Cryptobigotry: It's All the Rage
So a yesterday, white guy Gavin McInnes told three other white people that racism doesn’t exist on white person’s station Fox News. I’m getting all that out of the way that you know I’m an awful, virulent racist up front. I write Vice style columns and I need to be real edgy right off the bat. So like I was saying, McInnes said a classically stupid thing that really should be taken apart. The thing about him and guys like him is that in order to get past this sort of thinking, figuring out the tricks is pretty important.
Cryptobigotry. That’s my I-went-to-college word for “you are saying some pretty racist stuff but pretending you aren’t racist.” It’s all the rage nowadays and McInnes is getting to be world-class at it. Basically, it says that if you are complaining about a thing, you’re really causing it.
“You getting mad about someone getting in your face and saying nigger nigger nigger? Well, man, if you weren’t so uptight about it, it wouldn’t bother you.” That sort of thing.
It sounds like it makes sense on the surface in the “Denial is not just a river in Egypt” way (Denial isn’t a river in anywhere, actually). If you take out the part where you are offended, then there’s no offense.
So it’s sort of like if McInnes tripped and fell and it didn’t hurt, then he didn’t actually trip.
Wait.
Anyway, he took aim at Michelle Obama and Eric Holder’s recent comments about racism and the need to be vigilant against it. In McInnes’s eyes, the Eric Holder attitude of “they’re out to get you” is the real poison. Invoking racism and making it public is really what drives it forward. Programs like affirmative action which are designed to redress the inequality instead promote it. Saying “we are viewed as inferior” basically means you’re saying “we are inferior.”
What McInnes wants is for things to be even, level, and he believes that they pretty much are. Any further agitating would just make things unequal. That’s the main plank of the cryptobigot’s platform. It relies on the “It’s 2014! We’ve come so far in the fight against _____ism!” feeling. All the big fights are already won because I read about them in history class, I got a 96% on my 8th grade test about the trail of suffrage rights, so why would anyone still be mad?
Right. Well, we all know the reasons to still be mad, so I’ll skip right over that. Let’s look at another case that’s a bit starker: Michael Sam.
Yeah, he kissed a guy on ESPN. Yeah, it caused an outrage and it got some people in trouble. What came out of it was a lot of talk about the double standard in the media, where people who are gay can’t have anything bad said about them, but people who are “normal” are always demonized. Cal Thomas brings up the repeated mockery of Tim Tebow’s Christianity, comparing it to the comments about Sam and asking aloud why those damned liberals who made fun of Timmy T. didn’t get their druthers.
Here’s the thing. In many states around the Union, gay marriage is still not legal. In a large number of states where it is, it’s mostly because bans were struck down by judges, not because they were enacted by legislators. That’s an important point because legislation means a lot broader support represented in the decision.
In how many states is Christianity illegal?
Michael Sam’s possibility of being drafted, or rather, the possibility that he might not be drafted because of his sexuality, was what made news. It was exceptional, it was a story that did not make itself because of Michael Sam’s effort to push a gay agenda, it was simply that he was going to be the first openly gay man to be drafted to an NFL team. You may ask “Why does he need to be open?,” but considering straight people don’t need permission to kiss on TV, I think we’ll scuttle that question, thank you very much.
Tim Tebow, on the other hand, made ostentatious poses and displays of a faith that a majority of the country professes and is frequently cited as being the foundation of this country. He was a good-looking white male quarterback of an NFL team making a spectacle of himself. That is what people were making fun of, primarily.
Even if not, where is Tebow going to walk down and be afraid because he’s a Christian? Maaaayyybe Satan’s Alley, New Mexico, but that’s a place I just made up. How many jobs does Tebow have to be afraid of losing or not getting because he’s a Christian? Again, BeelzeBurger may take a pass on him, but that doesn’t exist. (Incidentally, steal these ideas if you want to, BeelzeBurger could be a hit.)
There’s no adversity he’s overcoming. He’s not done anything. Other than his skill, he’s not exceptional, and considering he’s in a league for people with extreme skill, that doesn’t really count. Plus, it’s not really cool that he’s doing his paint writing and poses, it’s kind of Boy Scoutish and lame. He never really had a cool persona. That’s what people are making fun of, not the fact that he is Christian.
But Cal Thomas has to make this equal because that way he can simply say that those on the other side are making a big deal of things. It has to be an attack on Tebow’s Christian faith because then Thomas has a chance to take a shot at Michael Sam. If Tebow can be made fun of and nothing happens, why the furor for jokes about Sam?
The great thing about cryptobigotry is that it can be done by any majority group to any minority. In fact, it relies on that being the case. All you do is point to all these organizations that exist, regardless of the level of impact that they’ve had, and say “Everything is fine the way it is!”, regardless of who’s healthy and who’s not, who’s needy and who’s got too much.
If you came into your money because of your parents who came into their money because of their parents who found their money under the floorboards, well, you basically worked for that. If your dad got fucked in the Enron bust, had a heart attack and died and left you and your family pennniless well, that’s your bad luck, buckaroo.
Because for a cryptobigot, it’s essentially to disconnect yourself from history in any real sense. Oh yeah, you’ve read books about it, but none of that really matters. In fact, go ahead and disconnect yourself from all context.
I’m sure every trust fund kid who earned every cent of his money knows how to make every bit of their clothes, or if not, they know someone who makes them personally. And, of course, they have the finer points of paving roads and building stores and providing electricity at hand.
That executive in his sharp business suit, I’m reliably informed, knows all about keeping his office building sparkling clean. Why wouldn’t he? He built the damn thing with his own two hands, and he also paved and painted the roads on the way there, and he waved the plane that brought all his business friends in to the nearby airport (that he built (own two hands)) and he flew the plane and he served drinks. Also, he was all his business friends.
Well, of course not. Yet it’s the contention of these cryptobigots that all those things that their businesses rely on are the product of their work only and they should get all the benefits. Now that’s a spatial look. You flip that through time and it’s the same. Their idea is that whatever is happening now is how it should be and there’s nothing in history that they rely on that is not accountable to them. They can’t conceive that somewhere there was luck, or there was benefitting from some discrimination or prejudice, and more than that, they can’t believe that prejudice would echo down to this day.
When people like the Benham brothers complain about their faith preventing them from getting a TV show on HGTV and thousands of black people, Latino people, Asian people, Native Americans complain about not getting housing because of their race, I’ve gotta chuckle a little bit. I can’t help it. It’s when they remain just stories that you can equate them and believe that they’re in any way comparable. When they aren’t real, the Benham twins can complain about not getting a show as if it was their right to get a show with whatever beliefs they had, even if they might have clashed with the views of HGTV and not necessarily the public at large. After all, it would have been HGTV’s decision and the fact that anti-gay activists consistently fight for the right to exclude gay business, I’m sure gay-friendly companies are afforded the same leeway.
When it’s not real, you can think that people being driven off TV shows for their views is the same as prison populations being so unequal you’d think they were meant for a different country.
Because those are the stories that minorities tell, stories not just about rejection but about violence, loss, belief in the system and betrayal. That’s the “mythical racism” that guys like McInnes are decrying. It’s equating masses of poor minorities being unable to get the foot in the door for jobs with one CEO (quite a noteworthy position) of a very visible corporation having his public opinions called into question.
Of course, for McInnes and Thomas, these are all stories. You tell them and they exist just in that way. They don’t need to be real, and in fact, it’s better if they’re not. Better if they’re just speculations about how the world works so people can fill in the blanks. And if you’ve got your story, and it seems to tell everything that needs to be told, why in hell would you listen to mine?
http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/05/cryptobigotry-its-all-the-rage/