Racial Slurs & the Policing of Black and Brown Minds

How Kehinde Andrews' "Psychosis of Whiteness" helps to explain the psychology of this.

Photo by Dave Lowe on Unsplash

Claims about the inauthenticity of people’s blackness or brownness or gayness if they have the “wrong ideas” for that demographic as decided by certain ideological subsets of it appear to be on the rise right now. This is the same kind of thinking that asserts that anybody who does not hold those views must be either suffering from an internalised “-ism” or be a self-serving traitorous panderer to a perceived dominant group. I have been accused of being a ‘handmaiden of the patriarchy’ because I’m not at all convinced I live in one and ‘a self-hating fat’ because I dislike and actively try to remedy my obesity due to the discomfort and health problems that accompany it.

It appears to be a constant in human psychology for people to feel more anger against those they consider heretics to their group even than those who are part of a group seen as adversarial. This makes some sense when the group is defined by a shared ideology. Catholics and Protestants have often warred with each other more than with non-Christians and different kinds of feminists can often spend more energy in heated argument with each other than with anti-feminists. When a certain set of principles and beliefs are very important to someone, it is often the people who claim to share them but are doing it wrongly who seem to present the biggest problem. I see the rationale for prioritising getting one’s own house in order if it is to stand strong against assailants and do so myself.

This rationale simply does not work when it comes to demographics defined by shared immutable characteristics,It is grossly illiberal for any ideological subset of a demographic to appoint itself the arbiter of which values and beliefs that demographic must hold collectively. This has particularly serious social consequences when the demographic in question is a minority one. When we have proponents of Critical Theories of Race or Critical Queer Theory asserting that theirs is the authentic voice of black or brown or lesbian, gay or bisexual people and demonising and bullying the members of those demographics who have dissenting views and these ideological groups have social prestige, we have a serious problem.

Given how recent are the developments in Western, white majority countries that enabled racial and sexual minorities to contribute to ‘the marketplace of ideas’ on issues of race or sexuality in any meaningful way, it is vital that liberal democracies oppose any new attempts to impede them from doing so. With homosexuality being illegal and black people being legally defined as second class citizens in the US and black and brown people being largely absent from the UK which nevertheless ruled the countries they did live in until the second half of the last century, it should not be controversial to say that they did not have much of a voice until very recently. Even with legal restrictions on these groups lifted, it took some time for social attitudes to change enough for racial minorities and (out) sexual minorities to access positions of authority in public institutions and be respected as public intellectuals, thinkers and commentators. Once able to do so, it is unsurprising that their intellectual and political thought was diverse seeing as how humans are known for being ideologically diverse and people of racial & sexual minority are humans.

Given the history of conservative resistance to homosexuality and multiculturalism, it is a clear sign of progress across the political spectrum that we have increasing numbers of conservative politicians, intellectuals and thinkers of all kinds who are of racial or sexual minority. As a leftist, I very much wish that black, brown, gay, lesbian, bi etc people would not be conservative but no more than I wish white and heterosexual people would not be. As a liberal who values individual agency, universal human rights and viewpoint diversity, I will absolutely fight for their right to be conservative and for conservative views to be freely expressed in all institutions including universities where they currently face most resistance. Then I can argue with and criticise conservative ideas that I most disagree with regardless of the identity of the speaker. I understand my left-liberalism as progressive. I cannot accept any attempt to limit the individual thought, deny the individual agency or impede the full access to the marketplace of ideas to anybody of racial or sexual minority as anything other than regressive.

Today, however, I intend to focus on my own country and the particular hostility expressed towards black and South Asian conservatives by black and brown British identitarian progressives. I also intend to use Prof. Kehinde Andrews’ new book The Psychosis of Whiteness to try to understand the psychology of this attitude.

Last week, we saw two particularly strong examples of this. Speaking of the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman’s, assertion that a failure to control migration to the West is an existential challenge, author and broadcaster, Medhi Hasan said,

You could argue that she’s worse than Enoch Powell because at least he wasn’t the brown child of immigrants.

To which the academic, author and broadcaster, Kenan Malik replied:

No. We should not impose on people of particular identities, backgrounds or experiences the responsibility for having the “right” views and judge those views more harshly than if they were held by someone, say, white, male or privileged. That’s a dangerous road to go down.

