Theses signs were put up around my college campus on Halloween night for the second year in a row. If you find this thinly veiled white supremacist rhetoric to be positive or acceptable in anyway, then unfollow me. If you care more about assuaging your white guilt than about creating and maintaining an environment where people of color can feel safe, then unfollow me. If you are uncertain as to why this propaganda is problematic, then I encourage you to educate yourself and open up dialogue with the people these signs directly affect. Black and brown people, be safe. White people, we need to listen and be respectful. These are tumultuous times, and we must not be afraid to take action.
What is wrong with being white? Are you saying that you hate people based on their race? Because that’s racist.
These signs were a part of a reactionary white supremacist movement. You could have learned this from a simple google search. Educate yourself before you talk shit.
They were not.
A group of people on one of the 4chan boards got together and held a discussion. One anon proposed that anything said which was even remotely positive about white people would be viewed as racism. The others countered that unless it was an overtly supremacist statement it would go unnoticed.
So they brainstormed for a few days, eventually landing on a completely innocuous message, neutral, the milk of statements about white folks, “it’s ok to be white” and posted these messages around the world one night.
The next morning hate speech alerts were sent out by campus and city administrations and police, proving the first anon right.
Basically, you were a subject in a social experiment meant to determine if racism against white people exists. You helped prove it does if you view “it’s ok to be white” as hate speech, which you obviously do.
It makes me truly sad to see white people so abused they just take the abuse in stride and pretend they aren’t victims of racism. You are.
If these signs said “it’s ok to be black” they would be met with “of course, hashtag black girl magic”.
If “It’s okay to be white” is racist then so is “Black lives matter”
You can’t say one is and one isn’t without showing your bias, it’s why the simplistic statement is so genius.
This is one of those instances where saying something so basic and obvious that isn’t worth saying makes people feel incredibly uncomfortable when it is said aloud for some reason to the point of reaction.
Like imagine walking around campus and seeing a bunch of fliers posted up saying “It’s okay to breathe the air.” You’d probably be thinking to yourself “W-was it not okay before? What does that mean? What’s going on? Is the air toxic? Should I be worried?”
So a part of me understands the absurdity of these posters being put up, but at the same time the reaction is unwarranted.