Tackling Nazis is Easy — Try Tackling White Supremacy In Yourself

Tauriq Moosa
Aug 25, 2017 · 5 min read
(Image credit: Fibonacci Blue/Flickr)

Denouncing Nazis is easy: they’re the literal villains of history. They’re the least controversial targets of opposition that’s ever existed. It’s not even a matter of morality, so much as tautology, to say Nazis are bad. So when they go marching in American streets in 2017, there’s nothing I want to hear less than a white person’s pride in opposing the throbbing pustules of toxic white grievance protruding from the cracks of what America calls its democracy. Charlottesville was only a “wake up call” to those who’ve been asleep. This doesn’t diminish the impact of the events themselves: the marches, the horror, the fear I feel as a person of colour for myself, my family, my friends (yes, even here in S. Africa where racists feel emboldened by such events), nor the domestic terrorist act committed against an American citizen on American soil for exercising her First Amendment Rights*. Charlottesville is, if anything, the small eyepiece of a telescope, through which white people can gaze at the bigger problem so many of us have been pointing to for these past few months.

While I felt a swelling of hope seeing the huge numbers of people putting their bodies on the line, opposing and calling out these organised racists, I’m concerned the winds in some white people’s sails will only go so far. Nazis are a problem. But for people of colour like myself, we already know to isolate ourselves from Nazis. Everyone — except the US President — knows Nazis are bad. But POC already won’t work with Nazis, be employed by Nazis, study under Nazis, serve Nazis.

The bigger problem is white people who go no further in tackling racism than focusing on Nazis. White people should be in a constant state of engagement with themselves and those around them in terms of the history of colonialism — i.e. white people’s history — and the current reality of white privilege.

Racism is white people’s problem that people of colour bear the brunt of. It is not our job to solve, it’s our obligation to endure and fight back.


I don’t want to hear calls for moderation or civility. I want to hear about fucking change. You can be civil in your tone and your conversations; you can be measured in your delivery and your writing. But injustice isn’t retracted through kindness. For example, the image of a colour-blind Dr King is the toothless forgery threaded together out of white people’s comfort, which they drape around themselves and call themselves “good”. They sing lullabies of Nelson Mandela quotations from pastel backgrounds with drawn flowers, ignoring that the man supported armed struggle against monuments to white supremacy and was declared a terrorist by the horrific apartheid government.

The President of America spread blame on a canvas called denial and now some white people want to frame that image and call it reasonable.

I don’t want to hear about white people’s civility. That’s code for stagnation, of doing nothing within yourself, of not changing the dynamics around you to fix the broken world that kills young black men, that maintains the current hierarchies and poisoned status quo, that emboldens racists even here in South Africa to say “Yes.”

Don’t come to me saying Nazis are bad. Come to me when you call out those around you, when you spend your time tackling racist systems rather than directing your anger at those opposing racism. Come to me when you spend more time reading black writers’ opinions, instead of simply cradling your boring grief about brown people “tearing up the past” and calling for decolonisation. My family and friends suffered through white rage — I get death threats and images of nooses regularly. Come to me when your white rage isn’t fucking aligning with my enemies’ to also be against people of colour and is, instead, raging against the system that continues to hate brown and black people.

White people, especially American white people, have no laws targeting them, no history of oppression, no mass incarceration, no massacre by police — and yet they march as if the statues of dead racists will break open their crusted eyes and slouch toward Washington to be born. As if a Confederate monument isn’t already installed in the American Cabinet and runs the fucking US Justice Department. As if white people don’t control both Houses of Congress and the goddamn Executive branch of the US government.

I do not want white people to be comfortable because comfort brings with it stagnation and complacency with the status quo. Only those at the top, those with privilege, can afford to sink back into the world, like an old mattress that’s already shaped itself to you. Most can’t. What are you doing with your rage? Against whom are you directing it? Are you a white person angry that black people are too loud, too “radical”? Have you read about what changes the world for the better? Have you considered people of colour are, at worst, afraid and, at best, unconcerned about your boring as hell white rage? That, maybe, just maybe, people of colour deal enough with white rage from avowed racists that we don’t need it from those who proclaim to support us? Your discomfort is not our problem, it’s yours and no one said change was easy or friendly.

Do you think your anger is helping? Do you think maybe, just maybe, you don’t know enough, that you don’t live in a world where complex systems are designed over centuries to hurt and harm you?

Have rage. Be angry. I want you angry. I want you unsettled. Then use your white privilege to speak out against racist systems, speak out against other white people and confront that white person in the mirror, too. That’s what will help change the world, not merely raging against the alt-right.

But please: don’t stop that either. Fuck those guys.

* which the American President has only commented on to boast about his whine — sorry, wine estate.

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Tauriq Moosa

Written by

Opinion writer. Law student. Bane of nerds. @tauriqmoosa

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