I used to believe racism in the United States was overstated. Sure, it existed. But it's not widespread. Common.
Well...I was wrong.
"Zohran Mamdani is a terrorist"
"Mamdani supports ISIS and Hamas"
"New York City faces sharia law"
"Mamdani wants to murder jews"
The amount of shit published about this guy is absolutely insane.
He recently attended the 9/11 memorial ceremony.
He exchanged a brief hug with representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and smiled for 5 seconds.
Immediatly, politicians went wild
Senator Ted Cruz:
Speaker Mike Johnson:
He smiled 5 seconds in a 5 hour ceremony and they accuse him of celebrating terrorism.
Here is the video. You can clearly see that he was stoic, he hugged her, then he immediatly went back to being stoic.
At the same 9/11 ceremony, JD Vance and Howard Lutnick laughed and joked.
No one cares.
I never thought I would say this.
The US is more racist than I ever imagined.
My ex-wife's grandparents lived just outside Chicago. Her grandfather used to hang out at the local mall, because he wanted to practice his Spanish by talking to random Latino families that passed by. He was so casually racist, that he would occasionally have someone threaten to kick the shit of him over something he said...and he had absolutley no idea why they were even mad at him. And I'm not kidding, he was probably the sweetest old man you're ever going to meet...would give anyone the shirt off his back, and genuinely didn't mean any of it in a negative way. He was just so saturated in white privilege, that had no idea that most of the things he said were completely inappropriate.
As a Canadian, I always marveled at the idea that he was "one of the nice ones". That if you put him on one end of the racist spectrum, there was an entire range of people out there, that were progressively worse than him. And in US culture...this was just "normal" behavior.
There is certainly a difference between oblivious accidental racism and intentional hatred based racism. Neither are good, but one is certainly a bigger problem.
I could argue that it’s actually the oblivious accidental racism that is the bigger problem because that is what reinforces structural and system racism. The blatant rager is more visible and obviously dangerous, so can be countered or avoided fairly easily.
Maybe we have different ideas of the oblivious racist. They should have their rights taken away kinda people I would group in with the hateful ones.
I think we agree on who we're talking about, but I'm just talking about scale. The hateful ones are an immediate threat to the people around them, but the oblivious ones are a far larger number of people and thus drive societal forces that cause statistical problems that cumulatively do more damage than one-off murders and such.