The White Supremacist and I
Tags: White Supremacy, Interracial Relationships, Us Military, Racism, Marine Corps

The White Supremacist and I

A memoir of a racist ex-boyfriend, and a probing into the world that created him

Photo source: Edgypatriots.com

When I was 17, I became close friends with a boy from my high school — I will call him Ben. In certain respects, Ben was your typical angsty white American teenager — in his Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt he would riff Victor Wooten basslines, smoke weed, and not do his homework. He grew up in a deeply conservative family, who transferred him from our public high school to a military academy during our junior year, believing that he needed tough discipline to uproot his uncouth, un-Christian-like behavior. It was only after he had transferred that we began talking regularly over instant messaging. We would talk about our shared love of classic rock and the guitar and wanted to meet up sometime to jam together. Indeed we eventually ended up hanging out, and not too long after, began dating.

It was during our very first meet up at a coffee shop that he told me he wanted to serve his country and had recently enlisted in the Marine Corps. Later on in our relationship he would reveal the nature of how he wanted to carry out his service. The Military Occupational Specialty or “MOS”, is a categorizing system whereby each Marine gets a 4-digit code defining their specific occupation. Ben would repeatedly mention how badly he wanted “MOS 0311”, which would designate him as a rifleman within the infantry. MOS 0311 would allow Ben to, as he put it, “kill hajjis”. ‘Hajji’ is an honorific term for one who has completed the Hajj to Mecca that had been co-opted by the US military to degradingly refer to someone of Middle Eastern descent. The United States’ everlasting occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and blatant Islamophobia has long since been normalized, but the military specifically indoctrinated service members to dehumanize Muslims as backwards terrorists who deserved to be killed with no empathy. Myself indoctrinated by whitewashed history textbooks and propagandized Hollywood war films, I bought into the idea that serving tours on foreign soil was an honorable and valorous pursuit, not an Islamophobic, imperialist one. Hearing Ben’s tear-jerking stories of what it meant to receive an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, the emblem Marines receive upon completing their grueling 13-week recruit training, tugged at my colonized heart.

I remember Ben as being a serious person. He didn’t laugh or smile much, he wasn’t easily amused like I was. In looking back, I realize that the only humor Ben seemed to have was racist. His racism revealed itself in his side comments, jokes, and “likes” on Facebook. One of the first YouTube videos he shared with me was one of a comedian self-dubbed as “The Amazing Racist”. He once showed me a meme of an ornate palace from the Roman Empire juxtaposed with a modern African village, suggesting the inferiority of the latter in its relative simplicity. He once saw a picture of a few of my Black friends and I hanging out in my basement and asked why I had “the projects” in my house. He once casually joked that white people were the superior race. These perverse attempts at “comedy” viscerally disturbed me, and I would call him out. Still, he didn’t change. Still, I stayed.

One day Ben and I were talking on the phone, and he told me that he “didn’t even see me as Indian” — to put it in his exact words: “I don’t know, you’re just white to me”. Imagine that — he rejected my brownness so much so that he gaslighted himself into seeing me as a white person. As someone who had never felt any agency as a brown woman, I wasn’t outraged by this comment, I interpreted it to be a compliment. And while I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it, I recall subconsciously thinking that it must have meant something good, something positive. In a world in which many of my Indian brethren sought after “proximity to whiteness”, white was right, and brown was just alright. Not only just right, white was also beautiful, as my community had led me to believe, too. Surely I must have been beautiful if I was “white” enough for Ben, whatever that even meant.

I had bought into the ugly myth of white supremacy and hadn’t even realized it. A woefully uncritical mind like mine was easily able to identify and call out his overt racism in the form of crass YouTube videos, memes, and jokes about my friends, but the more insidious racism slithered past and escaped me. Insidious racism, I would later come to realize, was far more dangerous. Insidious racism — through its wars on “drugs” and “terror”, relentless pursuit of “law and order”, and promotion of rugged individualism by “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” — was far more often the structural kind.

To someone deeply tranced within the myth that is white supremacy, Ben might not have been all bad, because he had redeemable moments that might allow him to be a person worth redeeming. Sure, he had the Confederate flag pinned on his dorm room wall, but he once rebuked his mother for telling him she “didn’t want brown grandchildren”. Sure, he would act uncomfortable every time we were in a setting with predominantly people of color, but he rejected his grandfather’s disapproval of interracial relationships. Sure, he would utter racial slurs on occasion, but he once decried the ridiculousness of “white pride”. Might this person be worth salvaging?