Racism Against White People: Leitmotifs of 21st Century Politics.

we're living through a period of history
in which there is an understandable but utterly wrong tendency to treat racism as if it were a mental illness or even as if it were an epidemic to be contained a type of communicable disease as if racist attitudes are passed on from parents to their children passed on from school teachers to children even as a sort of contagion to be contained to a very large extent obviously when we're talking about racism we're talking about something that is primarily emotional rather than rational and yet it's the rational part of the equation that's the most important to address in politics if you had been born and raised in israel and completed your military service in israel how do you think you'd feel about germans let's just if you were under 30 years old how do you think you would feel as a contemporary 21st century israeli jew about germans who were also under 30 years old there's no chance they're directly responsible for the events of world war ii and the holocaust when you have grown up with the central tragedy of the history of your people being a part of your education a part of your experience of the world is being part of the founding mythology explaining why you're living where you are in the conditions you're living in them the creation of the world as you know it hinges on this cataclysmic genocidal event even if it was in your grandparents lives or your great-grandparents lives right how do you think you'd feel is it possible that you would be just a little bit racist if you had been born and raised cree or ojibwe or mohawk or navajo if you had been born and raised as one of the indigenous people of the united states of america or canada how do you think you'd feel about white americans we don't even need to add here the caveat if you were under 30 years old you're talking about other white americans who are under 30 years old because in that case the genocidal series of events that remade the world as you know what they've happened so long ago right and yet the consequences remain so hard for us to deal with okay i think these are the themes these are the questions that come out when we're talking about racism towards white people and we're so ill-equipped to deal with it culturally because of this preconception that what we need to address is a kind of mental illness is a kind of contagion it's a misconception that takes on a life of its own like a cult belief that people signing up for a cult getting into a an ideology that somehow is self-justifying and takes over people's minds and no to a very large extent the racism we're dealing with in the 21st century is a rational product of events in the 19th century or in the 18th century you know or maybe just a few decades ago now of course racism is still bad and evil and wrong the fact that you personally may have had really negative experiences with white people your whole life you know doesn't mean that you can treat the next random white person you meet in a bad way that you can despise them that you can be prejudicing you can be biased against them even if the last 19 20 30 white people you've had to deal with face to face you've had this kind of conflict with even if you were raised in a situation as extreme as the indigenous people of north america you know this kind of cultural context in which you were raised as a member of a defeated nation and you had to wear the symbol of that defeat on your face at all times and you went to ceremonies where you sing and dance but every year there are fewer people who can even understand the lyrics in the songs anymore right where the whole political system and economic system that surrounds you was built on the ashes of your culture and your civilization and their national holidays are celebrating when they defeated you and drove your language to extinction right with the national religion that surrounds you right has its history of genocidal campaigns against what was your ancestral religion right to to live with that and still have the detachment and the self-discipline to meet another white person and say hey i'm gonna evaluate this person just as a human being i don't know i'm gonna set aside all my bad experiences and the bad experiences of my parents and grandparents and the whole kind of civilizational genocidal context for this meeting i'm gonna meet you face to face and i'm just going to treat you as a person i treat you as an unknown no matter how many negative experiences i've had before and keep in mind you know our indigenous people most of them grow up with white schoolteachers white school principals right many of the authority figures they will have had negative experiences with early in life will have been white the first police officers they've interacted with as teenagers very likely to be white they are very likely to see those confrontations as attributable to that grand civilizational narrative of defeat conquest and genocide right they're very likely to imagine or assume that this school teacher or this police officer is teaching is treating them like garbage is being rude to them or is being cruel to them just because of the color of their scanner just because of their ethnic status right and of course they might be right or they might be wrong on a case by case basis this is the kind of racism we're all struggling with in the 21st century and i i mean that i know i know that may sound right that i say we're all dealing with okay if you stop and examine your own experiences in life you may have these kinds of prejudices and you may not be aware that you struggle to contain them or compartmentalize them or have detachment about them i have a prejudice against white australians right i used to live in cambodia i used to live in laos i used to live in thailand even when i was living in hong kong okay white australians seemed consistently to be the most despicable human beings on this earth they made a very powerful negative impression of me i have australian fans of this channel if they send me an email or in theory if they meet me face to face in real life i have to put aside that anecdotal personal subjective experience those apprehensions those those you know i've have to put this i have to put aside also the political history that forms the context of this because i'll tell you something if there's one country on earth that's even more egregiously guilty of a history of genocide under the british empire right it's australia and what what country on earth is worse than canada the united states well australia is a