An open letter to white supremacists from a white guy

On Wednesday, a bunch of you stupid white guys with stupid flags, yelling stupid sayings in service of a stupid man broke into the Capitol building on a murderous rampage, intent on destroying my country.

You’ll notice one word is repeated numerous times in that sentence.

Stupid.

I could have used “ignorant,” but that would have been too kind. In the information age, there’s no excuse for being ignorant. You idiots believe what you want to believe, period. The facts don’t matter to you because you’re stupid.

Perhaps even that’s too kind. I could have used the “imbecilic,” but that’s four syllables, and I doubt you know what it means, let alone how to pronounce it. Because you’re stupid.

How do I know?

Because only a quarter-witted moron would condemn anyone for the color of their skin. (I’d call you a half-wit, but that would be too kind.) You claim to be Republicans? Seriously? You think you belong in a party that defines success in terms of hard work and accomplishments? Now that’s what I call stupid, since you only seem to care about someone’s skin color, or genitalia, or birthplace.

You can’t possibly care about principle, because you worship a man with no principles: the most unprincipled leader in the history of our country. And the other guy you claim to worship, Jesus of Nazareth, told his followers to love their neighbors as themselves. You only love yourselves. He told them to stop worrying about the splinter in another person’s eye and worry about that 2-by-4 in their own.

You don’t have a 2-by-4 in your eye, the windows of your soul have been boarded up — if you even have one.

One thing’s for sure: You haven’t got a brain. And as a result, you have to go on a pilgrimage to see a con man who fancies himself a wizard to let him tell you what to do.

I’ve heard some people say we need to be compassionate to people like you. To reach out, because you’re caught in a cult and have been brainwashed.

But you don’t have a brain to be washed, and the vacant interior of your skull is indelibly stained by your hatred. Some people have compared Trumpism to a cult, and there are many similarities. But one thing’s a whole lot different:

Cults lure people in, indoctrinate them, isolate them. They don’t allow them contact with family, friends, or society at large, because they know that contact with the outside world break the spell. You don’t have that excuse for your stupidity. You indoctrinated yourself. Because you’re stupid. You have access to the outside world; no one’s stopping you from contacting your family and friends. You chose idiocy over their company. Or maybe they chose not to put up with you anymore, because you’re so terribly stupid — and your stupidity is both cruel and toxic.

Please don’t try to make this about rural vs. urban “philosophies.” I prefer rural areas to cities myself, because I like my privacy and I enjoy natural beauty. That doesn’t make me stupid. Like you.

Don’t try to make it about poverty, either, because there are poor people in the cities and the countryside, too. And for people who are struggling to put their trust in a billionaire con man is (say it with me) stupid.

If you were just stupid, that would be bad enough. But you’re willfully stupid. You choose to be that way. You won’t read a newspaper because it won’t tell you what you want to hear, and you hate schools because they might challenge you to actually think: to look at things from a different perspective — another person’s perspective. And that person just might be a woman or someone with more melanin in their epidermis.

Don’t know what those words mean? I’m so sorry. If you cared more about education, maybe you would. But I’m going to do you a favor and define them for you: Melanin is pigment, the stuff that makes one person’s epidermis a little darker than another’s. And epidermis is another word for skin. That’s the surface layer of a person’s body. And if all you can think about is what’s found there, rather than what’s found in the brain, you’re just what that skin is: surfacy. Superficial.

Pro tip: You won’t find the brain in the skin. It’s part of the central nervous system. Don’t know what that is? I’m not going to tell you this time. Go back to school. If you dare.

Why am I so angry at your stupidity?

I’ll spell it out for you, even though you might be illiterate. I’ll give it a try. It’s your fault that people of color hate people like me. Your heroes, the guys on those Confederate monuments Trump loves so much, who waved that disgusting battle flag, put them in chains. Forced them to sit in the back of the bus. Made them work for peanuts. Spat on them. Cursed at them. And for what? The color of their skin?

And because of how people like you treated them, they distrust me. I resent that. I don’t like being judged by the color of my skin any more than they do. But you know what? I don’t blame them. They’re not stupid. They know that people with light-colored skin have mistreated and maligned and abused them for hundreds of years. They have a reason to worry. They’re smart to distrust people with less melanin in their epidermis, because they’ve learned the lessons of history.

You haven’t, because you won’t even go to school. And you don’t have any reason to hate them, because they’ve never done anything to you. Oh, you might want to blame them because it makes you feel better about your own stupidity. Because having a scapegoat — dehumanizing and blaming people who don’t look like we do — is easier than actually working to solve your problems. That would mean taking personal responsibility, which is something Republicans are supposed to stand for.

Oh, you didn’t know that? That’s because you’re stupid. Stupid people blame others for their own shortcomings. They’re not self-aware, because they’re not aware at all.

You call yourselves proud boys because you can’t deal with your own shame. Even though you’re an embarrassment to yourself and everyone around you. You call yourselves patriots and “nationalists,” even as you treacherously seek to destroy your nation. You call yourselves a “klan” because your real family has disowned you. You say you support the police, then try to beat them to a pulp when they demand law and order from you. Because you think you’re just that special.

You’re not. You’re stupid.

And if you want to accuse me of being ashamed of my skin color, that’s stupid, too. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not proud of it, either. It’s irrelevant to me. Skin color didn’t invent central heating or the traffic light or the ironing board. Those were all invented by people of color, by the way, but their skin didn’t do it. Their brains did.

I don’t feel guilty for being white. I feel horrible that people are being abused, demeaned, and killed because of their skin color. That’s not just inhuman, it’s stupid.

My skin color means nothing to me. My accomplishments do. I’m proud that I graduated summa cum laude; that I had a successful career; that I’ve written 30 books. But I’ve never been proud of my skin, any more than I’m proud to be tall or bald or born in this country.

But it is my country. I may disagree with my government, but I have no interest in overthrowing it — because this is a representative democracy, and I realize I won’t always get what I want. You don’t seem to understand that concept because you are, that’s right, stupid.

Let me, therefore, engage in a probably futile attempt to educate you, just in case I’m wrong and there really is a brain in there somewhere: This is a republic. That’s the nation you live in. And, to quote some of you brainless bigots, if you don’t like it, you can leave.

In fact, please do.

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Featured photo: Armed cigar-smoking Klansman in southeastern Ohio, 1987, by Paul Walsh, Creative Commons 2.0