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Notes -
When did anti-racism become incorporated into a person's character after Civil Rights in the US? Talking to boomers, even liberal ones, it seems their attitude is mostly that personal prejudice is, while not encouraged, also not a big deal so long as you don't let it cloud your judgement in an official capacity (such as discriminating while hiring). Even many boomerlibs I know talk in racially disparaging terms about people they don't like (i.e. a black driver who cut them off). I'm around 30, and growing up in Houston with an ethnically diverse social group it seems that ideologically everyone was on board with equal opportunities, but if someone was personally racist it was more of a personal quirk than a major character flaw unless they were, like, in a criminal organization or something. I'm PMC, and grew up PMC going to public schools, so I may have been in a bubble.
To give a tongue in cheek quote from my dad, "When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?" It seems that there was a gap in between when everyone agreed the nation as a whole should act in a race-blind or even anti-racist way and when people decided that it's imperative that people as individuals abandon racist feelings/beliefs.
I'd also be interested in if/when this happened in other nations as well, such as the nations of Western Europe.
The process in the 2010s went something like this:
The mainstream media, and sub-mainstream outlets, would craft an emotionally-poignant faux-tragedy out of an event related to race, eg Michael Brown.
Political operatives would boost these stories by sharing and responding to them online, treating these events as an intimate and civic tragedy of totalizing emotional importance. Some of these operatives just wanted Democrats to win, some of them wanted to grow their account. And some of them were actual die-hard antiracists (a tiny minority with a distinct origin in academia, coming out of Soviet anti-American Marxist tactics to weaken America).
Normal youth in America, absolutely starved of any civic or collective-religious ritual or belongingness, and not understanding anything, would imitate the operatives in mourning the faux-tragedies. This is something that seems important to do unless you know the game being played, and it is also cathartic in the same way watching true crime or a tragic drama is cathartic. This also brought them attention.
Because the faux-tragedies targetted the empathetic, the mourners were often young women, which means that young men would engage in it driven by pure desire to have sex with them.
With each additional sequence of catastrophizing an event, the grievance seems bigger and bigger and more legitimate and pressing, and the operatives etc were racing to develop the most “sticky” narrative because by making your message stickier you get more attention online, then your message was imitated, etc.
If you do this enough, “antiracist” becomes a desirable thing to signal within the cohort affected by this messaging. If you totalize the importance of racism, then you are also totalizing the importance of anti-racism. And it feels good to put that identity label in your bio.
It’s fun to draw a comparison between BLM-era ritual mourning and the Khameneist ritual mourning in Iran, and indeed there have even been cross-over episodes. They both have the intended aim of recruiting political allegiance by lazer-focusing on an ostensibly sorrowful, unjust, dramatic death, identifying with the suffering victim, and then embodying a sort of repented or amended spirit which comes out of it, especially within a space for collective effervescence.
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