People with the same experiences or family backgrounds can interpret those experiences and that background in significantly different ways depending on their broader ideologies. It's the interpretation & ideologies we should judge, not the identity of the person holding them.

Both men are British leftists of Indian descent and the “brown children of immigrants” and both of them have strong disagreements with Suella Braverman as well as with each other so we immediately see that Mr Malik is right to assert that ideological differences both exist among those with similar identities, backgrounds and experience and influence their interpretations of them. In short, identity-based standpoint epistemology fails again and to criticise the Home Secretary, we must focus on her ideology, not her identity as Mr Hasan perceives it. Ms Braverman is not speaking as a brown child of immigrants but as a British conservative politician with anti-immigration views. There is plenty to criticise in Ms. Braverman’s ideology, views, policies and relationship with the truth and many Brits of all races have done so, including me. Others of all races heartily approve her stance. To suggest that brown Brits with these views are morally worse than white Brits is quite clearly racist and it also detracts from addressing the substance of her policies and their likely devastating effects on vulnerable human beings.

A few days later, the organisation African, Caribbean and Asian Lawyers for Justice posted this tweet which I have screencapped as it has been reported for racism multiple times.

It is encouraging that the use of racial slurs against Mr Robinson was overwhelmingly recognised and condemned as racist by the quote tweeters including a significant proportion who mentioned finding his views highly objectionable. The most reasonable and dignified response, in my view, came from the head of the Equality and Diversity Unit at Oxford University and previously for the police. Vernal Scott said,

This happened to me during my time in policing, and it hurt. Now, I don't agree with Mr Robinson's views at all, but there is more than one way to be Black, Asian, White, Mixed etc. To mock him using repugnant racist terminology or imagery reflects poorly on the authors.

The organisation that produced this image did not mention what services Mr. Robinson has provided to white supremacy, but it is likely to refer to his having supported Dan Wootton following his suspension from GB News from which Mr Robinson is now also suspended. This entire debacle was related to a segment on Mr Wootton’s show in which Lawrence Fox responded to the feminist, Ava Evans, seeming to oppose an initiative for supporting men’s mental health with obnoxious and puerile comments about not wanting to ‘shag’ her. Mr Fox was suspended for making these comments and then Mr Wootton was suspended for finding them amusing. I do not intend to address that incident as this genre of juvenile insult most often found on social media in which supposed adults respond to views they don’t like by telling the other person that nobody wants to have sex with them or accusing them of being a virgin or incel should be beneath the notice of intelligent adults.

If this was the triggering event for the horrible image, it is significant that the African, Caribbean and Asian Lawyers for Justice did not target the white Mr Fox or the white Mr Wootton, but went 3 stages removed to the mixed-race Mr Robinson and criticised none of his views but simply called him a ‘house negro’ and an embarrassment to black people worldwide. If they wanted to object to Mr Robinson’s ideas on race, they could have argued against his rejection of Critical Race Theory or his statement that “Skin colour is not an identity, it should not dictate politics or personality. It is melanin, a pigment. That is all.” Instead, they made no argument against his views but simply used racialised slurs that implicitly accuse him of betraying black people and pandering to white people.

I should mention that I myself have criticised Calvin whom I know slightly and met in the context of our shared opposition to segregating people by race. My first perception of him was of an ethical conservative opposing social division so I was dismayed by the increasing number of his tweets which indicated that his support for a multi-ethnic society was not matched by an equal support for a society that is pluralistic on religion. I did not accuse him of betraying any identity group but appealed to him to reject illiberal ideas and adopt greater tolerance of Britons with other religions or none.

