Being racist is not being crazy, people.

In class today we were talking about all of these cases of race-infused violence in the south during the Civil Rights Movement, and Emmett Till came up. And of course we talked about how brutal his murder was - he was beaten, shot in the head, drowned, one of his eyes was gouged out. There was a quiet in the room as we all took in the sheer amount of superfluous physical violence put upon him and everyone from the black kids to the brown kids to the white kids could feel it.

So of course this white guy has to say that those murderers must have been “psychopaths” and “crazy,” because obviously only mentally deficient people would be so cruel as to beat a black kid to death over allegedly flirting with a white woman. And then a few of the other white people in the room were like, “Yeah, they must have been crazy, like serial killers are,” and suddenly an invisible white angel had appeared in the room to bask the white people in a beautiful white glow of non-white-guilt as they sighed a sigh of relief and the painful things that happened to Emmett Till or Medgar Evans or James Chaney suddenly became less painful because the white guys who did it must have just been crazy. God-forbid they were actually perfectly sane and were just hellbent on exerting the racial hierarchy and upholding a racist status quo.

Yo, for real, calling people who engage in violent acts of white supremacy or any kind of oppressive dominance are not akin to people who would be classified as “crazy.” People are drawn to think things like that because it allows any white person to separate themselves from their role in white supremacy and just make racism into something that is only perpetuated by individuals and not toxic and oppressive culture.