The Day the Fascist Snowflakes Came to Cancel a Black Lady and a Brown Dude
Feb 4, 2021
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It began, strangely enough, a noted leftist journalist, who once used to be widely admired. He singled out two minorities — Imani Gandy, a well-known Twitter personality, and, well me. Imani made a joke: “Petition to put white cis dudes on a barge and float them out to sea.” I said, irritated by the fact that the rich white world is 16% of the the globe’s population buthoarding the vast majority of its vaccines, “Eff off already, white people.” He took pics of those things, and said: “The ‘anti-racist’ advocates are speaking out today with particular righteousness.”
Bang! A far right firestorm ensued.I was told to get deported, I was told go back to my country, I got called all manner of racial slurs. I got sent many, many death threats, even some threats of sexual assault. They tried to contact colleagues and get me…cancelled. The…fascist…snowflakes…wanted to…cancel…me. And honestly, that’s kind of funny, even as it was well, terrifying. If you’d told me a decade ago that a noted “leftist” journalist would’ve led a fascist mob of angry far rightsnowflakestocancelme…the irony might have toppled me over in my tracks.
I’ve watched this journalist’s fall from afar, his self-inflicted transformation from fierce journalist to pariah to alt-right icon, with a certain kind of bewildered disappointment — as many others have. I used to admire and deeply respect him when I was young, the way he stood up for justice and risked jail to put the truth out there. And yet here he was,gaslighting two minorities to a rabid army of far right trolls. He pretends to be against cancel culture and internet mobs and bullying and so forth. And here he was leading one made of the worst kinds of people,literal white supremacists,who were about to send me violent death threat after death threat.What the?
Still, this isn’t about him. Only in this way: every firestorm has an instigator, and the instigator in this case seemed to be a person I once admired, who’d turned seemingly into a troll himself.Making common cause withfascistsandNeo-Nazismight have been an alarm signal you weren’t exactly on the right side of history — but he seemed oblivious to all that by now, in ways much broader than me and Imani.
So what happens once a far-right firestorm is instigated against you?
Well, three things do.
One, you find out just howmanycrazy people there are out there.The replies rolled in by the tens, then dozens, then the hundreds, then thethousands. It was a tidal wave of rage and abusiveness. I often describe extremists and fanatics as human hair triggers, andthe trigger had been pulled. Like an avalanche, once an internet firestorm gets started — nothing in the world can stop it.
Two, you find out just how manycrazypeople there are out there.Who took the time to reply to my little Tweet? Every kind of far right nutcase on the planet, apparently. There were the Holocaust deniers. There were the anti-semites who thought I was Jewish and asked about the size of my nose. There were the usual coterie of far-right personalities egging theirownsupporters on. There were the paramilitary guys, the gun nuts, the fundamentalists —all of them. I wonder how this journalist feels about beginning what became an anti-semitic firestorm ofliteral fascistsupon two minorities. I wonder how he feels about them trying to contact myfamily.I wonder how he feels about those fanatics sending me violent and bloodydeath threats.
Imagine if I were a woman, for a second. Imagine how much worse it would have been. I mean, I’m a guy and eventhenI got rape threats. Now imagine being a woman and beingmass sexually harassed by violent strangers.I understand why so many women leave social media out of fear.
Isn’t this just…cancel culture…but even worse?Because let’s face it, I’m not a Nazi or a fascist. I don’t put kids in concentration camps or call for anyone to be annhiliated, andno, telling people to “eff off” in a real conversation is not remotely equivalenttoany of that.
Three, how does it feel to be attacked by a tidal wave of fascists? Well, it’sscary.And that’s the point. To bully, intimidate,terrorise. That is the only language the far right has ever known or understands. Just think of the bloody coup attempt at the Capitol. The same folks that justify and support it were now at my door, baying formyblood.
These people weren’t having some kind of abstract theoretical debate with me. That is because their attention had been focused on one tweet which wasdecontextualisedfor them. Most of them read it and had no idea I’d been having a real conversation with myownfollowers about global inequities,in this case, vaccines. They had no idea that I say this kind of stuff to my followers all the time, and it’s something of a joke between us, the same way that I’ll make fun of “brown” people. They had no idea that when I say “white people” I don’t mean a skin colour: I’m often mistaken for Italian, my Kashmiri friend is paler than most white people and she has green eyes, but we arenot white. Not allowed to be.Whiteness is a social fiction, not a skin colour.It is an invention, a strange and stupid one, which still shapes our world in terrible ways.
But the trolls, the fanatics, the supremacists, the fascists?They weren’t interested in themeaning, the context, the point,of what I said, which goes back decades by now, whose culpability I’ve wrestled with myself, and wondered how farI’menmeshed in.
They just wanted a target to focus the day’s violence and hate on.That is what I really received a heaping dose of:hate.