But the question remains why are Mehdi Hasan and African, Caribbean and Asian Lawyers for Justice and so many others conflating identity and ideology and exerting particularly strong pressure on black and South Asian Brits to adhere to their views and none other and regarding them as particularly reprehensible when they don’t? I think the book, The Psychosis of Whiteness by Professor of Black Studies, Kehinde Andrews offers a glimpse into this psychology. In it, he writes,

I use the term ‘psychosis of Whiteness’ as a provocation. I want to be abundantly clear I am not arguing that all White people are psychotic. I am not using the term in the individualized way psychiatry has, to describe so-called ‘deviants’. We cannot see racism as an individual disease of the White mind; to do so would mean the solution would be to treat the sick people, rather than to address the societal issues that cause this psychosis. I use psychosis here as a metaphor to diagnose the delusional thinking that is necessary to maintain a racist society. If we were able to fully accept that the barbarity of White supremacy is the keystone of our prosperity, then we would be forced into action, creating an alternative economic system to the one we have, one that no longer reproduces the material conditions of White supremacy. To avoid facing up to its true nature society creates myths.

The “psychosis of whiteness” then is another false consciousness narrative which requires people to awaken to it. The term ‘false consciousness’ itself is most used within Marxist thought. However, sects of humans believing themselves to have seen through layers of social constructs and conditioning to the truth while the rest of society stumbles on blindly accepting the propaganda created by the powerful is probably as old as sects of humans are.

We see it in Chapter Five of the Book of Jeremiah written around 600 BCE in which God instructs the prophet Jeremiah to tell the Jews that they are being led astray by false ideas that suit them, “Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not” and “The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?

Because historically the dominant ideologies that have survived in writing have been religious, we see this concept of a majority-held false consciousness that an enlightened few can see through repeat over and over again in religious metaphor. . People ‘see the light’ or ‘open their heart to God’ receive a revelation, an awakening or an epiphany. For St. Paul, the ‘scales fell from his eyes.” In other senses achieving something like “a state of grace” (Christianity) ‘deen’ (Islam) or ‘good karma’ has to be constantly consciously worked for. In Islam the concept of Jahiliyah, typically translated as ‘age of ignorance’ or ‘state of ignorance’ can be used to describe the Arab world before the emergence of Islam, non-Islamic societies or Muslims who are practicing their faith incorrectly. In many Eastern religious traditions, people engage in spiritual and meditative practices to ‘open/awaken the third eye’ which enables them to obtain deeper inner wisdom and see the external world more clearly and accurately and have a higher consciousness.

In our current, more secular world, we still have this belief that some people have seen through deceptive social structures to the truth of society and that others need to wake up. If we look at the definitions of ‘red-pilled’ and ‘woke,’ we see that they are remarkably similar even though the social realities they see are utterly opposed. Taken from the film, “The Matrix” in which a red pill allows the protagonist to see the world as it really is, those who describe themselves as “red pilled” usually mean that they have realised that they have been misled by dominant progressive ideologies which oppress men and white people while woke refers to having awaked to a social reality which is white supremacist, patriarchal and homo/transphobic.

Oxford Languages defines ‘redpilling as’

to cause (someone) to have their perspective dramatically transformed, especially by introducing them to a new and typically disturbing understanding of the true nature of a particular situation.

while wokeness stems from the Black Radical Tradition.

The earliest known examples of wokeness as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates back to the early 20th century.

(Interestingly, Andrews uses the ‘scales falling from eyes’ and ‘red pill’ metaphors for seeing the psychosis of whiteness.)

In an idealised liberal society, we would have a system in which everybody who thinks they see the problems with systems in society accurately and other people don’t can’t just assert that everybody who disagrees with them is blind or asleep and expect to be taken seriously. Everybody with political, religious or philosophical views believes themselves to be right and others to be wrong. It would be incoherent not to. Therefore, we must bring our arguments to the table and test them against each other. As Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind,

Each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds…But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.

This is not a perfect system as people can be and have been wrong en masse many times and we have often been, as we are now, in a state of polarisation where we do not feel a common bond or shared fate or want to interact civilly. It is nevertheless, the system we should aim for given the evidence that liberal democracies have done better at advancing knowledge and human rights than totalitarian regimes where everybody has to pretend to believe the same thing.

Unfortunately, we currently have large swathes of society which have no confidence at all in this system. If you are skeptical of expertise, the government, institutions of knowledge production and the media and believe they are controlling or withholding the information you need to make any arguments for reasons of ideological bias, you cannot believe we have a functioning marketplace of ideas.

If you believe as Andrews does that we are suffering from a collective psychosis, even if we did have such a marketplace, it cannot possibly work.

