it’s not their job to explain it to you. They have other shit to do with their lives. But I, on the other hand, do not have anything better to do than swerve wildly out of my lane and whitesplain racism to you for the next 20 minutes. Because it kind of is my job, and I have all the time in the world. It’s a funny thing, time… 🕰
Whose job is it to mend the crimes of history?– Do we have to take responsibility for things that happened a long time ago?– I don’t even take responsibility for things I did before… July– This person, who the fuck is that?– No, I don’t have any white guilt. That’s not what this is about– That’s just more white narcissism is what that is, so wipe away those white-ass tears– Here, I’ll pick you out a cotton ball…
Part One: Freddie Gray
On April 12, 2015, three police officers near a housing project in West Baltimore arrested a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray because he was carrying a spring-assisted knife that maybe was illegal? They handcuffed him and loaded him into a police van.
“His leg broke and y’all dragging him like that!”
When the van arrived at the police station, Gray was in a coma for some reason, with three fractured vertebrae and his spine 80% severed at the neck. A week later, Gray died of his spinal injury, while the Baltimore Police released contradictory and inadequate information about his arrest. This led to widespread protests all over the city, eventually culminating in the notorious Baltimore riots.
Now you might be thinking: “What does this have to do with racism? If Black people don’t want to be killed then they shouldn’t commit crimes and run away from the police”. Well, the first problem with that is that extrajudicial executions for non-violent crimes shouldn’t really be a common thing in a civilized democracy, and it’s a little alarming to me how quick you are to defend this. And the other problem is that that’s a very superficial analysis that refuses to examine the deeper reasons why Black neighborhoods tend to have more poverty, more crime, and are subject to more aggressive policing. So let’s delve a little deeper, starting with Freddie Gray as a case study.
Gray had a long arrest record of mostly drug offenses, and a lot of conservative commentators brought this out as evidence that he was "no angel". The implication I guess was that Gray simply got what was coming to him, that he deserved to die. But why did he commit all these crimes in the first place? I don’t think he was selling drugs for lack of entrepreneurial ambition. Did he just do it for no reason?
Well, let’s see. Freddie Gray was born in 1989 in the West Baltimore neighborhood Sandtown-Winchester. You can see in this picture of him as a child that he grew up in a dilapidated row house with peeling lead paint. Lead was used as a cheap additive in house paint until Congress banned it in 1978 because it causes serious cognitive damage in children, leading to deficits in attention and increased aggression. Which may explain why children poisoned with lead are seven times more likely to drop out of school and six times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system.
But shitty Baltimore slumlords often haven’t bothered to comply with the Congressional ban on lead paint. And as a result, 93,000 children with lead poisoning have been added to Maryland’s lead registry, and in Baltimore the vast majority of these children are Black. Many of these kids were later awarded structured settlements as compensation for permanent brain damage. And Freddie Gray was one of these kids.
Now you might be thinking: “Well, reparations were paid out. So, problem solved, right?” Well, unfortunately no. What’s happened is a sub-industry has emerged of shark lawyers who swoop in on the lead poisoning victims–some of whom can’t even read a contract– and offer to buy out their structured monthly settlements in exchange for a lump sum that’s a fraction of the total worth of the settlement. And that’s exactly what happened to Freddie Gray. In 2013, a company called Access Funding bought the $146,000 remainder of his settlement for $18,300. They also bought his sisters’ settlements, acquiring the entire $435,000 Gray siblings’ settlement for $54,000.
Now I hope we can all agree that this is objectively bad. But to understand how it relates to structural racism, we have to look at Baltimore’s history of racial segregation. Or you know, we could just keep doing live streams with Richard Spencer– Interviews with Nazis, the new YouTube craze!– Goddamn it. I need to relax. I need music.
♪ I bless the rains down in A F R I C A ♪ I bless the rains! ♪
Part Two: Housing Discrimination
Take a look at this map, which shows Baltimore neighborhoods with children with elevated lead levels between 2010 and 2013, and compare it with this map of Baltimore’s racial demographics, yellow dots standing for Black residents and blue dots standing for white. Lead, race, lead, race. Also, notice how sharp the divisions are between Black and white neighborhoods. Why in the 21st century is Baltimore still so segregated? I thought racism was over.
Well, here’s the thing about that. When your country’s history is four hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, you don’t just get to say "oops, sorry about that… It’s all cool now though, right?" No, it’s not cool. And these maps are a pretty good illustration of one of the major not-cool things. Let’s look at how this shit happened in the first place. I hope I’m not being too controversial if I propose that a hundred years ago, America may have been somewhat racist.
In 1910, a Yale-educated Black lawyer named W. Ashbie Hawkins bought a house in a prestigious white Baltimore neighborhood. This produced such an uproar among the white residents that the city passed an ordinance mandating the segregation of every residential block. Basically, the ordinance forbade Black people to buy or rent houses on majority white blocks, and vice versa, until the supreme court overturned the ordinance in 1917.
