Back from BLM Re-Education Camp ...

It’s good to be home again.  And to be so enlightened.

I haven’t gotten my Participation Certificate yet, but I feel pretty good about the week I spent at BLM’s Re-Education Camp.  I learned so much. I’m certainly a better person now. 

Frankly, my first impression was that I had arrived in the wrong place.

I expected most people at a BLM camp to be black, or as the media have recently decided Black (with a capital B).  But most of the people there were White. (See, I learned.)

Like really White.  Blindingly White.  Whiter than me, by far.  Like so White they were almost a light blue. Unhealthy looking, too, like shoppers in a health-food store.

My first thought was they probably never spent much time outside.  They probably never did anything more strenuous than texting.  Or maybe walking up the stairs from their mom’s basement to get money from her purse to pay the Domino’s or Grub Hub delivery person.    

But here they were, in all their pale glory. In their black (Black?) T-shirt with the screen-printed Black Power Fist or Black Lives Matter text they bought online with mom’s credit card.  Ready to learn how to be taken seriously. Ready to discover how they could fit in with racial and economic groups that normally terrify them, and maybe routinely shook them down for their lunch money.  Ready to take on “The Man” to fight for racial justice, whatever that was.

And maybe, just maybe, get laid.  Because, honestly, that’s the hope of a lot of adolescent and socially awkward Whites marching in protests. If you’re an unattractive White string bean or a porker you may think a protest could be your best shot at getting laid without having to pay for it. Especially when you’re wearing a face mask that hides your zits.  

Anyway, I digress.  I only brought that up because most of the Whites, male or female or somewhere in between, in camp didn’t look like they’d ever had sex with a real person other than themselves, or were likely to anytime soon.   

But back to my studies.  My first course was Sloganeering.

It was taught by a self-described “radical Marxist transvestite self-loathing anti-Semite atheist” (born as Jane White to a bourgeois WASP family in New Jersey) now listed on the course outline as Patrice Lumumba Kanesha Rosenstein-Castro-Guevara-Rivera.

Or just “Pat” for short because that was an appropriately gender-fluid name.

Pat rejected such patriarchal pronouns as he/she, him/her, his/hers, and used only they/their to describe themselves (Pat).  Yeah, it got a little confusing at times. But most of us in their class eventually got the hang of it. We used first names a lot. 

I often wondered how this gender-neutral thing would work in countries with languages where ordinary inanimate items have a male or female gender and verbs to match. I never brought this up in class because Pat had a tendency to punish anyone who was overthinking. 

Anyway, about Sloganeering.  The theory behind it all is that the slogan must be offensive enough that media types won’t be able to resist it, even if they have to bleep out curse words.  Actually, the more bleeps the better. Listeners could then imagine the worst.   

Yet it also must be simple enough even a four-year-old, or a teen or adult with the intellect of a four-year-old, can easily remember it, even if they don’t understand it. 

That’s harder than it seems. Most great slogans are short and memorable, like “Pigs in a blanket; Fry ‘em like bacon.”  Easy to remember; hard to forget.  Hard to replicate, too. A classic.     

Next was Situational Protest Tactics, taught by an aging hipster named Moonbeam McDuster (probably a nom-de-guerre).  McDuster was a legend in the protest industry.  He’d managed some of the biggest protests:  fighting voter ID laws, school vouchers, Chick- fil-A store openings, racially insensitive dress codes, gender-specific school restrooms, and – lest we forget – his courageous stand against Subway’s five-dollar-foot-long ripoff.  (It wasn’t a full 12 inches long.)

From him we learned tips on how to prearrange events on social media.  How to blend in with ordinary protestors until the time was right and then working up everyone into a frenzy.

We also learned effective media manipulation techniques.  Like co-opting local politicians, creative taunting, distance spitting, faking an injury, inciting a riot and looting on cue, how to set up a “money shot” (i.e., cop cars on fire; smashing windows) for camera crews, and how to avoid harming media folks once a riot starts. 

