Racism is a funny thing. Not funny ha-ha. Well, sometimes it is. Who doesn’t like a good potato famine joke? Sometimes racism is funny, but not this time. This time it’s funny in a strange, confusing and completely insane/inane way.

You see, there exists a breed of people out there in the long grass of the internet that attempt to hide themselves as anti-racist. They do seem to in fact promote segregation, cultural imperialism, inherited sin, prejudice and racial profiling. These people don’t wear white hoods, they don’t burn crosses, wear swastikas or beat up Muslims. They go by the name of social justice warriors.

A bingo card for the writing of social justice warriors ©kharmii

If you don’t have a Tumblr account, then you may very well have gotten by in life to this point only hearing the vaguest whispers of these crusaders of hypocrisy. They do tend to prefer the echo chamber of their own little world consisting of hashtags, reblogs and trigger warnings. In this online gated community they can pat each other on the back and engage in a circle-jerk of biblical proportions.

Social justice warriors are the type of people who demand that if you are “white” – a generic term if ever there was one – you are guilty of every sin to have been committed by mankind. You are, by having low levels of melanin, a racist by the logic of these social justice warriors. Never mind the variances of what constitutes “white” culture. German, English, Irish, French or Polish? Nope. Just “white” despite there being no commonly accepted sociological or biological standard for “white”. Is that racism? Not according to the social justice warriors. They say the dictionary is wrong.

Going one step further, a particularly insidious “reverse racist” recently claimed “whiteness is an illness”. If that’s, doesn’t that make someone who belittles someone with that illness an “ableist”? In the mind of social justice warriors, that’s the logic of the patriarchy.

Anything that disagrees with the dogma of social justice warriors is patriarchal racism. You see, facts and history do not matter. Only feelings matter to social justice warriors.

“White” nations have been guilty of some terrible crimes in the past, from the colonial era and apartheid to the Transatlantic slave trade and the Holocaust. Oh wait, the Holocaust doesn’t count to some social justice warriors because the near 6 million Jews, 2 million Soviet POW’s and 2 million Poles had “white privilege!” That also discounts the Penal Laws and Plantation of Ireland and the Holodomor in the Ukraine, as these are “white” nations.

Many social justice warriors, you see, feel the need to fight for the group they call people of colour (POC). That in itself, is a racist term. It’s simply a modernized version of “coloureds”. So all non-whites are one group? This lumps the vast majority of the world’s population into one category and places the label of victim on them.

It treats non-European ethnic and cultural groups as a curiosity, something to be wrapped in the softest of cotton to protect them from the awful world of the “white man”.

And if you are a non-racist, average “white” person who appreciates other cultures, you are guilty of “cultural appropriation”. That’s right, the spread of ideas, belief systems and cultures is now a racist act. Somehow. So before you listen to Coltrane, practice yoga and enjoy some sushi, remember that you are apparently committing a racist act.

There is another group who think the same way, only instead of “cultural appropriation” they call it being a “race traitor”. These people are neo-Nazis and often frequent white supremacist websites like Stormfront. Their ideology is very much that you should keep your whites and colours separate, as you don’t want them running.

Their ideology is worryingly similar to that of social justice warriors, leading to the popular Reddit game: “Stormfront or Social Justice Warriors”.

These social justice warriors are mostly “white”, middle class and American individuals whose sense misguided outrage and closeted racism drives them to remove from very varied groups of peoples every sense of agency and identity. Many even subscribe to the “One Drop Rule”, meaning you can claim membership of a group of “POC” if you have even the slightest suggestion of having someone in your family tree that may have possibly been a “person of colour”.

Don’t worry, no one will check if you do or not. Ignore also the fact that this in itself is a racist concept that fosters the idea of racial purity and the importance of bloodline.

This mindset is damaged one. It is utterly divorced from reality, and ignores the progress and change humanity has made over the years. Yes there are still problems, racial tension and inequalities in a lot of nations. Equality is not quite there yet.

However, these social justice warriors don’t want social justice. They want a fight. They want an easy fight that can be fought from the comfort of their keyboards and the safety of suburbia. They group people according to the colour of their skin and encourage segregation and hate.

The separation of people that the social justice warriors push and screech for does nothing to further the destruction of racism. It just gives it a breeding ground.