Recreational Racists

We live for clicks, likes, followers and the validation they bring. Even if they are a two dimensional, hollow click validation of strangers rather than the substantive approval of our family or community online or off.

Under pressure from social media companies and friends, people open accounts only to find their social circle and popularity does not necessarily soar as it has for others. Out of frustration, a user may something inappropriate, only to find it gets more attention than anything else they had posted before. Despite having done something bad, the attention feels good. The user may start looking for the best things to be horrible about in order to gain the most attention possible.

Even if they might not start out as inherently bad people, that is who soon becomes their community. Click me, you like me. People go where they are liked, even if that place is bad.

We, the internet community, don't help. We share the worst things we see and follow accounts and causes we despise (who does that?). Maybe  for the right reasons, but a share is a share and a follower is a follower. Some people would rather be hated and followed than not followed at all. We have seen numerous cases of haters, when unmasked, demand they have a right to say what they want and then beg not to be outed (look up examples @sweepyface and Violentacrez ) and promise never to do it again. They claim they didn't mean the horrible things they said. Andrew Anglin, who runs the Daily Stormer website and is now being sued for his online viciousness, recently claimed his website was an experiment and not the rampant anti-Semitism it appeared to be - a hobby Nazi. 

Of course there are genuine haters, racists and bigots who would love nothing more than to lead a lynch mob, beat immigrants with impunity or burn minority-owned businesses. We certainly have enough of those people. We don't need to foster weekend warriors for hate.

In a world measured in likes and views, people will resort to any online behavior, as long as it gets reposted, retweeted or shared. Sensationalism, distortion, artifice becomes king. Attention getting behavior is nothing new, just ask any third grade teacher. It's all about insecurity. 

We need to call out bad behavior and hate online from those we know. On some issues it is NOT OK to agree to disagree. We need to acknowledge and value of the people around us, so people feel real validation and are not forced into distructive behavior to find acceptance online. 

Larry David's Preface to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

People fear what they don't know. Bias, racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism are most common in places where people don't meet anyone different from themselves. Yes, there is bias in diverse populations, and some haters will say their bias is due to their experiences with certain groups. Upon examination, their exposure to certain groups and their experiences with others,  have been of a very limited nature.

Stereotypes are more easily integrated into a belief system when there is nothing to challenge those stereotypes.

In the vast majority of cases the only exposure some people have to different religious, ethnic or social groups is from television, movies and, of course, the internet. Opinions are formed, solidified and fortified based on the thinnest of evidence; a script, an interview, a post on some website. Whether the information is true or false makes little difference. This is why monitoring, confronting and challenging hateful words and attitudes, regardless of how overt or tacit, matters.

I am a white male and would not presume to talk about racism or sexism, but I am Jewish. There are many people who have never known, met or had close contact with a Jew. Huge swaths of our population have never been to a city with a sizable Jewish population and seen it. I am not talking about the  ultra religious Lubavitcher sect who wear the back hats, not the Chabad missionaries, just the average Americans who are Jewish.

Many people spend the time to learn the reality, but for far too many, their ideas of me are shaped by what they are told. All too often the evidence of the distortions they are told are found in Henry Ford's International Jew, David Duke's Jewish Supremacy or The Elders of the Protocols of Zion. And that becomes all the evidence they need.

So, when Larry David makes a Holocaust joke, he has erroneously signaled, to far too many people,  that it is now OK to joke about the Holocaust. Unfortunately, it's not and may never be. We are talking about one of humanities darkest moments.

The best of people will understand where David is coming from, but the worst will use this as an opportunity to degrade something that must remain unassailable. The Holocaust is not just a Jewish thing, racism is not just a black thing and sexism is not just a female thing. Once we get that, maybe then.