WARNING: HIGHLY OFFENSIVE LANGAUGE
First off, I owe the universe an apology. I’ve spent years saying that racism is fast becoming a thing of the past, and that the non-caucasians among us were exaggerating the issue.
I am very very wrong about that.
As I said earlier, I’ve been playing Epic Pet Wars on the iPod Touch. (osrzae) It’s addictive in its simplicity, and odd because that simplicity is deceptive. As you climb the ranks strategy becomes more and more important. It’s as though someone made chess interesting again. (Seriously, chess has stopped being fun now that there are computers to analyse every move and each subsequent combination.)
But the thing is that apparently there is this subculture where being openly racist is cool. Or should I say kewl? Why else would people name their EPW pets things like ‘niggakilla’, ‘stompthenigger’ and ‘death2nignogs’? It’s gross and disgusting. Even more disgusting than the infantile sexual aggressiveness of names like ‘swallomycum’. These kids–at least I pray they’re kids who have a hope of growing smarter and away from this grossness–take pride in being vile and disgusting.
Part of me wonders if some of the overt racism isn’t a form of rebellion. In my forays into Twitter for Posse Codes (osrzae), it’s obvious that many of the other gamers are somewhere between 11 and 19. That’s the prime age to do something forbidden just to test your boundaries and rebel against what you perceive as boring conformity but the rest of the world calls ‘manners’.
Either way it makes me sad. Sad that people allow themselves to be ruled by hate. Sad that something innocently fun is corrupted by that hate and sad that I’m so very wrong about racism in America dying.
(For the record, my pets are Caduces, Claddagh, KiwiMermaid, Melusina, Monsterbunny, GrapeSlushie, Footshoe, EmeraldIris, Bellfree and some other names I’m forgetting now. Oh yeah. Zevon. Of course.)
I see this up here in New York too. Yesterday, I was looking up information on a local road race and ran across the blog of someone who had run in the same race last year. I’m reading along and it’s just a conventional runner’s blog (what kind of shoes, training details, boring insider stuff) — but then dropped into periodic disturbing hate-rants about the “Jew York City Marathon,” the author’s deep humiliation at being beaten by both niggers and women at the last road race, political ramblings about the day the country died (when the rest of the country voted in “that damn nigger president”)…and then the writing looped back to regular running blog stuff again…and back and forth it went. It was unsettling.
It’s paradoxical. There’s more casual and cruel racism among those inclined to be racists than there has been in a while and they feel much more free to express their bigotry than they have since the 1960s. On the other hand, there’s a growing group that is much less racist — and that’s probably what’s making the first group so anxious about asserting race supremacy. Not sure what’s going on with adolescents everywhere…the adolescents I hang out with at Kid’s school and at the dance studio are excellent people and I have high hopes for the future.
I used to be quite optimistic about the kids. And I still am about many of them. But … Kat, I know you dip into fanfic and stuff from time to time and I wonder whether you’ve encountered the entire RaceFail mess over on Live Journal. It’s been going on all year so far. And it’s a huge reminder that even if the nasty names show up less than they used to, the obliviousness to any lesser forms of racism hasn’t changed.