The mind develops psychosis to deny a problem, to distort a person’s connection to reality so thoroughly that the utterly irrational becomes logical. Whiteness, the controlling set of ideas that order the world, is not a rational beast that can be reasoned with. In order to sleep at night White society has created a psychotic way of understanding the world and when racialized people struggle to navigate it this is used as evidence of our deficiencies..

Nor can it work if you believe as the Critical Social Justice activists do that we are unconsciously socialised into identical biases that maintain a white supremacist, patriarchal, transphobic etc status quo and that we each need to work to access those biases and dismantle them before we can anything approaching a level playing field that would enable reasoned debate and that we are nowhere near having achieved that.

The workings of CSJ’s unconscious bias belief and Andrew’s collective psychosis belief may sound almost indistinguishable but Andrews refers to CSJ anti-racism as “the anti-racism industrial complex” and condemns it utterly saying,

A related concrete action we can take is to immediately stop all unconscious bias training. If it is unconscious, then it cannot be trained out of someone. If that is your goal, you are just wasting everyone’s time and your money. Bias, just like the psychosis of Whiteness, arises within the society we live in. Only in a society not defined by racism will you end the unconscious biases it produces.

…

One of the main lessons the psychosis of Whiteness can teach us is that we need to stop waiting for White people to transform the world….One of the most dangerous delusions of the psychosis is believing that we are lost without White people. Stop waiting for, or trying to convince, White people. It is as useful as a rat chasing its tail.

The only solution to the problem of racism is revolution. The delusions of the psychosis of Whiteness are caused by the political and economic system of White supremacy and if we want to eliminate it we must go to the source. We need to stop individualizing the issue and end the liberal charade that if we could only educate everyone, we would all live in blissful union.

For Andrews the only way to end a racist society is for black people to work together collectively for revolution. He is a little vague about how to do this practically although he advocates eschewing white institutions and accepting that white people will only care about black interests when it also suits them (Derrick Bell’s Interest Convergence Theory) and capitalising on that. He ends:

It is not about you. We must collectively work to build a reality free from White supremacy. We cannot afford to rest until that goal has been achieved. The journey to liberation will be uncomfortable, so rather than ending this book by trying to reassure you, I challenge you to confront the demons that haunt our society.

What is clear is that he believes that black people must accept that they live in a society dominated by the psychosis of whiteness, work collectively in a revolutionary way against it and eschew individuality. “It’s not about you.”

The biggest danger to this collective project therefore is black people who do not conform to this. He says:

It cannot be reiterated strongly enough that the psychosis of Whiteness is not reserved just for those with White skin. There are countless historic and present-day examples of racialized shucking and jiving to the tune of White supremacy to pocket some pieces of silver. This is perhaps the most dangerous element of the psychosis, because putting a Black face on White racism provides a veneer of legitimacy to these ideas.

and

Of all the barriers to breaking through the psychosis of Whiteness, Black and Brown faces feeding the delirium is perhaps the greatest.

Andrews draws his “White Psychosis” hypothesis from his own childhood experience.

.I went through this delirium as an eleven-year-old. I knew Blackness was an important part of identity, so I denied that I was Black. I had only White friends, and embraced exclusively White culture, even the desire for White people’s hair (although I’m glad to say this last one was short-lived). It felt like the only way to make sense of myself. If Black was bad but I was good, then I had to be White. Like converts to a religion, those who are trying to prove their Whiteness are always the most extreme. ….My early teen years were not the easiest and I was routinely called names like Bounty Bar and Coconut, because both are brown on the outside and white on the inside. I used to hate both of those terms, but they were accurate. I was running away from my Blackness, trying to reach something I had been told was the ideal. My experience was not unique.

In this he is like Robin DiAngelo who asserts her universal white superiority complex hypothesis drawing on her own childhood experience,

From an early age I had the sense of being an outsider; I was acutely aware that I was poor, that I was dirty, that I was not “normal,” and that there was something “wrong” with me. But I also knew that I was not Black. We were at the lower rungs of society, but there was always someone on the ladder, just below us. I knew that “colored” meant Black people and that Black people should be avoided. I can remember many occasions when I reached for candy or uneaten food lying out in public and was admonished by my grandmother not to touch it because a “colored person” may have touched it. I was told not to sit in certain places lest a “colored” person had sat there. The message was clear: if a Black person touched something, it became dirty. The irony here is that the marks of poverty were clearly visible on me: poor hygiene, torn clothes, homelessness, rotten teeth, hunger. Yet through comments such as my grandmother’s, a racial Other was formed in my consciousness, an Other through whom I became clean.