“Well if the supreme court overturned the Jim Crow laws then what’s the problem? Racism can’t exist if Black people have all the same rights as white people.” Well... no. That’s actually not correct. In 1934 Congress created the Federal Housing Administration to promote home ownership in the midst of the Great Depression, when many homes were foreclosed. One of the FHA’s purposes was to establish a reliable credit system backed by the government, which would regulate interest rates and insure the terms of mortgages. FHA-backed loans played a critical role in facilitating home ownership throughout the middle of the 20th century, the period many white Americans now remember as the golden age of the American Dream.
But many Black Americans were excluded from home ownership and the benefits it conferred to white families, particularly the family financial stability it enabled. So how was this exclusion possible? Well basically the FHA, city governments, and white citizens adopted a variety of subtle methods to enforce residential segregation and deny home ownership to Black Americans. For instance:
i) Restrictive covenants
When the 1910 ordinance was overturned, Baltimore’s mayor created an official Committee on Segregation, which cooperated with neighborhood associations to pressure landlords in white neighborhoods to sign covenants committing them never to sell or rent to Black residents. These agreements were enforced through strategic building and health code citations issued against owners, and by evictions of Black renters who violated the covenant.
ii) Redlining
The FHA adopted a policy of refusing to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods, which were colored in red on official maps, giving the practice the name “redlining”. This effectively denied Black citizens access to government-backed mortgages, which in turn, left them vulnerable to:
iii) Predatory lending
Unscrupulous white sellers took advantage of Black buyers’ exclusion from FHA-backed mortgages, exploiting lax regulations to design unfairly priced installment plans with abusive terms, which allowed for instance, sellers to repossess and resell homes after a single missed payment. Many Black residents had no choice but to buy into these exploitative contracts, and they often resorted to subdividing houses or neglecting repairs in order to make payments, further contributing to the overcrowding and decay of Black neighborhoods.
iv) Blockbusting
Predatory real estate agents often used a scheme known as “blockbusting”, where they’d intentionally provoke fear of an impending minority takeover among residents of a white neighborhood. They would then exploit the fear that they created to trick white homeowners into selling their houses at below-market prices so they could resell those same houses at extortionate prices to Black families desperate to escape the ghetto.
The long-term effect of these practices was that many Black families ended up trapped in decaying neighborhoods with bad schools, little opportunity, cyclical crime and poverty, and aggressive, discriminatory policing. And even though most of these segregation practices have ended, the injustice remains unredressed. No reparations have been paid to Black families who were effectively robbed of home ownership during this period, predatory lending having cost Black families an estimated $500 million in Chicago alone.
But worst of all is that the segregation and ghettoization caused by government-backed discrimination of the last century is still ongoing. I’m currently sitting in my gentrifying white fuckin neighborhood like one mile away from where Freddie Gray was arrested, in a neighborhood that’s like a whole different country. Here’s the 1937 redlining map of Baltimore. Now compare that to the 2013 population by race map. If the 1937 map is the product of racism, and it is, and if the city still follows the same pattern of segregation today, and it does, well, it’s almost as if the effects of racism have not entirely been eradicated.
And it’s not just Baltimore that’s like this either. Here are redlining maps of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, L.A. All these cities are still segregated as shit. And it’s not like a separate but equal situation either. Compare the 2013 population by race map of Baltimore to this map of Baltimore police stops between 2010 and 2015. That’s Black neighborhoods in red, and green dots representing recorded police stops of Black pedestrians. And finally, let’s bring back the map of childhood lead poisoning between 2010 and 2013.
Now consider this information in combination with some scientific studies linking lead exposure and violent crime, and it almost starts to look like there’s some problems going on here that might not be solved simply by telling Black teenagers to tighten their belts and do less crimes. But I don’t want to overstate the lead-crime theory either, because that only accounts for a small fraction of what’s going on here.
The bigger picture is the lasting economic deprivation caused by segregation, the historical exclusion from home ownership, the lost opportunities, the bad schools, and this country’s ongoing insistence on treating a problem of injustice as if it were simply a problem of criminality. I know I said my interest in this topic isn’t a matter of white guilt, and it’s not. But also, fellow whites… how do we sleep at night? 😴
“In this guided meditation you’re going to relax your body and release your guilt. You’re not responsible for what your great grandparents did. As you ease the tension in each muscle group, exhale deeply and repeat the mantra: ‘Black Lives Matter are the real racists’.”
Part Three: Mass Incarceration
Since the 1970s the United States incarceration rate has rapidly risen to the point where nearly 1 in 100 American men are in jail or prison. We now have the highest incarceration rate in the world, accounting for 22 percent of the world’s prisoners though we make up only 4.4 percent of the world’s population. More than a third of the total incarcerated population is Black, and the Black incarceration rate is almost six times that of whites.
