I was feeling grouchy after not quite keeping my cool during a chat today.
Essentially, a Canadian with whom I've discussed far right movements *for years* asked me: "You seem interested in the topic of white nationalism: can you tell me what that is and how it differs from Black nationalism?"
It's just frustrating to be asked questions that aren't trolling, but which still come from comfortable ignorance and have to be unpacked on multiple levels.
Brings back "fun" memories of life in KW. 🙃
The problem in that tricity was its two tiers of comfortable ignorance: your garden variety white folk, most working lower class jobs or maybe even unhoused, who found comfort in hard circumstances by holding that they were at least better than non-white persons, and believed themselves the greater social victims.
Then there was the academic equivalent: folks of means who loved nothing more than tacitly defending hateful white conduct via "intellectual" hypotheticals about marginalized people.
@MLClark It's important to note that hateful white nationalism was/is intentionally stimulated & promoted by the upper classes, as part of their divide-and-conquer strategy to prevent the different racial groups making up the proletariat from uniting against their real common enemy - the bourgeoisie.
Right-wing racial hatred is a tool of bourgeois exploitation... and it has been for a very long time, perhaps since the very beginning.
That was a major part of my answer and my frustration with the question. I have outlined many times with him the groups that benefit from stoking up this sentiment for economic gain and power, and the processes by which they operate.
But it's very difficult for this person to see outside their info silo, so the conversation perennially comes back to a superficial racialized dimension, filled with presumptions about me as a feminized leftist who must simply think "white men bad".
@MLClark Ah, I can definitely see why that'd be frustrating.
For what it's worth, I've seen many people exhibit similar inabilities to break out of their closed way of thinking... what you're describing seems to be a fairly common issue.
I bridge the gap between right and left enough to fairly reliably get around that... one of my usual strategies is to agree with (or appear to *) the "what", while covertly undermining the "why" in terms that make me sound like one of them (a rightwinger).
As do I. Grew up in a conservative household; I know how. It manifests in my writing, too; I often get queries about why I don't rage more openly against X, by people who haven't the foggiest idea what it takes to actually deradicalize and ease people out of info silos.
Humanist first; our uplift *has* to include all. But my feminized body often works against me when talking to white masculinized persons. They often presume not just topical ignorance but also knee-jerk activism.