The Socially Acceptable Bad People, and How to Foil Them

There’s a large and comfortable space, right in the middle of “Western” social norms, where you can be an absolutely shitty person and be perfectly socially acceptable, normative even. If you’re white, automatically, and being cishet and wealthy doesn’t hurt. You can be racist, transphobic, homophobic, pro-cop, and love Capitalism and not lose a single social privilege or even lose access to most social spaces. In fact it will grant you access to spaces and privileges you wouldn’t otherwise have.

That’s because Western society is a white supremacist patriarchal imperial Capitalist construct that only tolerates women, non-white people, gay or trans people, etc, if they throw other marginalized people under the bus and pay homage to the root of the power system: the White Cishet Capitalist Male Patriarch. It extends no permanent power but it negotiates the ability to be power-adjacent so long as it serves the dominant systemic interests.

Capitalism, so long as it is the system we live under, reproduces itself for free in this way, on the backs of those it takes from. It socially reproduces and enforces its interests in this way. Let’s keep an eye out for these dead-eyed dynamics in our social groups and look for those being abused by those dynamics. And then disrupt them, and normalize the disruption.