Dear Fed Up White People On Social Media

Let your newsfeed remind you of the stupidity, hatred, privilege and pain, even if it's on a daily basis. Real life isn't an app, and not everyone can tune this out with the click of a button. Don't delete those people, respond to them. Often.
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Businessman or designer using laptop computer at desk in office

Dear Fed Up White People On Social Media,

Stop deleting your racist, homophobic, rape apologist "friends." Stop blocking posts and people because of the ignorant things they say. Stop thinking "I don't want to see this anymore" and putting it out of your view, washing your hands of it as best you can. Instead, let your newsfeed remind you of the stupidity, hatred, privilege and pain, even if it's on a daily basis. Real life isn't an app, and not everyone can tune this out with the click of a button. Don't delete those people, respond to them. Often.

Every racist post you see, comment. Anti-gay meme? Comment. #NotAllMen, #AllLivesMatter... roll your eyes... but still make that comment. Make them want to delete YOU. Argue with them until you're both blue in the face. Will it change their minds? Probably not. Will it make them get a more realistic view that they aren't the majority? Hopefully. Let's be honest, more often than not there's a very specific type of person making those types of posts. I don't even have to give a physical description but chances are they're wearing a 'Make America Great Again' hat while sharing their latest black-on-black crime statistics. Be prepared for their "I'm not racist, I have black friends" responses and keep responding until they finally run out of excuses. Take their words down to their lowest common denominator so they have nothing left to hide behind.

Common sense used to tell us that arguing with people over the Internet was a waste of time. But letting idiots surround themselves exclusively with other idiots nonstop has brought us here. Allowing stupidity to flood comment sections on news sites, public pages and eventually creeping in to our personal pages via mutual friends, has given those people a false sense of security. And the #NotAllWhites comments are just as distracting as the #NotAllMen comments and believe me, I've had to jump plenty of hurdles with those. Trying to get my points across about how women are treated while being interrupted by well-meaning #NotAllMen people made me realize how important it is to not interrupt a person of color to remind them not all white people are racists.

Again, no physical description necessary, there is a specific group of men in this country that have no real experience with discrimination. And for those who love to grasp at straws with the Irish, please tell me when any U.S. Presidents of Irish descent were required to publicly produce their birth certificates. Saying a black man wouldn't be treated unfairly by police if he would only "comply" is an asinine thing to say when our own President is treated so disrespectfully by some very high profile people. Bringing up black-on-black crime or the fact that blacks sold other blacks into slavery doesn't absolve all white people for eternity. If you're caught buying drugs your defense can't be "Well, the drug dealer was selling the drugs so *technically* I'm not to blame". But on that note, if you're white, at least you won't serve nearly as long of a sentence, right?

There is a reason you won't find as many racist white women, as many racist LGBT people or as many racist people of color. There is a reason women are thankful for the men who stand up against sexism, a reason LGBT people are thankful for straight allies, a reason people of color are thankful for white allies. It's because we know what it's like to be treated differently, some worse than others, and we know what it feels like to be underrepresented, spoken over, silenced, and to have our "rights" voted on. Even when we haven't personally experienced a more extreme version of the discrimination our ancestors did, we still feel it. We don't feel victimized for it, we feel motivated to continue the fight we inherited. We don't want to evict anyone from their ivory tower, we just don't want someone else to be the architect of our own.

The problem with social media is that it allows people to block what and who they want and build a dangerously close-minded masterpiece. Then they forget how to transition back into the real world and suddenly there's a war on women, a war on police, a war on religion and a race war. But war implies a battle and this is more like euthanasia since we should have pulled the plug a long time ago. People like that aren't strong (keyboard) warriors, they're a dying breed and they know it. And for those of us who are fed up, our instincts usually tell us to just delete people outed as bigots, block posts we don't think are appropriate and unfollow pages consistently visited by less evolved members of our society. But maybe it's time we exit from the high road and follow their DeLoreans just closely enough to remind them which direction we're all traveling in... because I refuse to keep allowing them to take us backward.

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