Now without even bringing race into it, it’s clear that America has a prison problem in general. Sentences are too long, too many non-violent drug offenders are in prison, too many defendants are pressured into plea bargains, and a private prison industry incentivizes high rates of incarceration. But disproportionately, people of color are victimized by this system.
Now a lot of people are going to look at the incarceration data and say: “If the Blacks don’t like going to jail they should just do less crimes. Let’s do another interview with Richard Spencer.” You know what, why don’t we all interview Richard Spencer. Every single YouTuber. Free speech mandates that we all constantly broadcast fascist propaganda. Let’s get em all in here, every single Nazi in one giant live-stream and then we can finally give the Jewish question the platform it deserves. Goddamn it. Where’s my toad venom?
Look, it’s just not always the case that Black people are imprisoned more because they commit more crimes. For instance, Black and white people use weed at about the same rate, but Black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for it. And we’re talking about a drug that, at this point, white America has basically decided shouldn’t really even be illegal anyway. So we’ve now got a ten-billion dollar legal marijuana industry, and just look at what white people are doing to weed:
"Mark Smith is the CEO of Tumbleweed—a ganja-preneur!… It’s a strong, strong sativa, very high in limonene. It’s a great bronchodilator so I like to use it when I work out."
"Yeah so, uh, in fact in the back of a limousine is only, one of the only legal places you can consume cannabis."
The whites are at it again. They have gentrified the marijuana. And now we’ve got white business people making millions of dollars selling the same drug that Black people are still disproportionately incarcerated for having sold– This is the most basic kind of unfairness, and if this doesn’t make you angry then either you’re really ignorant about this or… you might just not care about Black people.
I don’t like to assume the worst of people but when I look at the state of the conversation about race in America, I see a lot of people who are willing to just wave away the extrajudicial executions of Black people by the police, the mass incarceration of people of color, and the vicious history of discrimination and its ongoing repercussions. And from those same people I see a tendency to get extremely outraged by any Black person who takes a stand, or takes a knee, or speaks up about this in any way.
There’s an endless mill of content about how authoritarian and evil Black Lives Matter is, and how it’s identity politics equivalent to white nationalism, and it’s unpatriotic and postmodern and racist. And I’m sorry, but this group of creators are being really melodramatic. Black college students complaining too loudly are not Orwell’s nightmare. If anything in this country deserves to be called an authoritarian nightmare, it’s locking people in cages for decades over drug offenses. But right-wing YouTube doesn’t seem very interested in using their free speech to talk about that. They’re too busy complaining about people… using their free speech to protest? How dare they!
Now I can also anticipate another objection that doesn’t come from YouTube fascists or stock salad-eating basic white girl caricatures. I imagine some Black people will probably watch this video and think: “Where does this white bitch get off telling me I’m a victim? I take responsibility for my own life instead of blaming all my problems on racism”. And here’s the thing about that. You’re actually right in the sense that “taking responsibility” or "taking control" of your life to the greatest extent possible is actually a good way to live your life as an individual. So by all means, don’t allow yourself to be defined by victimhood. Do take control of your destiny as much as possible.
So I’m not saying anyone should blame all their problems on bigotry and wallow in victimhood. Please don’t do that. go succeed as much as possible. But also, while you’re succeeding don’t deny that oppressive circumstances exist. Yes, it’s possible for individuals to escape oppressive circumstances, but we also have a collective duty to work to eliminate the unjust conditions that create those circumstances in the first place.
Wow, I feel I just gave a great speech. Would you take my speech less seriously if you knew I’ve been drinking Bud Lite Lime this entire time? Look, I even put a lime in it. Bud Lite Lime with lime! The official beverage of people who complain about people who complain too much about people who complain too much about racism! 🍺
Part Four: The Final… Countdown
I want to say two more things before I flee into the forest. First, there are actually more racial groups in America than just Black people and white people, I’ve just narrowed the topic of discussion so this video isn’t three hours long. But there are lots of other kinds of racism in this country, and someone should make videos about those too.
Second, please don’t get all of your information from YouTube. I’ve put some links in the description with my sources and some further reading on the topic. Also, don’t get all your information about race and racism from white people, like come on, that should just be common sense. So when this video ends what you should do is scroll down, smash that unsubscribe button, unclick that little bell so you no longer receive notifications about my videos, and then you should go subscribe to a bunch of people of color and listen to what they have to say.
Umm… so I guess that’s it. I was just kidding about the forest. I don’t fuck with forests. I’m really more of an indoor tranny. So… guess I’ll just go sing a song about fighting racists.
♪"Battle Hymn of the Republic" ♪
Death to capitalism end the patriarchy smash the binary hail Satan!