Every technological advance this nation has ever produced has inevitably become intertwined with the country’s oldest and most cherished traditions, of which the practice of anti-Black racism is perhaps the most salient. Photography gave us lynching postcards; film gave us Birth of A Nation; the Internet offered racists the anonymity that even Klan hoods could not. We are not in unprecedented territory. We are returning to form.
Also not new? The extremely tired reasons white people have historically used, and continue to offer, to justify these behaviors. Chud has cast himself as a crusader for a white race oppressed by the request to not publicly use the word “nigger” or to taunt and traumatize Black folks with it. “I am simply weary after 6 months of being attacked by our government for expressing the constitutional freedoms our ancestors fought and died for,” he whined on social media after his arrest for stiffing the restaurant. “It’s not illegal for White people to say the same word they say to each other.” In a message posted immediately after last week’s shooting, he declared, “We should all have the same right to free speech regardless of what color my skin is.” This has landed him guest spots on Alex Jones’s InfoWars and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’s show. His videos have likewise been bolstered by Twitter’s algorithm, which, under owner Elon Musk, favors all things white supremacist. But even a right-wing media ecosystem sustained purely by self-pitying white grievance—and demands for Black people to be put in their place—aren’t new. White Americans have, quite literally since the end of slavery, claimed to suffer under the “outrage of Negro domination,” to quote an 1868 newspaper, and claimed that their own violence toward Black folks, from verbal harassment to lynching, is justified by that threat. “The Klan…saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule,” a white woman wrote in 1914. All these years later and Musk, the world’s richest man, is tweet-complaining that Lupita Nyong’o’s being cast as Helen of Troy is evidence of anti-white racism. Black freedom is somehow always tantamount to white suffering.