When You Argue With a White Supremacist, You Can Never Be Right

I recall being indoctrinated with the tactic of mockery. White supremacists can never be wrong. They can never look weak. They can never admit there’s something they didn’t know. If they’re caught by surprise, they immediately default to, “Well, that was impossible to predict. That was an act of God.”If anyone attempts to challenge them on this, they perceive it as a personal attack and respond with violence or mockery.My father was so good at mockery that he rarely had to resort to violence. Though violence, too, was part of his arsenal. He used his physicality to get my mother and me to do what he wanted. He made himself large and cornered us against the wall with his chest, always while wearing a smirk as if his actions were nothing more than a harmless joke.Harmless to him. Much of our existence entailed his long-winded lectures about how we were required to see things from his point of view. There was no other point of view. Our duty in life consisted of navigating the long path so that we could see everything as he did. Yet, we lived beneath the implication that we would never inherit his power.The task he attempted to impose on us took great effort and offered no reward. Naturally he reached for the tactic of violence. He raised both his voice and his hand.All that was commonplace. I learned to live beneath that ever present threat. You wouldn’t think a person in that situation would manifest defiance. But you have to remember that my maturity remained incomplete. Even now, at age 50, I have only a dim understanding of what I went through. I knew that he modeled defiance and often earned laughs for his boasting, so I mimicked that behavior.This is why the ideology of white supremacy always crumbles. It’s filled with inherent contradictions. My father often complained that nobody ever showed him “any respect.” But I honestly didn’t know what that meant. He never bothered to model it. He considered himself intelligent, but he also openly wondered why I didn’t know things he’d deliberately prevented me from observing.We could never be right. Only he could be right. This mentality serves you in the short term. It makes you feel powerful. You turn every learning opportunity into a clown show at the expense of the educated person in the room.When you think a laugh justifies everything, you can persist in this worldview. But as the years go by other people advance while you remain defiantly ignorant, and eventually it becomes clear to everyone that the world has passed you by.It becomes clear to everyone, that is, except the white supremacist.I remember sitting in the warehouse with a work crew on a break. When I was stuck doing manual labor, I always tried to get a conversation started. When people got caught up in the conversation, it extended the break. That got us closer to the end of the work day without having to break our muscles and our bodies.Scrambling for something to talk about, I churned up an oddity about the properties of light. “Isn’t it odd,” I said, “that when you combine all the colors of light into a single beam, it’s white. However, if you take color in the form of paint and mix it all together you end up with black?”In my foolishness, I posed this question to a bunch of workers my dad had picked up from the halfway house for the day. Every single one of them belonged to the class of boys that burned textbooks rather than read them. Some might suggest that on an unconscious level I’d been deliberately trying to provoke them.I was rubbing education and intellect into their faces.Though, I honestly find the properties of light to be interesting. I also hoped the gathering would recognize my attempts to draw my father into conversation so that our work time might be shorted.My surprise came when I found myself attacked not by the pack of ruffians and strangers, but by my own father.“What do you mean when you mix light together you get white?” he said with a sneer. A few of the men close to him began to chuckle and I knew I was in trouble. He was addicted to laughter, and if it meant sacrificing me to get more, he’d gladly do so.“Like a prism,” I replied. “You can separate a white beam of light into different colors, like Newton.”“A beam of light isn’t white,” he said, sneering again. More laughs.“It’s defined as white. The color that comes out of the sun.”“The sun is yellow,” my dad said again. I recognized that the face of the bully had been called to his features. He physically transformed when he became angry. His eyebrows became bushier. His body began to hulk. He sneered when he talked and pretended he didn’t even notice the laughter even though I could tell all his senses were fixated only on that.It felt, now, that he was deliberately trying to misunderstand what I was saying. He was deliberately making a mockery of the innocent point I was trying to make. I should have said forget it. But my pride had been drawn into the conflict and I wasn’t mature enough to free myself from the trap.“I’m talking about the difference between mixing color in the form of light and mixing color in the form of paint.”“Paint gets its color from light,” dad said, and that brought an enormous chuckle. “You’re not making any sense.”“Ah, you’ve inadvertently given me the answer,” I replied. “Paint gets its color from the light that’s absorbed versus what is reflected. When you mix all the colors together all the components of the white light must be absorbed.”Now he was angry. He stood up and threw the remnants of his lunch in the garbage. “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. We all knew we had to get back up and get to work.I knew I had to revert into camouflage mode. In that moment, my father had declared me an outcast. I knew I’d become a target of scorn. It’s a dangerous place to be.I’d been attempting to avoid this result because I’d lived my whole life within the energy of cruel people scheming to understand which person they could sacrifice for a laugh. Right now, it appeared to be me. It was in times like these that somebody might catch your foot as you walked, or shove you into a wall.I hung back, not knowing if the strangers that my father had inexplicably selected as his allies were about to fall upon me. I kept my head down, I said nothing, and we loaded back into the trucks to go out into the field.That evening we had to take a trip together to get some supplies. It was just him and me in the car. It took an hour to get there and an hour to get back. We didn’t say a single word to each other for the entire drive.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI’m so happy you’re here, and I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe