A lot of it in U.S. has to do w/ the type of churches & the communities you're in from them, which run whole towns in more rural parts. You're in or you're out. If you're in a dominant group (such as white,) you have cultural rep advantages & better economic ops. They get to be the good lordlings.

This friend of mine has to work for racists. She’s like a white person whisperer. She has zero animosity or resentment for racists. She just accepts them as they are. This is how she survived I guess? But their reasoning doesn’t change? She has universal love for all. They stay just as racist.

Bc their lordling status isn't being challenged. We're all raised in these hierarchies & marginalized folk have to deal w/ not setting us off in the day to day. "Fiscal conservatives" see themselves as practical, beneficent lordlings - still bigots but they're not the directly violent 1's, you see.

For sure when you look from a distance you think ‘how do you wallow in the lies like that…you must know…’ But when you get close you see the whole mental architecture that they use to uphold it and it’s very chilling. The emotional capacities are so stunted. Inner humanity has been damaged. Scary.

Yes, but it's also all of us. Our society taught us & it's very easy to forget & pull rank w/ those who are marginalized to your lordling status. Bc we see it as our worthiness as individuals rather than a cultural rep that's handed to us. To give it up takes conscious effort. RW'ers are too scared.

It’s true. You have to examine situations and even your own mind all the time to see ways that you are playing into it and reproducing it— and figure out methods to disrupt it. It’s very insidious. But many cultural systems have NO TOOLS for this. They’re designed to prevent that. Disheartening.

An example—it’s better than nothing!—is that I know a Black woman in the South who lives next door to a huge racist. He saw her struggling so started coming over to fix things in her yard! Then down all his flags. (She didn’t ask he just did it.) She became an ‘us’ to him. He won’t truly change tho

For him, bc he's white, he's inherently superior, good, meritorious, etc. (cultural rep) & Black folk are inherently inferior, lazy, bad, etc. (marginalized peasant). But there can be good peasants, partial exceptions. She's not "us", but she's not quite "them" & he can help her as a neighbor.

I know racist minds have been destroyed by racism on one level but seeing it close up the way she has gotten me to do—I just feel so desperate for this whole worldview to end forever. Reconstruction was our chance but we have to do it. How anyone can want that ‘culture’ to survive…it’s maddening.

Yes, I guess that’s it. The South is a trip. She is 82. You would not believe the intimacy between her and these racists. And she knows what racism is, she has a very good analysis. She knows just how they are. They are like children to her, though. They need her to be kind so she is kind.

But if you help all Black folk, as part of helping everyone, then you're getting rid of "us" as the superior righteous worthy; you're changing the social order, removing the hierarchies that give him status & power, elevating inferiors as equal, pointing out his status as righteous worthy was false.

Right. It HAS to end. It’s like a horror movie but with millions of people.

True. Many years I spent trying to understand these people. The best insight someone gave me was EXACTLY that. It’s all ‘us v. them.’ In puzzling about the ludicrous tendency for inconsistency—because they DO use moral ideas— I hadn’t realized that was their moral framework. Racism is the cause.