Now, perhaps like many others, I’d always wondered why no CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS reporters or camera crews ever got hurt even in the most violent BLM protests. And why the cameras always seem to be at the right place at the right time, too.  The secret, it turns out, is wireless earpieces – you know, like the curly-wire jobs on Secret Service details – linking the media and protest organizers in real time. Who knew? 

In other courses, we also learned that while Black Lives Matter – probably the most – we still needed to convince more White people that everything bad is and has always been their fault. Black poverty. Black illiteracy.  Black unemployment. Black males in prison.   

Because everything is the fault of Whites.  And their legacy of enslaving Blacks.   

The public-school system saw the irrefutable truth in this early on. Lesson plans and textbooks had for decades reflected how slavery shaped American history from the beginning. 

Instead of a proud history as some claimed, America had in fact a shameful past. It included rapes of Black slaves by white masters, lynchings of innocent Blacks, secretly infecting Blacks with syphilis to study its effects, segregation, miscegenation laws, murders of civil rights activists, assassinations of Black leaders like MLK, Jr., and suppression of Black votes and racial discrimination even today. 

There wasn't much else in American history worth noting.   

If it weren't for slavery, America wouldn't be the racist nation it remains today. Nor as rich; that is, just for the Whites. Also because of slavery, Blacks never shared in that prosperity.  

The New York Times and its award-winning 1619 Project spelled it all out.    

Whites in the media and among Democrats in Congress, as well as all Blacks in the House and Senate (except one), agreed.  Blue-state governors and big-city mayors also concurred that Whites were ultimately responsible for everything bad in the country, and especially in their cities, even for Black on Black crime and the high number of Blacks killing other Blacks every day.

Blacks couldn’t be held to the same standards as Whites because Blacks never recovered from their enslavement by Whites.     

It was time for Whites to admit their guilt. And pay up. Not just with money – although that would be nice – but also with perpetual special treatment of Blacks.  Until reparations come through, Blacks should get everything for free – free college, free housing, free guaranteed minimum income, and whatever else they decide – and the right to discriminate as they wish on the basis of race, as just restitution for slavery at the hands of Whites.  Because it’s owed to them.       

That’s what the entire movement is really about.  And why convincing Whites is the struggle.  Many older White people remember reading books years ago that claimed a different view of history.  Not all Whites watch CNN or read The New York Times; some even watch Fox News.

On top of that, older Whites are notoriously stubborn and won’t easily give up the marks of their Whiteness.  Like that “Protestant work ethic” thing.  Their notion that children do better in two-parent households.  Their insistence on personal responsibility.  The high value Whites place on being on time, being polite, and speaking proper English.  Their belief in objective, rational linear thinking; cause and effect relationships; and their reliance on quantitative analysis.

It's so ingrained in Whites we may have to intimidate them until they accept the blame for everything and give up these foolish and oppressive notions of White culture.

Hence, the riots will continue and cities will continue to burn.    

Now, before anyone thinks BLM Re-Education Camp was nothing but hard work, it wasn’t.  There were a lot of games and contests to break up the workload.

The most challenging was the brick toss – especially difficult for a lot of the noodle-armed pasty White guys; frankly, the bigger, heftier White girls embarrassed them. 

The skateboard window smash game – my favorite – had competition between teams.  White team members smashed the windows so their handful of Black team members could race in and steal stuff. We got points for highest number of useless items stolen in a minute or less. 

My team won mainly because we were lucky enough to draw a Michaels craft store as our assigned target, which was, as always, crammed full of completely useless stuff. I’ll admit the teams that drew an ABC liquor store, or even the Dollar Store, got better stuff, but a win is a win. 

And it was about the only time we Whites had a chance to interact with Blacks. Which was nice.  The rest of the time the camp leaders kept us segregated.  

So anyway. It’s good to be back.  Mom and Dad said it’s good to see me again and have me back in their basement.  While I was away, they’d restocked my minifridge with all my favorite juice boxes. They also refilled my supply of my favorite Pop Tarts and bought me a new PlayStation.

Then they asked if I had fun at camp. If I made any new friends there.  And I just snapped. 

Fucking oppressive White people.  Always with the questions.