Anti-Blackness and race hate increasingly seem to be a rite of passage for white folks, no matter where they end up on the political spectrum.
I’ve been thinking how every few months, seemingly like clockwork, some public figure’s old racist messages are suddenly made new again. Most recently, the leaders of Young Republican chapters around the country got busted for their racist and antisemitic texts—including proclaiming “I love Hitler”—in their group chats, but it’s not like they’re the only ones. I’m not even referring to the second batch of racist Republican group chat texts that leaked, sent by Trump appointee and would-have-been head of the Office of Special Counsel Paul Ingrassia. I’m thinking instead of Ethel Cain, the indie singer-songwriter whose eight-year-old racist social media posts resurfaced a few months ago. Cain, who happens to be trans—and whose self described “anti-war, anti-patriotism fake pop song” ended up on Obama’s 2022 recommended playlist—and the Republicans in those group chats would seem to have nothing in common except for youthful indiscretions involving the use of edgelord racism and ironic bigotry. But that’s kinda my point. Anti-Blackness, and race hate more broadly, increasingly seem to me to be a rite of passage for white folks, no matter where they end up on the political spectrum.
I know I’m supposed to acknowledge here that Cain apologized, a tacit demand I both resent and understand the requisite to-be-fair-ness of, so I will acknowledge as much, despite myself. She noted that she was “young” when she made those posts, and that they were intentionally “inflammatory and controversial” to “make [her] friends laugh”; she also admitted it was “deeply shameful and embarrassing to see that dredged back up.” And no, her transgressions were not as troubling as those of the Young Republicans, many of them adults representing one of our major political parties who apparently thought blatant racism was workplace-appropriate. Still: Her offense and her apology follow that all-too-familiar shape. No shade, but I have grown used to, and grown tired of, these apologies—in part, because they follow the same recognizable semantic pattern, just as they also follow the resurfacing of racist posts by every white person who ever had a Nazi phase, which, again, seems to have been all of them. In fact, perhaps this is true of all non-Black folks. A few years back, when Latina pop singer Camila Cabello’s racist Tumblr posts, complete with n-word, reappeared, her apology also noted that the posts were from her—quote—“younger” days, but that she was now “deeply ashamed” and “deeply embarrassed” by them. I could probably draft them myself, if I wanted a second career in celebrity crisis management.
I hate the assumption that those of us hurt by these racist displays are just supposed to accept these apologies. The same way we’re also supposed to accept that the person who demeaned and denigrated us publicly for yucks isn’t racist anymore and, for that, is owed forgiveness. That even after the thousandth cut, we must extend empathy to someone whose very own words prove they were incapable of mustering empathy for us. I suppose it’s to her credit that Cain herself didn’t demand anyone accept it or suggest that we “learn to take a joke.” (And, to add credit, I’ll note that she actually bothered to write, “I am white, so while I can take accountability for my actions, there’s no way for me to fully understand the way it feels to be on the receiving end of them.… Any way you feel about me moving forward is valid.”) But her fans—who are overwhelmingly white and therefore weren’t the target of her remarks but who clearly felt that they should have the authority to police Black folks feelings—most certainly did.
The most visible and powerful fan of the Young Republicans did pretty much the same, but with even more overtly fuck you flair. Vice President JD Vance’s sorry-not-sorry took the same semantic tack but ended up in a different place. He claimed that “kids do stupid things.… They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do,” and called the offensive taken to their words “BS.” Unlike the other folks attempting an actual apology, Vance isn’t just using the classic “young” defense—however untrue it is, considering that participants ranged in age from 24 to 35. (Likewise, Paul “Hitler Streak” Ingrassia, at 30 years old, is no spring chicken.). He’s saying—literally—this is how we as white kids behave, and you better get back to being used to it. And that there is plenty more where that came from.
“I really don’t want to us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives,” Vance added, meaning fuck your feelings, don’t you dare create consequences that might hurt ours.
Here’s the thing: On the one hand, white people keep telling me that racism doesn’t exist. On the other, they keep admitting not only that it does very much exist, but also that they find it so awesomely irresistible, they can’t help but roll around in it for a few years, leaving a filthy e-trail across social media behind them. I dunno, man. I too was a pretty edgy teenager, into very edgy youth subcultures, and whenever I dig back into my decaying online posts I note they are many things—far too earnestly effusive about punk rock and Oi! and all manner of Doc Martens maybe—but bereft of racist nonsense.
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So please stop asking how we got to a point where Nazism is cool and the manosphere is a form of government. Stop playing dumb, white people—I’m literally fucking begging you. It’s been almost three decades since Gavin McInness, who would go on to found the Proud Boys, used Vice magazine as a vehicle to make the least transgressive, uncreative, stale thing—and here I mean racism—into a faux-edgy aesthetic brand for white 20somethings. Nearly as long since Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and every other digital cesspool forwent guardrails, allowing cruelty to be rebranded as humor. All that stuff gave ironic cover to what was always the same old racist contempt, now calcified. Back in 2023, after another right-winger was busted for antisemitic messages, conservative journalist Aaron Sibarium wrote, “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.”
In other words, here we are, because we’ve been here for decades. And once again, as with every issue involving anti-Blackness, if we were honest about American history we’d realize this is just the digital age’s expression of a phenomenon that dates back much further. White Americans have always bonded over anti-Black humor and racist jokes—it’s a way to turn domination into shared laughter, reinforcing “in” and “out group,” or “us” versus “them.” What’s more, those jokes get told more often, and become more vicious, when Black progress makes whiteness more insecure and in need of reassurance. Blackface minstrelsy and coon songs were white Americans’ “joking” expressions of anti-Blackness in the early 1800s, a way to portray enslaved Black folks as dimwitted, lazy, and hypersexual; as abolitionism grew in popularity in the 1830s, and in the post–Civil War and Emancipation eras, minstrel portrayals grew more threatening and menacing. In his groundbreaking study An American Dilemma, released in 1944—as the earliest glimmers of the civil rights movement flared—sociologist Gunnar Myrdal noted that white people were loath to discuss Black folks “in formal intercourse…[but] he enters all informal life to a disproportionate extent. He creeps up as soon as the white Southerner is at ease and not restraining himself. He is the standard joke. It is interesting to notice the great pleasure white people in all classes take in these stereotyped jokes and in indulging in discussions about the Negro.…To the whites, the Negro jokes further serve the function of “proving” the inferiority of the Negro.” More recently, in 2017—as white hysteria over Obama swelled, metastasizing into MAGA—sociologist Raúl Pérez applied Plato’s superiority theory, which suggests all humor involves an element of looking down on others, to an American racial context. He points out that “racist humor and ridicule has long been used as a mechanism for fostering social cohesion among whites at the expense of nonwhites” and maintains the “false neutrality of white supremacist ways of thinking.” Same, same.
Cain didn’t see her career significantly derailed by her racist posts, and frankly, I wouldn’t want that for her in any case. Some of the young Republicans lost jobs, which shocked me, since as a nation, we aren’t really punishing racism anymore. Paul Ingrassia clearly agrees with me, because his statement announcing that he’s withdrawing from the running to lead the Office of Special Counsel stated that he lacks enough “Republican votes at this time,” an implicit promise that he’ll be back someday. It’s probably just a matter of time until he’s appointed to a position that doesn’t require votes, and the rest turn up in even more powerful positions, older and better paid, with the same smug sense that this is how things are. And sadly, they’ll be right.
