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Re:The Silicon Oligarchy on Friday June 19, 2020 @01:17PM (#23576620)
You may already know this, but when people say "white supremacy" they might not mean what you think they mean. For a certain strand of activist, "white supremacy" doesn't just mean the KKK, lynching, Jim Crow, apartheid, black slavery, all the other obvious and overt forms of white racism. It refers to a vaguely-defined sense of racism that supposedly is omnipresent in American (and more generally Western) society, affects everything we do and is apparently inescapable. These people will tell you that we live in a white supremacist society, that white supremacy is at the core of most if not all of our social, political and economic structures, and if you disagree then this only proves that you support the system and are therefore a white supremacist.

This might sound ridiculous but it's taken very seriously by a growing number of people; it has its roots in a certain strain of postmodern thought called critical race theory that's been slowly emanating out of academia for the last decade or two and is now seriously spilling over into the mainstream. See e.g. Robin Diangelo's book White Fragility (which is currently back on the bestseller lists) which asserts that all white people are racist, and if you're white and don't admit that you're racist then this is just you demonstrating "white fragility" which proves... that you're a racist. This is of course divisive, harmful, unfalsifiable garbage but if you don't think these kind of ideas are becoming very influential then you haven't been paying attention.

So basically the reason why it seems like people are constantly throwing around terms like "racist" and "white supremacy" like they have no meaning is because they have consciously and deliberately stripped these words of all meaning. Of course that's not how they'd describe it, but if think this is just me being a conspiratorial right-wing nutjob I highly encourage you to learn more about critical race theory (newdiscourses.com is a good place to start) and understand what these activists are saying. This stuff is coming for you eventually whether you like it or not so you'd better be prepared.