real candidate this way their their guilt their civilizational narrative um you know it's not just bad it's one of the few that might be might be worse than ours and i and i feel that when i deal with this i'll be real with you i had an australian friend this is true of actually more than one australian friend i'm thinking of one in particular an australian friend once and i remember he sat down with me a white guy needless to say and he gave his justification for why he thought the genocide and conquest and extinction of those languages was just fine and dandy why it wasn't his own mind he made up you know these excuses for i was a practicing buddhist at the time you know i didn't you know um you know boy i hated him you know i i hated him for it and we were made friends for several years after that you know you know i i was i was disciplined about it but you know wow and i've got to say there's part of me just even from that one conversation it's not the only conversation i've had like that i still carry it with me when i meet other australians i do you know and i've done so many australians who were studying buddhism you know they were into alternate hippie lifestyle alternate religion you know they were into kind of counter culture they weren't you know strict adherents of kind of british empire anglican tradition but still they were racist against indigenous people they were racist against aboriginal australians they were pro-empire pro-genocide you know they're still part of you know like oh okay so you want to meditate and embrace something that comes out of asian culture right but you can't question this aspect okay i've got i've got conflict there i've got a kind of prejudice a kind of racism against white australians and it's partly that personal experience that you know buys me that way partly a broader political historical civilizational narrative okay and i still have to meet them face to face on a case-by-case basis i have to treat each and every australian i meet as an unwritten chapter in my life as a blank sheet of paper i have to treat them as something genuinely unknown i have to give them that chance i have to give them the chance to be the exception of the rule all right i've known white people depends to some extent on what their job was in life and just even where they were from geography i have known white people who told me sincerely that every single indigenous person they knew was an alcoholic or a drug addict or both right this these are the people they knew you know i've known people from different walks of life i knew one guy who worked in construction and you know he knew the type of people who worked in construction on his racial views and so on you know reflected that when you live in saskatchewan and so on you know so you're dealing with someone who's had incredibly negative experiences with a non-representative sample of the population and what i say to those people every time is look it wouldn't matter if 90 of them were drug addicts now cogs even if it were 90 percent you still have to have an absolute moral commitment not to them to yourself for your own moral integrity right you have to be committed to meet and speak to each and every one of them face to face with total detachment right detachment over your own feelings detachment over whatever the statistics are right you have to be willing to meet them as a human being like you know on neutral ground and let them show you who they are each and every time even if you are disappointed each and every time again you know you might work behind the counter of a liquor store and you know what a remarkably large percentage the people you meet as your customers are alcoholics you might work at a strip club and you know for different ethnic groups you're meeting people kind of at their worst some of the people you meet they might other times of the day if you've met them you might have a different impression of them and you're seeing these guys when they're drunk and on drugs and trying to harass the women in the strip club or whatever you know different people are working these different contacts said i knew i knew a white guy and he had been married to more than one black woman his own children were thus half white half black he worked in construction his level of racism against black people was just mind-boggling he's just you know it's like your wife is black your kids are black you really live and yet nevertheless you're so racist against black people and he would tell you it was based on years of experience working on the construction site you know he had he had his reasons right it was a kind of rational racism right but rational doesn't mean good it's rational and it's still something you have to overcome and how are you going to overcome it right you've got to overcome it through detachment and through what i call active research active research leading to an informed opinion all right in the 21st century it was completely predictable that this would be the century in which racism against white people would intensify as never before things that were unknown are becoming known things that small numbers of scholars had to find in an archive are becoming instantly google searchable right if you're korean how do you feel about the massacres that took place in the korean war how are koreans in the future gonna feel about those massacres they're becoming more known they're not being forgotten they're becoming instantly accessible instantly knowable in ever greater detail we even have photographs if you live in north africa you're born and raised in north africa how do you feel about the history of the french empire really we could say any european empire the italians and others and the british of course all had empires in africa right how how do you feel about it something that in the past might have been a rumor or word of mouth spread around by your grandfather all the archives are on are on the internet now in just a few mouse clicks you can get i i've been in the torture chambers that the french empire houston laos by the way it's a funny story i wasn't tortured there but i've been in the pin in the building okay you can get the records of who tortured who and why you can get the records of what they did to suppress rebellion in cambodia it was a real example they would line up groups of 10 cambodian men i'm sorry actually i think it was actually 12 and they would kill 10 of them i was going to say it was 9 out of 10. i think they would kill 10 out of 12 and then they would send two of them away alive so they'd spread the story of this execution random