“Forgive me, I’m a Racist Reformed!"
On ‘loving’, ‘learning’ and ‘growing’
On the evening of the 26th of February 2012, in Sanford, Florida, George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an innocent and unarmed 17-year-old black boy merely visiting his father, who would sooner come to grieve his son than get the chance to see him again. His cries echoed throughout the states, loud enough for black people everywhere to hear. Where a collective sadness manifested, leading to justified protest, but at the same time, a white teenage girl would come onto the internet, having felt the air of resistance and likely feeling a certain resentment towards the shift away from prioritising whiteness and share her own sentiments.
“Guarantee if Zimmerman shot a white guy his wouldn’t even be a story. NEWS FLASH THIS WASN’T A CRIME OF RACISM IT WAS SELF DEFENSE”
.This post was merely one of almost a dozen, and her hatred would seek to cut a hole in posters screaming ‘BLM’, but would one day drift below a sea of other racist comments from those more well-known. It’s fine though, because years later, Schofield would discover the key to her success, having considered those words buried. Now she has over 2 million followers on Tik-Tok and co-hosts the podcast ‘Cancelled’ with Tana Mongeau, who’d also experienced her fair share of controversy over the years. The two are in a sense an ideal match as co-workers and friends, because what works as bonding glue better than the shared guilt of a questionable past?
They begun discussing the stories of other celebs who had been ‘cancelled’ in the way that Tana had over the years, but I’m sure the two didn’t quite predict that one day Brooke might make the perfect guest for their own show.
Her (white) fans stand ‘entirely shocked’ at her behaviour, with many claiming that she appeared as being the more upstanding of the two. But I wonder when it’ll become time for us to drop our naivety when white women who hang around with conservatives and pay homage to people like kid rock in their bios, have been platformed for nothing but being involved in scandal after scandal, and have shown little interest in social progress, turn out to be a little less than admirable.
I am sure many of you have noticed as well as I have that revelations about influencers saying the n-word has become almost normalised, like a kind-of rite of passage for a certain brand of white influencer online.
Scold, accept, forgive has become the routine for the white middle class, female demographic, and so has also become the expectation for black people and POC too.
“I believe in learning and growing and changing”, they’ll say condescendingly, as if the capacity to forgive is an art lost on communities that have been forced into peaceful acceptance of a violent regime (an oxymoronic and painful existence), which demands you squash down your better judgement in fear of even more violence, and worse still accusations of being exactly what is whispered with the stereotypes. The narrative that marginalised communities can peace their way into shaking hands with racists is not only untrue but also serves nobody but private extremists, who claim to learn and grow whilst doing exactly the opposite. It feels like gaslighting, and most black people, some of whom are the same age as Trayvon Martin would have been, some of whom are the same age as Brooke herself are well within their rights to be angry, feeling that love does not and should not conquer all. Where racism is alive and well, let hatred for those same systems and those that perpetuate them survive also, because at least then we’d have a fighting chance at advocating for ourselves.
Right now, in the UK, innocent people of colour are being murdered in the name of a fascist, xenophobic ideology. According to Sky News, almost 400 people (EDL members) have been arrested in the week fuelled by anti-immigrant riots that began after the Southport stabbings, which involved the tragic murder of three girls by a man named Axel Rudakubana, a Rwandan 17-year-old boy (born in the UK). Of course, the ‘claim’ is here that these are riots designed to avenge the young girls, but instead they insult their memories by prolonging the air of death and tragedy, utilising their murders as justification for the murders of more innocent lives, those which they had been wanting to claim for long before the Southport stabbings.
But I suppose those that would have us forgive racist sentiments as they’re spat out online would have us ignore the very real consequences of this kind of harmful messaging. On the one hand, you could argue that Schofield’s comments haven’t insighted hatred of this magnitude, but who’s to say that somebody on the brink of committing a hate crime wouldn’t see her comments, and feel more emboldened to treat the people of colour in their lives with further disdain, or perhaps do even worse.
I’m not going to cut round corners in saying this, her apology was bullshit. I mean I guess she ‘acknowledged’ her ‘past’, attributing her views at the time to being raised in a household dominated by conservative media like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, as she was adopted by her right-wing conservative grandparents and blah blah blah, (I stopped listening after a while, and zoned out just about long enough to realise whatever she said wouldn’t matter, because her commitment to change seems rather convenient. But most interesting (and so obviously transparent) was the completely random and unrelated mention of her mothers substance abuse issues. I have no doubt that this would have caused her suffering and trauma as a child, but also wonder how this is related to her obscene levels of racism and hatred. An apology that sounds more like a story-time, or one of those trauma dump candy salad moments going viral currently doesn’t quite wash with me or others that reside across black and ethnic communities. But somehow her comments are still filled with those who despite being completely unaffected by her comments claim to have ‘forgiven’ her already, an act all to easy when your forgiveness doesn’t ask you to compromise your level of self-respect or a core part of your identity.
In this way, Schofield’s career probably won’t suffer for too long, given that her target audience, those who don’t deem her ‘relatability’ made frail by her racist past, due to the fact that they themselves have likely had those all too classic bouts of racism in their youths too. I wonder if we scour their twitter archives, we’ll find similar comments about Trayvon Martin, or George Floyd, or Sonya Massey, with their words cutting holes in poster’s screaming ‘BLM”.
Asisa.
Whats even worse to me, as you mentioned, is the amounts of people in the comments claiming to forgive what is not their offence. The co host of the podcast, Tana, also dropped a comment about "the past, moving on, growing". Is white growth reserved for only when they should be held accountable?
A story time delivered on her white fox news family, a grown ass woman, whose racism reaches even to death?, her eyes getting misty as she recounts her own trauma, when her tweet and behaviour at the time as possibly contributed to the trauma of many?
People do not see the anger of POC, but a white woman's tears hold so much power.
What a sick sick world we live in.
once again, an amazing take. i sincerely cannot believe that the magnitude in which history repeats itself.