"How do you frustrate a Jew? Place him in an oval and tell him there is a dollar in the corner"
---to my non-anti-semitic mind, this joke didn't make sense-how is lying to someone okay and why would it be unreasonable for them to be annoyed you lied to them? I would come to learn the joke is funny if you already knew that Jews were greedy. In a class of over 20 students, mostly Christian white, this joke made sense. To me, the Indian kid and the Polish kid, it was confusing; to the African American kid, it was obvious.
The man making this joke was not wearing a Klan's hat, he was the very loveable baseball coach at my high school. Everyone liked him, he was a decent man-the respect he received for decent meant that I had to figure out what was wrong with me for not getting the joke, that it was normal to get the joke, and the one African American kid who objected to it must have just misinterpreted what everyone else construed as lighthearted fun.
"How do you make sure an Black Football player catches a ball? You paint it like a watermelon"
---to my non-versed in American stereotypes mind, the joke didn't make sense. In a class of over 20 students, mostly white, this joke was funny. To me, the Indian kid and the Polish kid, it was another American thing we had to learn; to the African American kid, it was obvious.
The man making this joke was not wearing a Klan's hat. He was our loveable Baseball coach tasked with teaching us World History up to World War II. I would later say that while he taught is dates and times and historical moments, he also taught me everything I needed to know about race relations in America, though it would take me a few years to parse it all out. I thought there was something wrong with me for not getting the joke, and the African American kid who objected, was unfavorably compared to me because I never said anything, which meant he was overreacting-not that the joke only made sense if you already knew racist American stereotypes, which I was still learning.
"A Polish man was climbing a pole to measure its height, another Polish man walks by and asks why he is being so stupid, he could take the pole down and measure it more easily, the first man says 'you are calling me stupid? you are the stupid one, I am measuring height, not length'"
The man making this joke was not wearing a Klan's hat. He was our loveable Baseball coach who could relate to everyone. I thought I got this joke, Polish must not have different words for length and height-I asked the Polish kid whether Polish used the same words for height and length and that's why the joke was funny? He looked at me and said, no, the joke is supposed to be funny because Polish people are supposed to be stupid. I asked why the other kids laughed, he said they always would. Since they all laughed does that mean that Polish people are stupid? I ask, he says, well, I can't get better than a C in this class, so maybe it is.
Proposition 187 is the talk of the nation, loveable Baseball coach decides to lead a class conversation on how foreigners were destroying America. It is the one and only time he ever calls on me that entire year. I say something like it is a cruel proposition. He then goes on to explain why it isn't and starts chanting about real Americans. I look in the back at the Indian kid and I look back at the Polish kid, we are all scared because the other 20 or so white kids are chanting about real Americans, jumping on their desks. Me, Polish kid and Indian kid sit together for the rest of the year.
Until college I had encounters with white supremacists, I just didn't know they had a specific brand-I thought they were just American. The neighbors who told us to go back to where we came from were Aryan, the kids in my average English class was a Klansmen. I had read about them in footnotes in one of the history books and thought they didn't exist anymore and he was just pretending to be a Klansman. To be clear, I knew the names of these groups, not really what they were. The most information I had about them were from footnotes in textbooks and they would just say things like "The movie Birth of a Nation gave rise to the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan" or "The Aryan Nation is made up of poor white men who object to their economic conditions."
It wasn't until I went to college and invited to my first party that I really started to get this stuff. At college I also had a huge library and could look information up much more easily. I didn't go to that party, but my friends (all white) left it early because Klansmen were handing out business cards at this predominantly white fraternity party. My friends notified the organizers of the party who had no objection to the Klan being there, they were nice guys and weren't being disruptive. I asked why they got back early, they explained the Klan was there and then took it upon themselves to introduce me to all the white supremacist groups that were in the area and to never let myself be caught off-guard. A few months later a Black student would be attacked by one of these groups and even later, they would vandalize the cars of students of color on campus...and whenever I saw the Nazi across my room meet up with his friends in uniform in the lobby, I learned to just stay in.
Since that first party I knew I had to always be aware of these people, and the advent of the internet would make it easier for me to find them and learn where they were and who their targets were. Over the years, I learned that different regions had different hate priorities, I learned their speech patterns and talking points and their dog whistles. I learned which industries were the most invested in these ideologies in various regions. That would come in handy with my work later on, but the good white people would never believe me.
Much like the loveable Baseball coach, these people were nice, likeable, specially to other white Americans, who like my earlier classmates wanted more to be in on the joke, than to object to it. The dog whistles they used could be deployed very easily-giving an out to other white Americans in not understanding them and making people of color or immigrants look "too sensitive" or "irrational" for understanding those whistles. People of color have to understand the dog whistles to be safe, white supremacists have to understand them to organize and the decent white person-doesn't have to understand them at all and could live comfortably unaware of the hate they may be participating in and doing the discrediting of those who critique-in a very well-intentioned way.
In some ways, that is what I loved about President Trump's tweets. The dog whistles became very clear and visible, the decent people in the middle just couldn't pretend he wasn't saying what he was saying. Americans learned that almost half of this country openly voted for that hate, that white supremacy wasn't some fringe thing, but a pervasive thing. That it wasn't just a guy with a Klan hat, but the teacher, the pharmacist, the emergency room Dr, etc. To this day I don't believe Americans would come to see the hatred that lives within our systems if white people weren't outing themselves. Until Trump, most Americans, specially white Americans, would do to critics what my teacher and school administrators did to the African American student who complained about the racist jokes-tell him that he didn't understand, and a critic's lack of comprehension would be based on the silence of people like me who literally did not understand or people like the white students who wanted to be in on a joke and be liked by the guy everyone else liked.
I remember once discussing strategy regarding an entity violating Title VI. One of the people we negotiated with was using words I had read many times on the discussion boards for that region's white supremacists. I knew our efforts at resolution were futile, but my co-negotiator left the meeting so optimistic because of how nice the other guy was. I told him I wouldn't expect much because he sounded a lot like the KSS. My colleague explained to me how I wouldn't know because those people would never talk to me. What my colleague didn't realize is that I have to regularly check the chatter of these groups because of how much I travel and the very odd hours and remote areas I often have to pull over for gas and food. Negotiations ended, and we had to call the feds, I gave the agent the name of a potentially friendly person in that entity-how did I know? I never met him, but he was often being derided on the boards for being a N* lover. I never mentioned that part to the agent, but I knew that a large portion of that workforce was on those boards and couldn't be trusted to follow the law-so I gambled that maybe the N* lover might.
Another time, I was told a very horrible story, a colleague indicated that it must be a rumor created by superstitious immigrants. The chatter on some of the message boards of white supremacists included bragging of what they had done. The message boards at that time were still visible to everyone so all it would have taken was an online search, but even then, it didn't warrant even a question because the people who were worried were only superstitious immigrants.
There is part of me that loves the idea of making it very difficult for Trump to organize. Without him tweeting and mobilizing, his movement is hurt, but as his movement goes underground, the dogwhistles will change and it will become increasingly easier for decent white people to dismiss the complaints of those who need to protect themselves from those groups and inadvertently participate in the hate of the newer dog whistles.
On the one hand, I feel like Trump got what he deserved, he empowered these platforms over his presidency and they used the power he gave them to silence him...on the other hand I worry that unless the new dog whistles are in their faces, most people will turn away from the serious healing work that needs to be done in the U.S. and somewhere-anywhere, there will be a loveable Baseball coach teaching everyone that hate is okay if held with good intentions.
P.S.: Am I the only one bothered by the fact that a billionaire could do with one button, what Congress should have done all along?
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