massacres taken out it's not becoming forgotten it's becoming more easily knowable in ever greater detail so let's say you're let's say you're someone born and raised in north africa how do you understand your own identity how do you relate to white europeans as that history becomes more instantly and verifiably known let's take a step back through the centuries how are you going to feel about the fact that your indigenous culture your indigenous religion your indigenous language and most of the things that made your civilization great were wiped out by islam north africa is now a mix of various indigenous peoples and more or less arabicized peoples through the massive civilizational expansion of the islamic world right i have met and spoken to a small number of north africans who said openly that they bitterly resent the fact that their indigenous language their indigenous culture was wiped out by the muslim empires that everything good about their people and who they could have been and what they were before that this was suffocated by islam and one said to me that's why i'm an atheist i mean not all these people were racist you know there was one guy i didn't talk to him face to face i talked to his girlfriend and he was born and raised in central asia and he intensely and in great detail knew about the buddhist religion that was indigenous to his country and what those customs and dances and costumes were like and he knew that they had been exterminated by islam so in the same way that some people whether in australia or canada you know they regard themselves as a defeated people as a conquered people and then they look at racism and racial politics through that lens right these are people who are even looking at the status of islam and their culture the domination of their culture by islam and looking back at history and saying it didn't have to be this way right we could have ended up being a country that's more like japan or more like thailand we could have had our own unique you know cultural story that emerged out of a mix of buddhism and animism and other you know cultural influences and instead this was suffocated by islam and they resent it right and a new kind of national consciousness a new kind of racism right may now emerge out of that resentment the world is changing in ways that are difficult to trace because precisely the sort of information that used to be the exclusive domain of scholars is becoming instantly clickable on the internet it's becoming knowable and verifiable and it's going to shape people's lives to a much greater extent than rumor and innuendo passed on by their parents and grandparents okay the mythology that made the british empire make sense has died okay and what has replaced it what's replaced it are instantly clickable archives that are going to include the details of and sometimes even photographs of people being tortured to death the mythology that made the french empire make sense the mythology that made the portuguese empire make sense and the dutch empire the mythology has died out and what has replaced it is a set of cold hard facts about imperialism and colonialism that we have yet to feel the full depth of resentment i had one friend we now haven't spoken in many years six years or so i had one friend who was chinese ethnically chinese married to a white man their child was half white half chinese they moved to africa together i think he was in the oil and gas industry this white guy which is very unsurprising given the other things i've just told you so he had a straight job in a corporate office kind of thing you know and she is the wife would take care of the baby and go to the fruit vegetable market and she said the racism of the people the racism of these black african people the particular place she was living against her husband was so intense and she said couldn't believe it she could go to the same market alone or her with the baby and these people would be so wonderful to her they'd be so kind and so encouraging and you know obviously she's struggling with the language barrier she was chinese i mean she's still a foreigner she's still an outsider to them right and this is a this is a culture where 99.9 of people are black you know um it's not a multicultural society in that sense or multi-ethnic society and everyone's so warm and positive and loving and then if she comes back with her husband who is white and french i understand most people will have clicked on this video thinking you were going to get some kind of caddy shallow commentary on what people say on twitter what people say on facebook and what people say on instagram the the widely observed fad or fashion of blaming white people for everything and even using white as an insult attacking vegans as white vegans and attacking different ideologies and schools of thought as white okay it's a little too easy it's a little too easy you know in the middle of beijing china politically economically and militarily one of the most powerful places in the world right they have giant portraits of two white men in tiananmen square karl marx and friedrich engels if you grew up in china today if you grew up in cambodia today don't you think you might feel that everything that was good and right about your country was destroyed by white people and by white people's influence the influence of the west of european civilization of europeans of white people it's not limited to colonialism it's not limited to imperialism and it's not even right wing that's kind of the implicit stereotype okay there's this whole other can of worms there's this whole other unfathomable legacy that is now going to inspire resentment and frankly racism as the people of china and the people of cambodia wake up to the extent to which their culture their language their civilization was ruined precisely because they embraced white western ideas they worshipped karl marx and frederick engels and to some extent people like lenin and stalin that they adopted the white man's wisdom and they burned down their buddhist temples they burned their books they adopted a fundamentally self-hating attitude of trying to destroy everything about their own culture so that they could dress like compete with and imitate white europeans i think the 21st century is going to be the first century of a blossoming ongoing global culture of anti-white racism such as has never been documented in the history of the world before what we see now unfolding within the united states of america on twitter on facebook it's a joke don't laugh take it seriously it's a harbinger of much worse things silicone