How Racism Became Hip
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It's no surprise that The New York Times used the word "hipster" more than 250 times in the past year.
Dawn Beattie
Of course, most people are not a complete hipster package deal. Many seemingly un-hipstery people have a hipster attitude, without even realizing it. And many, if not most, people who dress and party like hipsters don't have the hipster attitude at all.
Actual hipsters and people with hipster attitudes are really two, totally different things.
A hipster in attitude but not in lifestyle or dress would basically be an aggressively cynical person. A hipster attitude is a cutting edge way of arguing with people, that celebrates irony and insults traditionally-held beliefs. A hipster attitude is a counterintuitive one that ridicules positive things like idealism and sentimentality. A hipster attitude is an attitude that is supposed to offend people. At the very least, it should be provocative.
Before, when someone argued with you just for the sake of it, you would accuse them of playing devil's advocate or being argumentative. Now, you'd probably call them a troll. Trolls are essentially just trying to be hip. So, trolls have very hipstery attitudes.
At the top of the intelligence food chain, you might have counterintuitive writers argue that New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt, that pimps are good for prostitutes, that breast-feeding is not worth the trouble, that obesity isn't really an epidemic, or that Radiohead sucks.
These essays and books are hip, because they are so provocative and original.
At the bottom of the intelligence food chain, you have counterintuitive commenters on YouTube write that the Holocaust never happened. You have young women watching other young women being raped on the internet and laughing about it. They might even call the rape victim a slut. You have passive-aggressive white ladies from The Real Housewives Of D.C. insulting Obama and Tyra Banks but championing George W. Bush in their black friend's house. You have Dr. Laura Schlessinger using the "N Word" 11 times on her radio show.
In other words, Dr. Laura isn't actually racist. She just thinks racism is hip. And she's clearly not alone.
Racism, along with its cousins, bigotry and sexism, has attracted a large following of people who want to shock people, but who have nothing original to say. Atheism, rock and roll, drugs and sex just don't shock people anymore like they used to.
To be sure, many people are not racist to be hip. Some of them genuinely do hate other races.
Police officers can become racist out of a combination of fear, ignorance, and mob-mentality.
People who grew up in a small town, exposed to only one race, might feel distrustful of other races, too.
But Dr. Laura, who is surely exposed to other races all time, who converted to a religion that has been subject to persecution for years, and who calls herself a "doctor," could not possibly care as much as she claims she does about her so-called first amendment rights.
Her rant was likely not motivated by rage against a politically-correct world, like she made it seem. She really isn't that jealous that black people get to use the "N Word" all the time while she can't. Her rant was really all about vanity.
Wouldn't I look like such a badass, Dr. Laura thought, to go against the grain, and kind of defend racial slurs?
This is a problem because it can lead to actual racism in people who listen to Dr. Laura.
Worse, it sends the message to talentless trolls across the world that being racist gets you a lot of attention. For some, the fact that it's negative attention doesn't even matter.
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“those who don't believe in innate human equality, don't hate anyone because of it.”
First of all, racism doesn’t require you to hate someone from another race. You can love your slave because she’s so great at ironing your socks, but still assume that you must automatically be smarter and more dignified than she is, because she was born a black woman and you are a white man.
“our manufacturing base has been sent overseas”
Outsourcing is an economic issue, not a race issue.
“The amount of sanctimony and self-righteousness attendant to this whole ‘racism’ scare is sickening to me, and that's why I attack it. It's reminiscent of the Red Scare of the 1950s, with the main difference being that in the 1950s, communists were actually killing people by the millions.”
Stalin was killing people by the millions. Random Hollywood screenwriters who did films with liberal messages were not killing people by the millions, but they were black-listed anyway.
You also seem to be forgetting the billions of people killed throughout history, for no other reason than the fact that they were the wrong religion or from the wrong country or the wrong sexual orientation.
“It's also based on a false premise—that human social groups are innately equal on both the cognitive and physical planes. That's a nice concept, but the problem is that all the available evidence undermines it.”
What on earth is a cognitive plane? Is that like an airplane, but full of cognition? Or is that a brain? Are you trying to say that all human beings do not have equal brains and physiques? Good point. But where in my story do I argue that all of our brains and bodies are identical?
Oh, wait, is that your subtle way of hinting that these brain and body differences are divided among race? Does belonging to a certain “human social group” automatically put you on a higher “cognitive plane” then someone from a different “human social group?”
I see. You’re a passive-aggressive racist. You use a lot of jargon because it sounds less harsh than just saying, “White guys rule and the rest of you totally drool!”
“All the available evidence undermines it.”
What evidence? Did you go to South Central, see a lot of poor black people, and assume that they were born with a special “poverty gene” that white people don’t have?
In my journalism school, I learned that you can speculate on people's motives all you want in an opinion essay. Yes, I am "actually" a journalism student. Are you actually Jim Goad?
OK, if it's an argument you want, I'm confident that I'm also better at that art, too.
You neglect a category of people into which I fit: those who don't believe in innate human equality, don't hate anyone because of it, and believe the current hysteria about "racism" is nothing more than a modern-day witch hunt designed to divert attention from the fact that the middle class is being destroyed and our manufacturing base has been sent overseas.
The amount of sanctimony and self-righteousness attendant to this whole "racism" scare is sickening to me, and that's why I attack it. It's reminiscent of the Red Scare of the 1950s, with the main difference being that in the 1950s, communists were actually killing people by the millions.
It's also based on a false premise—that human social groups are innately equal on both the cognitive and physical planes. That's a nice concept, but the problem is that all the available evidence undermines it.
If you're actually a journalism student, you should have been taught that it's always a mistake to act as if you're sure of someone's motives. I graduated summa cum laude from journalism school, and I was taught to write that someone SAYS they believe something rather than stating outright that they believe something.
Judging from your essay here, you seem to believe that someone can't possibly make "politically incorrect" statements if they aren't either trying to gain hipster cred or seething with racial hatred. There are numerous other possibilities that you apparently haven't considered.
Bold anonymous one,
By actual racism, I mean people who actually hate other races. There are other people who don't actually hate other races, but just pretend they do, because they like attention.
Jim Goad,
Grammar is just a series of rules that people are taught in school. If you want to argue with me about the content of my writing, then why don't you address that instead of an apostrophe error?
"But Dr. Laura, who is surely exposed to other races all [sic] time..."
Amy, I wouldn't be doing this if you hadn't brought up the topic of "whose smart."
"Actual racism." Care to define that? Racism is a social construct, whereas genes can be quantified.
"someone whose [sic] not very smart"
That would be "who's," Einstein.
'someone whose [sic] not very smart"
That would be "who's," Einstein.
At least she isn't quite as obnoxious as Jim Goad.