Don’t Let Hate Win..

Tantrums excused..

So, over on Instagram, we’ve been running a boosted post, on and off, for the last two months. It’s very patriotic and full of living history pageantry.  (The emotion at the end of the message is mine; I mean every word of it.)  Most people seem to like it, and we’ve been hosting students for so long that people in their late twenties tell us this was the favorite field trip of their childhood.  But, of course, there are also people who have been taught to hate their country from their mother’s breast.  I delete the vulgar posts, but on occasion, I’m motivated to see what motivates the “drive-by” insult.

What, after all, is wrong with America?  In a world where you can be put in a labor camp for not crying hard enough at the passing of a Marxist dictator (North Korea), in a world where you can STILL be a victim of slavery (Mauritania, Eretria, North Korea), in a world where you can be arrested for criticizing a minority religion (the United Kingdom), in a world where protest inspires political leadership to kill those taking to the streets by the TENS OF THOUSANDS (Iran), shouldn’t we be at least a little grateful for the good old United States of America?

This doesn’t strike me, at the outset, as a racial, ethnic, or religious issue.  It speaks to me more about basic intelligence and critical thinking skills.  If you don’t give America some credit, against, say, the UK, for allowing you to post on social media without a visit from the police, I don’t see you as white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim, or Christian.  I see you as slow.  Stupid.  If you really think America’s “indigenous people” would be better off living in the stone age, engaging in ritual torture, human sacrifice, and hunter-gatherer poverty, you are living in your own adult coloring book.  It’s a silly, romantic fantasy that all of your problems, historically, were created by some “other” invader.

I get it. A victim narrative is like heroin.  You, and your culture’s history, are completely excused.  You get to feel sorry for yourself and enjoy the sympathy of the crowd.  You get to talk about “reparations” as though they were actually deserved.  I can remember feeling sorry for myself as a 4th grader, after some playground slight.  It was positively delicious.  There was a tingle, a glow, knowing that, on some level, I deserved a little justice.  But I was a 10 year old, and I grew out of it, and unlike wounds that were centuries old, I actually endured, and forgave.

The slow kids, on the other hand, never really give it up.  Ponder this exchange with someone who, upon seeing the story of the American Revolution, doesn’t think “Bill of Rights,” or “Constitution” or “Rule of Law.”  They lump it all into a critique of progress itself.  I’ve changed (her?) native name to something more descriptive..

..and people worry about “white supremacy?”  What is this but pure, unadulterated racism and “indigenous supremacy” of the worst sort?  “Europe and Spain” [sic] did nothing productive?  The natives and the land were “pure and clean” only to be replaced by “hate?”  The Bible was a “phony ghost story book,” written for nothing but greed? All of our history is nothing more than “lies?”

Replace all that with “black” or “Muslim” references, told from the perspective of a European American.

It doesn’t work, does it?  It’s not really even allowed without consequences.  But I suspect the punctuation-challenged rant above could be introduced into any public school lesson plan without restraint.  In fact, questioning the obvious supremacy on display would be seen, by itself, as racism.

Why is this?  It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.  We keep the victims slow, and unchallenged, and grieving, and we simply don’t expect much from them.  They become the “slow kids,” because we treat them like the slow kids.

Over on X, a lot of folks were arguing about a scene at a theme park between a group of black parents and a single white mother.  Most of us concluded that there had been a dispute about cutting in line.  (That seemed, at least, plausible.)  But the mothers on the right, (who happened to be black), were making violent threats against the mother on the left (who happened to be white.)

In today’s racially charged environment, Americans are making more and more dismissive generalizations, and there’s a lot of racism of all sorts on the thread, which I don’t defend. But one thing has almost always remained true, since 1964 or so: you simply can’t criticize the actions of a single black person without some folks assuming you are impugning the entire race.  As Joe Biden found out, you can’t even compliment the intelligence of Barack Obama without some folks believing you are claiming black intelligence is rare.

One former guest, (and she seems real, not a troll), wrote me:

How do you expect anyone to support your farm when you’re disparaging black people on your official X account? You are actively stereotyping a whole race (i.e. black people like to fight and cause problems with white people) which is essentially turning away a whole sect of potential customers. I visited Riley Farm as an elementary student on an overnight field trip and I am disheartened to hear the things you are saying about Black individuals on your X account. As a Black person who had fond memories of that field trip, I am saddened to see what you think of people that look like me. Please do better. I understand you are older people with ingrained stereotypes in your minds but it is damaging to yourselves and others to continue to think and act in a racist way.

Hello?  Who is “stereotyping a whole race?”  Who is “disparaging black people?”  We’re looking at individuals behaving badly, and we’re making reasonable inferences about who behaved badly based on how much violence they are threatening.  How can anyone ever learn anything if all individual critique is always seen as a sign of gross, general racism?

I have advice for all people, all races, all religions:  stop letting people play that card.  When you indulge that, you make the perpetrators into emotional cripples, into race-grievance whiners.

You turn them into the slow kids.

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This post was written by Jim Riley