I Watched a Racist Kill Her Business on Facebook
By: Linda Caroll
Tags: Psychology, History, Culture, Racism, Hate

This morning, I watched a woman kill her family’s business on Facebook. When her dad jumped in to defend her, I knew it was bad.

When the whole mess jumped to Reddit, I knew they were doomed.

Sure enough. Boycott, boycott, pass it on, shared, shared, yup — not shopping there anymore. Hundreds of posts. So many angry people.

All because some racist didn’t like Phyllis’s shirt.

Phyllis’s Shirt…

When Phyllis was 6, her granny took her shopping for a new shirt. She was a big girl now, Granny said. Starting school the next day.

Her little eyes lit up when she saw it.

It was bright orange and had ties at the front.

“It was so bright and exciting,” she would say later.

Just like she felt to be starting school.

The next day, Granny took her to school in that orange shirt.

After Granny left, some grown ups came and forcibly stripped off her clothes. They took her new orange shirt. She was crying and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t give it back.

She would wear the uniform, she promised. But she wanted her shirt back. It was hers, she said. From Granny.

She was 6 years old.

As their clothes were pulled off and their possessions taken away, all the little children were crying. No one cared. No one came.

Phyllis never got to wear that shirt again.

They never gave it back.

That was the experience of thousands of little children in residential schools across America, Canada, Britain, Australia and more.

“Kill the Indian to save the man”

That was the motto of residential schools that started in America and swept across Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and more.

Systematic destruction of Native culture, language and family under the guise of education.

You will be assimilated was the message. Just like The Borg on Star Trek, except it wasn’t fiction. It was children. Crying little children.

Parents who resisted sending their kids were punished. First, food rations were withheld. If that failed, fathers were put in jail. For “refusing” their children an education.

Sometimes, law enforcement took the children at gunpoint.

Occasionally, children were sent willingly. It was the only way they could get an education. They were barred from public schools because of racism.

It went on for decades. According to the Native American Rights Fund, there were still 60,000 Native children in residential schools in 1973. The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996.

Phyllis finds her shirt…

In grade 8, age 13, Phyllis had a baby. She named him Jeremy.

She was terrified. She didn’t know what it meant to be a mother. Where would she have learned? None of her family had ever been mothered.

Her mother and grandmother had been put in residential schools too.

To learn how to be white.

For years, the color orange made her depressed.

That’s how trauma works. Triggers.

You know? Triggers.

Health care professionals say there is a direct relation between the trauma experienced in residential schools and high rates of depression, PTSD, addiction and suicide among boarding school survivors and their families.

Phyllis wasn’t going down that easy.

Can’t every momma bear relate?

So she started talking. Giving speeches.

In 2013, orange shirt day was launched.

It was so simple. Every year on September 30, people would be invited to wear an orange shirt. To remember the kids who were traumatized in those schools. To protest and show solidarity against racism.

Stop indoctrinating our children…

That’s what the angry white woman yelled. Protesting that her childrens’ school taught them about orange shirt day, how dare they!

She was angry. So angry. That they dared explain what orange shirt day meant. That they dared invite the kids to wear orange shirts to school if they want to.

If they want to, mind you. Not mandatory. Voluntary.

It wasn’t enough to send her kids to school in any other color. Or keep them home if she wanted to. That wasn’t enough.

No. She had to get on Facebook and scream about indoctrination and left wing identity politics, blabbity blab, because how dare they? How dare they impose politics on her children? That is not what school is for.

I laughed at that. Really? School shouldn’t teach history? Who should, then? Her? Racist white people who would rather keep on hating?

Only a racist could get so bent over a shirt.

Fact of the matter is, only a person who has never experienced the racist injustice doled out to marginalized groups could take that position.

Entitled white people. Just like her.

If she’d ever spent even one day crippled under the hate people like her dole out, I doubt her constitution could take it for a day, much less a life.

Their manager tried to do damage control. The crowd wasn’t having it.

No, no, that’s not the position of the ownership, the manager pleaded.

Yes it is, the crowd chanted. That’s exactly who you are.

Her Daddy is the president and he backed her up.

Don’t bother deleting it, we screen-capped. Yay internet.

And I have to wonder if that was the first time they experienced being on the receiving end of blind hatred and judgement. Seems to me people like her are far more used to doling it out than being on the receiving end.

There was an epiphany there, if they’d chosen to receive it. They didn’t.

Of course. Racists seldom learn those lessons. That’s kind of how privilege works. There is none so blind as he who will not see.