Although Andrews appears to despise DiAngelo and sees her as part of the problem, her belief that all white people who claim not to share her racism are being fragile is very similar to his belief that all black people who claim not to share his beliefs that we live in a collective psychosis of whiteness fall into one of three categories of self-serving pretence. He defines these as “House negroes,” “Cooning” and “Tomming” and believes these are very important distinctions and defines them for us (well, probably not me)

I make no apologies for quoting the terms Andrews uses to explain his categories of black people suffering from white psychosis. It is impossible to be clear without doing so. However, these are racial slurs and there is no justification for applying them to a human being.

House negroes to Andrews are those black people who have found a niche within the system of white psychosis where they can live comfortably and so are incentivised to maintain the system at the cost of other ‘authentic’ black people. He writes,

There are far too many Black people who have swallowed the lies of White supremacy and wholeheartedly support the racist political and economic system. Malcolm X explained this phenomenon when he drew a distinction between the house and field negroes on the plantation. He chastised those who worked in the house as being too close to the master, receiving lighter work and relative privilege due to their location. …

Malcolm painted this picture of the house negro in stark contrast to the field negro, the masses who toiled on the plantation, caught the lash and felt the harshest brutality of slavery….The field negro was the authentic Black position, because he or she understood the truth about the plantation: that the only solution was to get as far away from it as possible, rather than trying to reform it.

…

‘House negro’ speaks to the class dimensions in Black politics. If you can ‘make it’, then you can easily be blinded by the privileges of Whiteness that you have better access to. It should serve as a warning to all of us who have managed to achieve what Malcolm X called ‘token integration’.

…

‘House negro’ is a mechanism for identifying inauthentic Black identities based on their regressive politics. This is not a cultural criticism, but one that invalidates those with a house negro mentality from understanding the true nature of racism in society.

Cooning to Andrews is an act. It occurs when someone keeps a black identity but makes it one that is acceptable to white people. Barack Obama is his exemplar. He writes…

‘House negro’ is a noun, but ‘coon’ should be used as a verb. It is an active decision to debase oneself by playing the (damn) fool to the gallery. The Sewage Sewell Report was an act of cooning on the part of Tony Sewell, as were his subsequent media performances. Being trapped in a house-negro mentality makes the allure of cooning seem more palatable, but these are two very different categories.

…

In fact, the house negro who is seen as culturally Black is more dangerous because they present with an aura of authenticity. The rapper Lil Wayne is a case in point: he may have started in the field, but rose firmly into the house, even taking the step of endorsing Donald Trump. He rose to prominence by cooning, presenting the hyper-masculine stereotype of the Black macho man that many White audiences wish to consume. Ever since Niggaz Wit Attitudes (N.W.A.) burst out of Compton, there has been a tried and tested blueprint for cooning your way into the house. Before you object too strongly, what else could you call Lil Wayne rapping the words ‘I whip it like a slave’, other than a coon show?

…

I am not blaming Obama for his failure to address the problems of Black people. If he had promised us anything then he would never would have been elected. If he had tried to fight for any substantive reforms while in office he would probably be dead. ,,, The primary function of the president is to maintain the racist status quo, to both be defined by and feed the psychosis of Whiteness. Obama couldn’t be a Black president and had no choice but to contort himself to fit into the role….

…..

He and Michelle started how they meant to go on, by immediately visiting billionaire Richard Branson’s Caribbean island for some decadent relief. Since then they have settled into their lives as a celebrity power couple. In his role as wise old sage, Obama feels free to provide unrequested advice to activists about maintaining the racist status quo. At the end of 2020 he was criticized when he tried to lecture activists calling to ‘defund the police’, warning them that they might have ‘snappy slogans’, but these were bad politics as they risked alienating people.34 It would be easy to write off Obama and his post-presidential celebrity and allow him to settle in as the Uncle (Tom) of the nation. But there is a deeper lesson to be learned from the case of Obama. He didn’t sell out; he never made any promises. He isn’t an Uncle Tom because he never pretended to represent the Black population. Credit to him for creating a whole new category of Black political identity: the White House negro, someone who danced, cooned, sang, shucked and jived all the way to the presidency.

