Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
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Let me explain something to those of you who didn’t grow up around violently abusive white supremacists. They absolutely do not believe their own bullshit, but it’s useful for them to pretend they do.
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Like I’ve said before, I grew up around these people. I heard their dinner-table conversations. I listened to them at Christmas and birthdays. I know their dogwhistles and their little games.
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Let me tell you a story, however, about one I met as an adult.
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We had a neighbor—oh, let’s call him Gene. (This was NOT HIS NAME, and he has passed on now.) Gene was a terrible human being. He was retired, watched Fox all day, and took care of all the stray cats in the neighborhood.
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Gene drank the Fox Flavr-Aid early and he drank it DEEP. When we moved to the neighborhood, Gene came by with a plate of cookies he’d baked himself and told a “joke” that made it clear he considered me a whore since I’m a single mother.
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Gene was an elderly white man. I could have snapped him in half (and considered it more than once, truth be told). And Gene loved talking over the back fence. Since I’m white, he thought I was secretly on his side.
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One afternoon, Gene mentioned whatever the current outrage du jour on Fox was. (This was well before Der Turmpenfuhrer’s reign, by the way.) He fixed me with his baleful, watery stare, and said, “Obama was born in Kenya, you know.”
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Normally, I just turned around and walked away when Gene said that shit. I showed him my back, hoping to make it clear I was not, in fact, secretly on his side. But that day I had read @SlacktivistFred about IndigNation.
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So I dead-eyed Gene and said, “You don’t really believe that. I know you don’t.” I will never forget the look that crossed his face. Because it was familiar.