When I first started writing about politics online, I was warned by someone far smarter and wiser than me to 1) never read the comments, and 2) always ignore the hateful emails.
Walking the “racism beat” is stressful enough without the petty barbs and meanness that strangers throw at each other through the digital ether.
But my curiosity has forced me to bend and break those rules on occasion.
The especially hateful and mean comments, death threats, and recycled talking points that the right-wing hate media programs its victims with are now fixtures along the journey. I mock and laugh at them as needed; I pay careful attention when matters merit it; and learn a great deal about the American conservative id and the machinations of conservative opinion leaders from the patterns I discern.
While it’s true that the most persistent online trolls are sad and mentally unwell souls who are vomiting out their frustrations onto comment sections (or alternatively sending them to whatever target of the day has earned their ire), I believe that the caricature is often too easy and seductive.
For those of us who work the racism beat—or write about politics from a humanistic, progressive, or liberal perspective—we have a broad vocabulary to describe our detractors on the American right. The latter often earn being satirized, mocked, embarrassed (assuming they are capable of such shame), and being the object of schadenfreude because their politics are often unmoored from reality, their brain chemistry orients them to fear, their media tells them comforting lies, and authoritarianism gives them comfort. In all, many American conservatives are little Eichmanns in training and waiting.
Their elite opinion leaders are untouchable, disinterested in meaningful communication. Fox News and the right-wing hate media are political hustlers who are working the long con. The most extreme voices, the white supremacists, the militia members, the Christian Dominionists, and Oath Keepers are lost causes, too fully entrenched in hatred and/or historical-religious fictions about the founding of the United States to be rehabilitated.
America is highly politically polarized. People do not communicate, live near, or mingle with those who are of a different political orientation. Wealth, income, and racial segregation only inflame those divides. Because conservatism is a type of political religion, it is extremely difficult to communicate across divides of party and ideology—even when there should be broad areas of agreement and consensus.
Alas, I hold out hope that there is a broad middle ground, where decent people can find some area of mutual interest and agreement as we seek out solutions to shared issues of public concern. I may be a fool in this regard. But despite what often sounds like learned cynicism I remain, in many ways, a dreamer.
I received the following email from a (white) conservative who was upset by a piece I recently wrote about President Barack Obama, the Republican Party, and the grossly racist, white supremacist-fueled invective and disrespect the United States’ first black president has endured during his time in office.
I would like to share it with you (italics and emphases added):
I was trying to understand what you wrote in Salon about Republicans wanting to refer openly to President Obama as the N Word. There were a couple of discrepancies in the article I wanted to point out
First off, you claim that referring to him as a child or being childish is racist, but yet the article you linked to did not say that. It clearly stated that the term boy was used as a racist insult and I am thinking we all can agree on that. Those candidates did not refer to Obama as "boy"-they said he acted childish. How is this racist? Can one not refer to how a black person acts as childish without being perceived as racist? We are all capable of acting childish and it has nothing to do with one's race.
Second, I'm no birther but I am fairly certain that the origins of birtherism had to do with his father being Kenyan and the fact that up until well after Obama was elected he offered no proof of his country of birth. In 1991, one of his publishers stated that he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia-and nothing was ever done to correct this claim. In addition, Ted Cruz is now subject to attacks about his status as a natural born citizen. So how is this line of attack only meant as an attack against blacks to show they aren't "real Americans"? Is Ted Cruz black?
If you don't know it, there are a fair amount of white Americans who'd like nothing better to get along with all of our peers no matter what color their skin is or what religious background they hail from. And yes, some of us are Republicans who don't like Obama much at all. Whether you believe it has anything or nothing to do with his ethnicity is up to you; I know why I don't care for him and don't have to prove it to anyone.
With that said, it makes it REALLY hard to get along and treat each other well when some people throw out blanket accusations against people they don't know based only on specious reasoning and a feeling that someone means something other than what they say. Perhaps less rush to judgment and more intellectual honesty on your part would help us all to find some common ground. That is, if that's what you want in life. If not, don't be surprised by how people react to you.
There seems to be an element of openness here, an effort to try to communicate with someone he or she sees as wrong and misinformed, but not necessarily as “evil” (or who should be killed, in keeping with right-wing American eliminationist rhetoric). Unfortunately, the openness is smothered by preordained conclusions, poor reasoning, and questionable ethics and morals. This is the model for the “reasonable” conservative in the Age of Obama.
Contemporary conservatives exist in their own custom-created, immune from empirical reality type of lifeworld(s):
By the lifeworld Habermas means the shared common understandings, including values, that develop through face to face contacts over time in various social groups, from families to communities. The lifeworld carries all sorts of assumptions about who we are as people and what we value about ourselves: what we believe, what shocks and offends us, what we aspire to, what we desire, what we are willing to sacrifice to which ends, and so forth… Habermas writes that to make lifeworld assumptions fully reflective—to speak of them explicitly—is already to destroy them. Their power is their “of course” or “taken for granted” quality. Questions about the lifeworld—why do you believe such-and-such? —can only be answered (if at all) by some version of “because that’s who I am and who we are
It is not that the Fox News, right-wing media consumer is “uninformed” or a “low information” voter. Rather, they have internalized disinformation:
You have now reached the lowest of the low. Never underestimate the evil intentions of some individuals or institutions to say or write whatever suits a particular purpose, even when it requires deliberate fabrication. Disinformation refers to disseminating deliberately false information, especially when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or on the media with the intention of influencing policies of those who receive it.
This is a much more difficult and intractable problem to remedy because of the social/psychological phenomena known as “information backfire” and “confirmation bias.”
Social dominance behavior, prejudice, and a twisted logic which argues by implication that those of us who tell the truth about racism, sexism, homophobia, or other social ills are somehow responsible for “turning” people on the right into bigots, homophobes, racists, or misogynists colors this email. This dynamic is broader than a single communication: It typifies today’s movement conservatives.
How should we interact with the type of conservative who wrote this email? Are they beyond hope? And is it possible to free those in the right-wing echo chamber from their delusional alternate reality?
Here’s a shorter version of the question: Should I email this person back? If so, what should I say?