The Uncle Tom Leader, to Andrews, is a figure who has credibility and influence among black people and presents himself as dedicated to black interests while actually leading in a way that supports white supremacy. His examples are Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. He writes,

The Uncle Tom persona has to be credible enough for at least some Black people to fall for their charms. The person Malcolm X most frequently labelled a ‘modern day Uncle Tom’36 was none other than Martin Luther King, who no one could accuse of cooning. I’m sure Malcolm would have seen King as a house negro, with his relative privilege and strong belief that the United States could be redeemed, but he must have had enough of the field and rebellion in him to ignite the masses. Malcolm saw King as a Tom precisely because of this leadership, that he could lead Black Americans to march straight down the cul-de-sac of token integration. Malcolm X wasn’t questioning King’s Blackness, he was challenging how he used it to mislead the people.

…

Mandela was honest enough to admit that he sold out the revolutionary struggle in his own autobiography, where he explains that he unilaterally negotiated with the enemy and spent the last years of his incarceration under house arrest with his family…I spent time in South Africa a few years after Apartheid and visited again twenty years later. Not even the psychosis of Whiteness should be able to prevent anyone from seeing how much of a failure the African National Congress (ANC)’s South Africa is. The Black poverty rate is over 50 per cent (compared to less than 1 per cent for Whites),39 murders have risen to over 20,000 annually, and corrupt leaders and corporations are bleeding the country dry…. The post-Apartheid settlement was designed in the same image as the so-called decolonization on the rest of the continent. It was only a hallucination of Black political power while White domination of the economy has been maintained. Mandela was the piper who led the nation happily singing to its doom. Mandela has a much better reputation than other Uncle Tom African leaders like Mobutu, who made no effort to hide his theft of billions from the Congo. Or Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria, who engineered the looting of over one billion dollars from his country in a single transaction.41 But Mandela was more successful at doing the master’s bidding than the rest, because after he was elected in 1994 he was pivotal in cooling down the country most ripe for revolution on the continent.

To Andrews, then, there is no legitimate way to dissent from his conception of a collective psychosis of whiteness which requires a black revolution. If you don’t believe you live in one (even if you accept that racism still exists and needs addressing) and thrive within society finding common ground and a sense of shared national identity with white people, you are a ‘house negro’, benefitting from class privilege and betraying authentic black people. If your black identity is important to you and evident in your life but it is not radically revolutionary and racially segregationist and white people don’t universally hate it, you are ‘cooning’ to achieve success. If you dedicate your life to overcoming racism and lead others in that endeavour but your end goal is reform, unification and post-racialism rather than revolution, black nationalism and separatism, you are an ‘Uncle Tom’.

Andrews views are particularly extreme and I doubt that they will gain much support, especially as the only three people who seem to pass his intense purity test - Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and Derrick Bell - are all dead. I doubt that Mehdi Hasan or African, Caribbean and Asian Lawyers for Justice would endorse such radical separatism. Nevertheless, the notion that all people of racial minority are morally obliged to subscribe to one worldview and eschew their equal right with white people to be ideologically diverse individuals with agency and participate freely in public discourse from any position they hold appears to be growing. The beliefs and values of my black and brown countrymen and women are being subjected particularly to racially essentialist moral policing often accompanied by vile racial slurs. Again.

All Brits should be alert to this and object to it consistently especially if the individual being constrained or abused is someone we strongly disagree with and even heartily dislike. Do not be cowed from doing so if the individual doing the policing or abusing is also black or brown. That is irrelevant. None of this nonsense.

We are all qualified to see when somebody is being told what they should think because of their race or subjected to abusive language historically used to denigrate people of their race and are all qualified to object to this happening in our country. Use the clear, precise explanatory language of Kenan Malik or the powerful dignified reproach of Vernal Scott if you are lost for words. Or find your own way to say “Nobody owes you allegiance to your worldview because of their skin colour and if you respond to them with racial slurs rather than disagreement, you merit no respect.”