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Bigoted Commentators Online – Anonymity Opens Gates to Racism

Alex Constantine - November 19, 2010

Also see:  "IKA former Grand Titan Jarred Hensley behind Facebook vandalism"
"Neo-Nazi site charged over reader comment"

Profile of a racist troll: " ... In a response to a Gazette e-mail ... he said he came to the United States in the late 1950s and has worked as a police officer and for the federal government around the world in military and civilian intelligence. ... "

By Julie Mack
MLive | November 13, 2010

00untitled1 - Bigoted Commentators Online - Anonymity Opens Gates to RacismKALAMAZOO — His online handle is Marsxiv. That’s all online readers know, other than the fact that Marsxiv is a strong believer in white supremacy.

“White Americas (sic) still mistakenly expects blacks in America to act, behave, think, live and work like white people, which can never happen,” wrote Marsxiv in a recent post on mlive.com, the website where stories from the Kalamazoo Gazette and seven affiliated news organizations in Michigan are posted.

“The worst mistake made by the US Government was the passing of the ... Civil Rights Act,” he wrote in another post.

At a time when strident racism has been largely deemed socially unacceptable, unashamed bigotry thrives in the comment sections of Internet websites. Internet anonymity has removed one of the strongest barriers to incivility and breeds the type of language that otherwise would ruin reputations and end careers.

Do these comments reflect a reversal of racial progress? Is that progress an illusion while racism thrives underground? What kind of harm are such statements causing? Could there be any value in such venting? And what, if anything, should a free society do about it?

“A lot of people are angry and they’re looking for a venue to vent,” said TImothy Ready, head of Western Michigan University’s Lewis Walker Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnic Relations.

“They can’t say these things in polite company anymore. It’s not socially acceptable,” Ready said. “But give people an opportunity to say whatever they want anonymously, and they’re going to have at it.” ...

So what types of people are behind anonymous online attacks? The white homeowner who smiles at his black neighbor? Minorities trying to make whites look bad? People of any race just looking for a thrill?

In a response to a Gazette e-mail asking Marsxiv to describe himself, he said he was born in a Lebensborn, which were maternity homes set up in Nazi Germany for mothers and children who were deemed to be racially pure Aryans. Both his father and grandfather were part of the Nazi SS, he claimed.

He said he came to the United States in the late 1950s and has worked as a police officer and for the federal government around the world in military and civilian intelligence.

“I don’t consider myself a racist, but a realist that integration doesn’t work and that Forced racial integration is an institutional idea that was FORCED on America beginning in 1964 (but started in preparation long before) to placate non-whites in America and Nothing more,” he wrote.

More of what he wrote isn’t suitable for publication in print, but it continued in the same vein.

Don Burdick, the Barry County resident, has similar views. In a recent five-page letter, he wrote that “other races cannot comprehend freedom and liberty because of their slave mentality and/or predisposition to socialism and the Antichrist. ...”

Some of what he wrote also can’t be published.

In an interview, Burdick said he’s “absolutely not” a white supremacist.

“I’m more of a separatist,” he said. “According to the Holy Scriptures, God commands us to remain separate, and society kind of thumbs their nose at those directives. ... When we intermingle, we destroy God’s work.”

Burdick said it’s particularly hard for white males to offer their uncensored views of the world: “White males are the most discriminated group today,” he said. “We used to be in the majority.”

As Burdick’s comments suggest, Ready of WMU theorizes that many of the racist comments online come from older white men who are dismayed by the demographic changes and cultural shifts in America over the past few decades — changes underscored by the recent economic downturn.

“Their wages have gone down dramatically,” said TImothy Ready, head of Western Michigan University’s Lewis Walker Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnic Relations. . “For many white men, there’s a feeling of major loss of opportunity and status.”

The irony, said he and Jaime Grant, executive director of Kalamazoo College’s Center for Social Justice, is that those white men are feeling the same sort of anxiety as people of color.

“A lot of people who are battling for the scraps at the bottom of the barrel feel the other people battling for those scraps are the problem,” Grant said. “Folks impacted by structural inequalities tend to blame others. That’s what you see in these forums.”

http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2010/11/bigotry_finds_a_home_online_an.html
http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2010/11/are_online_commenters_primaril.html

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