Yeah trust me it *is* horrifying. Iâm ashamed of who I was and I think my only atonement is to talk about how damn easy it is to become one when youâre young.
This is gonna be a long post.
For a little bit of background, I am a mixed race person, half brown and half white. I was raised in a Muslim family and am still closeted around them.
I started to have issues with Islam at around 12 or so, when I first started to get the idea that I might be gay. Now I never would have admitted that was my reason. If you had asked me I probably would have said âlogicâ or something. Because of that I went hard into atheism and atheist circles.
Now people hate to admit this but ex-Muslim spaces are predominantly right wing. Ex-Muslims often see the left as âtoo tolerantâ towards a religion that hurt them. This was the only community I had though, and I read through everything. I was 13.
The other thing that people hate to admit is that, especially when youâre young, being mixed race is so damn hard. If I acted âtoo whiteâ, following my motherâs German/Austrian traditions, I was accused of hiding my true nature. But if I acted âtoo brownâ I was just another camel jockey. So I hid my âIndianâ customs from others and tried passing as white. Especially online.
So Iâm not saying this is all youtubeâs fault or anything. I was raised to believe that the brown half of my family was lesser and stupid. And with my hatred of Islam, I believed it doubly.
Then came Anita Sarkeesian. I was watching pewdiepie and from there my recommendations were all set. If Iâm remembering the pipeline it was pewdiepie - Philip Defranco - Chris Ray Gun (sp?) - Thunderfoot - Sargon - etc. But I was pretty much acquainted with all of the right wing youtube of the day.
Funnily enough, I found her through Thunderfoot. That got me into antifeminism, and more specifically, GamerGate.
I was primarily on the subreddits KIA (Kotaku In Action) and TIA (Tumblr In Action). Both made fun of the SJWs. I kid you not, I would gleefully wait for âSanity Sundayâ, where the people would talk about how feminism is disgusting, cultural appropriation is fake, the wage gap isnt real, etc. I would scroll through this tag for hours.
I got most of my youtube recommendations from those subreddits. This led me from GamerGate to more fascist lines of thinking, such as watching videos about why BLM is a terrorist organization, why all muslims were evil rapists, and why I was fundamentally right to reject my Indian heritage and follow my âcorrectâ heritage.
From here I delved into ârace realismâ, and I believed it all. I had to. This was the only community I had felt safe in. One of the fash guys even offered to shack me up at his house if my parents kicked me out for being atheist. I was 15.
To say that again, I was 15 and believed that white was right, blue lives matter, âwe wuz kangsâ, etc. I never would have called myself a fascist or a Nazi. How could I? I used my brown skin as a token, so that people could point to me and say: âSee, we arenât misogynistic and racist! We have this brown girl right here.â But I believed in all the things the Nazis did. Iâm not going to pretend I didnât. I will never pretend I didnât.
But then something happened. I admitted to myself, and to a few others, that I was gay. And suddenly, the homophobia that I had molded myself in, it didnât fit right. I happened to, by accident, click on the reddit thread of GamerGhazi, the opposition to GamerGate. And after a long bout of introspection I found out that they were accepting of gay people, that the things I had been experiencing were common, that maybe, just maybe, we didnât need a white ethnostate.
I donât want to be dramatic but that accidental click saved my life.
From there it was a road of recovery. I deleted all my old accounts, made new ones, and started to read leftist theory. I found better friends, cut out old people. So now, just about two years later, Iâm healing.
I think thatâs everything. I probably got some times and dates wrong because Iâve been trying to move on from it. But if you need more info or anything like that, please let me know.
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