Sometimes I Wish the Internets Would Go Away

Carmen Van Kerchove of Raciallicious writes a guest post at TPM Cafe asking a seemingly simple, but in reality complex question: What role should white people play in fighting racism? One would hope that the post would spark a meaningful discussion. Instead, comments immediately start out bashing and belittling Carmen’s efforts.

Is this for real? Not a April Fools day joke? DF? Is this you? This chick actually used “snap” in a written sentence. I think I might have seen everything now.

Carmen, thats a pretty underwhelming effort thanks for stopping by.

Nice. Second comment and we have an almost textbook example of one of the posts that sparked her questions in the first place, How to Suppress Discussions of Racism. There’s no addressing the issue; there’s the deflection (who cares if she used “snap”?); there’s the attempt to control what the audience sees (really, it’s an April Fools joke!); there’s the attacking the person, not the argument (see again the attack against using “snap,” which also obviously means she’s uneducated and shouldn’t be writing publicly); and for added fun, let’s belittle her a little more and call her a “chick” rather than a woman.

What got my goat, though, was when someone insinuated that Carmen does what she does “for the money” or out of some sort of mixed-race identity crisis. That was comment number 8. I stopped reading after that one for fear of breaking things. Where do people get off saying such things about people that they don’t even know? Again, what does any of that have to do with the question at hand?

Perhaps, the comments get better farther down and people actually address what she has to say. You’ll have to let me know because I’m not sure I can stomach going back.

[H/T Tom]