Thread by @careyhelmick

for anybody who doesn't understand the current catholic twitter drama, here is a thread about why we're getting so upset about the racist catholics

(I'm writing specifically for white people here) 1/23

the first thing to know is that racism is a very charged and serious word, so it is easiest to understand in the context of, say, the lynching of Emmet Till--a literal black-and-white event where we can point to the oppressors and say "they are fully culpable of mortal sin." 2/

Racism is not just white men extrajudicially killing a young black man because they hate his guts for being black. It has countless shades of perceptibility which are tightly woven into society and even our own minds. 3/

I grew up right next to the dividing line between single-family and multi-family homes in my neighborhood. I heard the white, affluent people in the homes complain about the poor, dirty, noisy, crime-ridden apartments. They were mostly filled with people of color. 4/

when you're a kid, your brain is hungry for patterns that help it understand the world and where you belong in it. The pattern of | white people=rich, good | people of color=poor, bad | is one I learned to recognize early. So have a whooooole lot of other white people. 5/

We grow up steeped in media and interpersonal reactions created by people who also grew up steeped in it. You hear people of color portrayed as ghetto, or dumb, or careless, or broken. You're a kid, and you don't know any better, and you learn to think that way yourself. 6/

Your thought patterns become your beliefs, which become your behaviors. Maybe you act just a little bit more cautious, more scared, more accusing, more pitying, or more condescending around people of color. It might be subconscious! 7/

Our tiny discomforts around people of color are perceptible to them and to society. We chafe a little bit, and we overreact and push our agitation onto the shoulders of people of color, who suffer far more. 8/

There's an epidemic of white people calling the police on black people for doing things like:
-playing music
-taking their kid for a walk
-selling water
-meeting a friend for coffee
-talking to their white spouses
-literally just doing their jobs 9/

we all know how safe and non-stressful police interactions are for black people

10/

what's really infuriating is that when white people use law enforcement as a tool to protect themselves from the discomfort of proximity to people of color, it increases the stress on entire communities, which has been measured to cause lower birth weights in their babies! 11/

people of color suffer from racism before they are even fucking born.

12/

(this is coming around to the catholic twitter racists, I promise) 13/

Society has quite literally been constructed to make things harder for people of color. It is harder to buy a house or get a job. They are more likely to be harshly disciplined at school, imprisoned, or killed by cops. They have dramatically less wealth than white people 14/

It's called institutional racism, and you're part of it. Everybody is prejudiced. Our internal biases reflect the treatment of people in our culture which in turn informs our perceptions in a cyclical, racist echo chamber. 15/

This doesn't make you a bad person! It's not *your* personal fault. The only thing you can control is your own mindset and behavior. Because we can't escape institutional racism, however, we have the responsibility to do some introspective work. 16/

You gotta realize that the way you treat people and talk about people matters. Just because you haven't called the cops on anybody doesn't mean that your thoughts and behaviors haven't contributed to the dehumanization of people of color. 17/

That's really what it comes down to. Everybody is just human. Everybody has the capacity to be bad or good. Society doesn't treat people as equals, but that doesn't mean you can't. It just means you have to recognize the violation of human dignity, and call it out. 18/

here's where we get to the racists on catholic twitter: they might not be calling for outright genocide, but they are calling for a kind of ethnic cleansing. They usually say they want peace, but claim that the only route to peace is for all the races to live separately. 19/

They want to blame people of color for their own problems and kick them all out of the country. They want to vilify refugees and immigrants, auspiciously for "security" but it's pretty easy to tell they just don't like brown people. 20/

they refuse to admit that it's not skin colors mingling that causes violence. It's dehumanization. And even though this is just stupid, stupid twitter, their souls are imperiled. 21/

When they stereotype, label, and denigrate people based on skin color, they feed into all the reasons why society comfortably ignores abuses against people of color. On some primal level, we have convinced ourselves that they deserve it, or they can't feel it. Not like us. 22/

it's disgusting and horrifying and has no place in Catholicism. it's not just silliness or larping. it has real consequences, and it is evil. 23/

this is hard and heavy

racist. racist. racist. youre all racist. none of you are free of sin

meant to point out here that they have intellectualized a lot of their reasoning into intricate bullshit. they can't actually justify anything. it's straight up glorified racism.

forgot to mention! they are also more likely to die in childbirth and more likely to be denied pain medication because doctors literally assume they don't feel pain as much as white people. Straight up dehumanization.