Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones But Memes Will Never Hurt You

I get letters...

A reader writes in with a problem. The idea is that the ape meme video the White House shared was the smoking gun that proves, at long last, that Trump is a racist and that ended a long-time friendship. She writes:

“Almost losing a long-time friend over this, she is very rabid about racism aimed at black Americans, her son is half African American (I am Lily white and so is she), and we are having a major war over this when I point out other issues that I think are just as bad about the far left. For example, she doesn’t agree that anti-Semitism is just as bad, and I do.

Anyway, she has TDS, badly now, probably thanks to me. She reacts emotionally to most things, and I don’t.

Do you have any articles about the Obamas pictured as apes in your archive that might give me a better perspective? I already admitted it was awful for Trump to do this (too clinical a statement from me for her taste, really set her off).

I tried to explain that negative black American iconography is equal in badness as negative iconography against jews but she hung up on me.”

The first thing I want to say is that there is no saving the Left. Whatever happens to them, it will have to happen without people like you or me trying to get them to return to any place of sanity. It won’t happen. But with this issue specifically, it comes down to two distinct ways of seeing the world between the Left and the Right.

So one good way to engage in this conversation is to bring up the study published in the Washington Post that said that Liberals dumb down their language when addressing black audiences, and Conservatives don’t.

That means that Liberals see themselves as more intelligent or superior to black people and thus have cast themselves as their saviors. This actually explains a lot of what we’ve lived through in the past ten years.

It’s a hard thing to get used to if you come from the Left because any criticism against black people is considered “racist.” Being called a “racist” to the Left is like being called a witch in 1690s Salem. Not only do many of them believe it to their core, but they also know that they can’t even associate with you if you do not share these beliefs.

I was called a racist way before I ever found my way to Trump. I was called a racist for questioning why Derek Chauvin would have committed murder with all of those cameras trained on him. Obviously, he didn’t think he was murdering George Floyd.

I was called a racist for defending the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Green Book against charges of racism. These accusations flew around online and got so bad that my friends began to slowly back away from me, as though I wasn’t the same person they’d known all of these years, but that I was a “racist.” They still believe that.

I voted for Trump for very specific reasons. The first was the lawfare against him, which I found dangerous to our democracy. The second was “gender affirming care” for minor children. But what I know for sure about Trump now is that he isn’t a racist. He tends to treat everyone equally, as most people on the Right do.

As to the meme specifically, yes, it was sloppy and wrong to post it, and wrong not to yank it immediately, but Trump also knows there is nothing he can say or do that will change their minds.

A lot of people on the Right think memes like that are funny. Not because they’re racists, but just because they don’t have the same protective layer as people on the Left do. They aren’t looking around and seeing “racists” everywhere.

Your friend doesn’t care so much about the meme. What she cares about is having you share her perspective, because it means you are in the same tribe. If you don’t believe the media narratives that Trump is a racist and Elon is a Nazi, then you can’t be in the same tribe because you do not believe the same fundamental things.

Of course, it’s racist to compare black people to apes or chimps. That was the dehumanizing propaganda that spread after the Civil War. The same kind of propaganda was spread about Jews in Germany and for the same reasons: it dehumanizes them so that anything can be done to them, and no one will say a thing about it.

Both things can be true: The maker of the meme just thought it would be funny to put it in the cartoon, but it is racist. On the American Left, however, there is never any forgiving something like that. But I always think intent matters, and I don’t believe Trump intended to post that meme.

What I’ve learned over the past ten years is to give people the benefit of the doubt, since I can’t know what is in their minds and hearts. If they come out and say who they are many times over (Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens), then I feel more comfortable passing judgment on them.

In the end, I don’t think it really moved the needle much. People who thought Trump was a racist still think he’s a racist (although by now, that’s nothing compared to other things they’ve called him), and people who don’t still don’t.

I’m sorry about your friend. It has happened to me many times. Overall, we all have to learn how to be more resilient. Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck, and these people think a meme is worse. I don’t know how to fix that.