Thread by @polotek

A lot of white people need to be deprogrammed. It felt weird to use that word at first, but I honestly think it’s the right one. Like they’re mostly okay. Then you hit this completely fictional reality written into the firmware and it just causes these glitches.

https://twitter.com/nathanlerner/status/1321839729738919936

We need a whole curriculum for this. Maybe it’s like rehab or something. But somebody sits down with @NathanLerner like let’s go through history in detail until you understand some fundamental things you believe just are not true. They never were. Then let’s rebuild your values.

It seems like this person is trying to do good work. They want to enable a more progressive future for everyone. That’s great. Imagine what they could accomplish if they weren’t working with a fundamentally flawed value system. One that won’t allow them to see the work clearly.

I wanna say more about what I mean when I say they can’t see the work clearly. I think Nate understands that we are pushing back against bad people right now. But his comment suggests that he hasn’t accepted that this is part of a deep legacy of villainy.

The people we are battling right now are not unique. Their ideas are not new. The depths of their evil and violence is not an unknown. This has all happened before. In this same way. In this same place. This is history in an unbroken line that we can actually see with our eyes.

Now I’m not saying that everybody should already know this. Learning history is hard. And we know that America is dedicated to not teaching it. We all have to be educated. But the difference between me and Nate is that the education is visited upon my body. I cannot deny it.

My education wasn’t academic. My education is engrained into my heritage. The way white folks came to my grandmas house and threatened us while I was growing up was undeniable. Later all I did was learn what to call it. We lived on sharecropper land, and we didn’t own shit.

I’m given the same rhetoric about America being this great bastion of freedom and democracy. But my body lets me know it is not true. I’m made resistant to the programming. And ever since I realized this, I keep thinking about all the people who have no natural resistance.

I keep thinking about all the people who are given the lie from birth. It’s a first principle for them. Foundational to how their value system is built. Unquestionable. I can only imagine how difficult it is to be deprogrammed from that.

All that said, my original point is different. More subtle and more insidious. A person like Nate is doing his part to build the future of this country. But is he even capable of a vision of the future that is truly just if his perception of the past is so fundamentally broken?