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).
@MLClark Starting out by validating some of their beliefs is a great way to get them to drop their mental guard a bit, so you can follow up with a different rationale for *why* the things they believe are true (in terms that make it sound like something they already believe, even if it's not).
Then you can keep alternating between validation (or apparent *) & alternate rationales. Get it just right, & they'll walk away with completely different beliefs without even realizing anything's changed.
Welcome to... all the work I do.
@MLClark Haha, fair enough!
I find it much more difficult to do electronically - it's comparatively a cakewalk in person, just because the total communication bandwidth is so much wider; it's easy to adapt based on their reactions if you can monitor them in real-time, haha.
Aaaaaand I have much less luck if it's not one-on-one or (if I'm on my A-game) one-on-two. Trying to thread the needle between 2+ people's reactions is really bloody hard.
Might be easier if you video called him/her?
This was a video call, and I handled the question just fine. After we got through yet another round of discourse on US lobbies & private actors like Peter Thiel, I even introduced him to the flawed colonialist shape of Garvey's Liberia dream, as an illustration of the way Western ideology can complicate efforts to escape itself, and Fanon of course came into play.
But I'm allowed to be competent in discourse and still vent elsewhere about the need to have these chats at all. :)
Across the spectrum, really.
Earlier in the chat I'd raised the anecdote of men recently stirred to take back the border, only to arrive and see a situation very different from the one they'd been fed. I talked with deep empathy for the confusion they felt, and the way that this info silo works against their best interests, too, by driving them into expenditures of anger that lead to their own wasted time and resources.
So one does have to cover a range of anecdotes sometimes.
@MLClark Sounds like your conversation went more historically/intellectually in-depth than mine usually do :)
I tend to (not unlike the right-wingers themselves) make heavier use of semi-intuitive arguments and appeals to emotion - which I suppose makes a lot of sense given my working-class populist bent.
Simply put, if I got too academic about it, the sorts of people I usually have those kinds of conversations with would probably start snoring (or at very least their eyes would glaze over).