Remember when Orwell wrote of the daily “two minutes hate” in 1984? As a way to keep the fascist masses in line?Well, here it was. I was today’s unlucky target. How many minorities do you think were discussing white people or making jokes about them on that very day? Thousands, probably. Millions, maybe. But the two minutes hate, which seems to have become very real, needs a different target every day. Fresh blood.New meat. Only then is the satisfaction of the kill had.
Like I said, they were human hair triggers. And they lashed out with kinds of abuse that were horrific to behold.I was a monster who deserved to die. White peopleweresupreme because they had enslaved the world and that was good and I should be enslaved too. I was a Nazi and a bigot — so of course, the actual Nazis putting kids in cages were that way magically exculpated. And, of course, I was the “real racist” for pointing out that we live in a racist world whererich white countries can still hoard vaccines, even though if we wanted to do the rational thing in terms of public health,the entire world’s elderly would get them first, regardless of race.
Now, the reason that none of those debates were to be had was that anydebate was already settledin these folks’s minds.They came to the table with all kinds of bizarre justifications and excuses for the way the world is and has to bealready invented— in the cases that they had them. There were the people that told metheirgrandparents hadn’t owned slaves — so theycouldn’tbe racists, apparently. The ones who told me thattheirparents came from the poorer parts of the rich world — so it was OK to be violent and callow, I guess. There were the ones who told me I wasn’t “helping,” like I was their…hired help. There were the ones who said, glibly, “Ididn’t enslave and murder anyone! Don’t holdmeresponsible for things that happened long ago!!” (I bet these are the same folks that happily take credit if you say “white people invented the light bulb.”)
Those were thegoodones. They were the ones that tried to think (and failed, but at least theytried.) They weren’t the ones that shouted white power slogans back at me, or equated me saying “eff off” to genocide and therefore wished genocide “back” on me, or the ones that called for “omnicide,” which I guess means killingeveryoneoff that’s not white.
Now, though these were the good ones, of course, their excuses and justifications were and areempty.Your grandparents might not have owned slaves — they just might have sold sugar or coffeeharvestedby slaves. They might just have bought a nice house that way, which you still live in. Andyou personallymight not have enslaved anyone, but of course if you are white, you live in a world whose inequality wasdefined and shapedby the brutality and racism of hate, which didn’t end so long ago: America was a segregated country until1971.
But they didn’t want to talk about any of that. They just wanted their two minutes hate. They wanted to violently, aggressively shout linesthey had already recited in their headsat someone new today, as a way to abuse them. What was the point of reciting those lines in your head, I wondered.
Our civilisation’s history of violence is a difficult and subtle subject to grapple with.And it cannot be done when noted internet personalities are gaslighting minorities for talking about it — and that is what equating a joke or “eff off white people” to genocide or fascism is,gaslighting.To reckon with a history of violence is a hard, hard thing. I admire anyone —anyone— who has the courage to do it. But equally, I have contempt for those who choosenotto.
Nobody is really innocent in a history and bloody and savage as ours.Nobody.Not me, certainly.
If the trolls had bothered to read the whole day’s tweets — which they hadn’t, because of course the journalist didn’t direct them to — they’d find out that I literally said “I implicate myself” in a history of cruelty and barbarity, too. Far from attacking anyone, I was encouraging people tothink and take responsibility. The idea I was trying to discuss — with my own sane, civilized followers, at least — was that we are all culpable in a history of violence, and we should make amends.Right down to the animals, reefs, rivers, and topsoil. The problem of human violence stretchesthat far. It’s up to us to take on that challenge, and decided where exactly our culpability lies — not simply to deny it. But that discussion of course landed on deaf ears.
In fact, if these jokers had bothered to read anything I’ve written on any of these topics, they’d see that I don’t support cancellingeven when theleftdoes it.I’ve never called for anyone to be annihilated or killed, in fact, I’ve written for decadesagainst that, but hey — what does that matter when I made the terrible mistake of telling my white followers to “eff off” for supporting their countries hoarding vaccines?
The only thing the far right extremists were interested in was defending themselves from a nowperceived existential threat like me, who apparently wanted some form of white genocide. Wait. Had I called for white kids to be put into concentration camps? Had I said: “let’s annihilate the white race?” Of course not, just a few tweets later, I’d said that “whiteness”itselfis a fiction. My puppy’s white. White people arepink.
Never mind all that. There was one goal, one purpose, one point of this game, and it was to terrorise and intimidate me.I have to say, it worked, for a while. Itisscary to have so many violent, aggressive peopleliterally sending you death threats. Think about how you’d feel for a moment, to have others saying things like you deserve to die and be brutalised and so on, ad nauseam.
But as I thought about it, all this revealed something ironic and almost funny. Here were the macho, tough fascists —acting just like the snowflakes they despised. You have to be pretty paranoid to think that “eff off, white people” for hoarding vaccines adds up to the paranoid fantasy ofwhite genocide. You have to be nursing a huge set of pre-existing grudges and grievances to go nuts on the first person who dares to criticise the world that way this day. And you have to be really, really fragile for a few words from a stranger as mild asthatto hurt your feelings on the internet.
And so you have to need toescalate.Sure, “eff off already white people,” isn’t exactly a nice thing to say. But it’s in reference to an uglyreality— racial inequities, like access to vaccines, not to mention money, resources, time, are veryreal. And I wonder whether white people really understand how deep they go. Still, “eff off” is not nearly at the same level as “go and die in a concentration camp, you monster!” or “I hope your whole family gets enslaved or “You’re a racist!!” I wasn’tevensaying white people are racists, but I think that’s what the fanatics thought I was saying — because that’s what they think andworry about being labelled as.
And yet that is just what, ironically, they proved themselves to be.All those folks that told me that white people really are supreme, or even the ones that said “my grandparents didn’t own slaves” or “Ididn’t enslave anyone” and yet are at the receiving end of huge, huge national and global inequities, winning lotteries of money, power, and resources — these folks all have a terribly impoverished understanding of what racismis.
If I say to you “Hey!Ididn’t enslave anyone!” and yet I live in a house built by slaves, does my logic carry any weight? Of course not. I’m justin denial.
How am I in denial? Byprojecting.
And so I was called all the things all these fanatics worrytheymight be.I was a “Nazi” for saying white people have enslaved and brutalised the world, as if, say the African slave trade had never happened, or indigenous people from Canada to Australia weren’t wiped out and dispossessed to this very day. I was a “racist” for saying that white people are hoarding vaccines, and that reflects long-standing global inequities in power and resources. I was a “monster” for saying…“eff off.”It was all projection.
I’m pretty sure I’m not a Nazi, and that’s because I’ve been fighting against fascism since I was a teenager. I’m pretty sure I’m not a racist, at least to white people, because someone less powerful than them, like me,can’t be. And while I’m not a saint, I’m pretty sure, luckily. I’m not a monster, who deserves to die, although I’ve oftenfeltthat way myself. They said they were deeply worried that I hated them — but there they were, busy hating me in totally disproportionate and horrific ways, instead ofjust asking. I became the Nazi, monster, the one who hated, the genocidal maniac, the bigot, the racist…all for questioning global vaccine inequities and using the f-word…theyweren’t those things.
It was all projection of the things they fear being, ontome.Hence, the hate. And that is the point of this two minutes hate, just as it was in Orwell’s 1984. To let the good people transfer their own intolerable parts onto others, emerge cleansed and pure — and the their targets as hated. Orwell was making a subtle, deep, enduring point:hate is what we project onto others about ourselves that we can’t bear.That goes way, way back in history. When Black Americans were slaves, white people worried nervously that they would “come for their women and land,” which of course iswhat whites had done to them. I had experienced a collective transformation of the hated parts of the selves of the fanatics ontome, so they could emerge retaining their own sense of goodness and decency this day.
How warped isthat, in the end?
So. What is it like living through a far-right firestorm? What’s it like when, ironically, the snowflakes of the far right come to cancel you? It’s scary. It’s terrifying. It’s ugly, abusive. It’s usually led and incited.That makes even more horrific, because now it’s got leaders, and it’s not random, but a structured, organized violent attack. Andthat is the point of it.To terrify and abuse and horrify. It is about the abuse of power. It is a public demonstration of the power a certain kind of people have, in order to make a public point about who and what can be controlled and dominated, and how.
That brings us back to whiteness. Whiteness, at least in American terms,isn’t a skin colour.I can pass “as white,” and “white people” are apparently all from the Caucausian mountains. It’s about power. Often, it’s about theabuseof power. Whatelseis it but an abuse of power the now proverbial white lady calls the cops on the poor Black guy just for…jogging? When Trump said “Make America Great Again,” and he meant: “ethnically cleanse it”? When I’m talking about vaccines being hoarded, and suddenly, there’s an army of supremacists and fascists abusively harassing and wishingviolence on me and everyone like me…because in their paranoid fantasies… I’m today’s face of the eternal monster who’s always wanted to exterminate their entire “race”…all because I used the f-word? LOL. Maybe you see how warped all this is, maybe you don’t.
White isn’t a skin colour — it never was. It’sa social privilege, which carries an attitude, a psychology of entitlement, which, taken to the extreme, develops into paranoia, a persecution complex, which makes certain people violent, human hair triggers, who set out to try and get the world they think is gettingthem.
It’sthe power, I think, to do all that. To a country. A people. Or justtoday’s minority, in today’s two minutes hate.
UmairFebruary 2021
