Every three weeks or so I get another email from another white nationalist or supremacist who has stumbled on my Facebook posts of May-June 2018, you remember, the ones where I resigned from the white race while lamenting how its offspring had overrun Harlem Shake. These emails, by now well over 300 of them, take pretty much the same line: I’m the racist and I deserve to suffer for my desertion (I’ve received only a half-dozen death threats, plus one delivered by phone to my department’s business manager).
I’ve copied the latest specimen above, from one Joseph Daniels, who says he lives near me, has seen me, and wants to inflict bodily harm upon me. That’s in his riposte to my reply (see the entire exchange below), which I rarely indulge in because doing so makes me feel as stupid as the guy—all but one is a guy—who threatened me in the first place. But once in a while, I get tired of the abuse, and tell him what I really think. That happened yesterday.
I thought my original Facebook posts were pretty funny, way satirical and all, but anonymous callers to Rutgers, roughly a hundred, didn’t think so, and the HR department there took them seriously enough to propose disciplinary measures “up to and including termination.” Not one of those callers, according to HR, was a member of the “Rutgers community,” that is, nobody who complained was from the faculty, student body, or staff at the New Brunswick campus. But the callers, again according to HR, were almost unanimous in claiming that I had expressed racist sentiments. Hence the speedy administrative response.
I thought the whole affair was nonsense until a VP swiftly rejected my appeal against the HR finding, and I had to acknowledge that I was about to be fired. At that point, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education stepped in, threatening a lawsuit against Rutgers on 1st Amendment grounds, which convinced the university’s president, Robert Barchi, to intervene; he appointed a special committee to review the case and produce a “more accurate” rendering of the facts. It did and I was off the hook.
[Here’s a link to an essay at Real Clear Investigations which puts my case in the context of academic differences on hate speech, free speech, etc.; it’s actually a hatchet job—”blatant anti-white racism” exists nowhere but in the author’s imagined ivory tower—but it does summarize the dividing lines.]
I write today about the latest episode in this saga because it doesn’t seem merely absurd to me anymore. Four years ago threats of bodily harm sounded ridiculous, so when one guy to whom I’d replied via email dared me to say the same thing to his face, I arranged to meet him at Harlem Shake—knowing he wouldn’t show. (A Station 11 TV camera crew did, however, and got me in trouble with the proprietors, who refused to serve me for a year after.)
Nowadays, I have to wonder. An hour ago, as I walked up to the CVS on 125th, I was scanning the pedestrians on Lenox/MX for any large white male moving purposefully, or for any similarly pigmented person looking at me oddly or otherwise. Was I afraid? I’d like to think that I was a little nervous is all, slightly more on guard than usual, but I did ask myself if the violent rhetoric of the Trump years had taken a toll—well, duh—and then whether it could be measured in precisely this way, in slowly accumulating units of doubt about my safety.
Notice that my perception of my personal safety has nothing to do with any reported, or rather purported, crime wave in Harlem or in the city as such. It has everything to do with the hate directed at me from the other side of a political divide, from an ideological distance that can’t be crossed because “they”—the people gathered over there—don’t just disagree with me, they believe that I am a threat to their very lives. How, then, am I supposed to entertain any possibility of identification with them, their interests, and thus imagine compromising with them? I confess, I can’t.
They can’t, either. That’s why the talk of another civil war isn’t just fake news got up by pollsters and political scientists with too much time on their hands. We’re stuck in an irrepressible conflict. It’s a zero-sum game by now. If they win, we lose, and vice versa.
__________
From: joseph daniels <jddmd66@yahoo.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2022 2:06 PM
To: James Livingston <jameslivingston49@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Remember this?
Any time you want to go motherfucker just let me know. I have seen you, because I live near your puny ass. It would be a massacre for you little angry dwarf. We can meet today. Let’s see how tough you are puny bitch.
On Oct 11, 2022, at 12:37 PM, James Livingston <jameslivingston49@hotmail.com> wrote:
Ah, gee, thanks, you dumbass, barely literate motherfucker. You made my day. What are you so afraid of? "Black thugs"? There aren't any in my neighborhood, and I'll bet there aren't any in yours, either. So, they're figments of your fevered imagination, raised to new heights by the fake news peddled at FOX News and through His Anus, Donald Trump. Poor Joe Daniels, a guy reduced to frothing at the mouth by his intellectual peers, morons like Tucker Carlson.
Who's "we" praying for me to get cancer? You and your gun-totin' buddies ready to shoot 'em up when your pathetic candidate loses again in 2024? Oh please.It's you who needs a good ass kicking. Maybe your Christian God will deliver one on Judgement Day, when He sees you for what you are--a sniveling coward who hates himself enough to wish death on those, like me, who think you're a joke.
Sincerely yours,
James Livingston Department of HistoryRutgers University-New Brunswick
From: joseph daniels <jddmd66@yahoo.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2022 12:18 PM
To: jameslivingston49@hotmail.com <jameslivingston49@hotmail.com>
Subject: Remember this?OK, officially, I now hate white people. I am white people, for God’s sake, but can we keep them — us — us out of my neighborhood? I just went to Harlem Shake on 124 and Lenox for a Classic burger to go, that would be my dinner, and the place is overrun by little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly, you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white. I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people.
A little self-awareness here smug motherfucker. You need a really good ass kicking. Maybe one of these black thugs catch you on the subway.
Hey cocksucker, you are white. Why was it ok for you to be in the restaurant? You stupid arrogant prick.People like your progressive white guilt degenerate ass is the problem. We pray you get cancer and rot mf.
Gfy pos!
James, what you are describing on this site is the Politics of Resentment, when a "populist" leader comes to power by telling an aggrieved majority that their failures and discontents are caused by "others" (Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, socialists, liberals, elites, intellectuals, gays, RINOs, George Soros, Liz Cheney, fill in the blank). We are in an Age of Delusion and Anger, when opportunistic enablers and sycophantic apologists are willing to sell out our democracy for their own personal benefit. In 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel "It Can't Happen Here" about a populist showman who came to power this way, and then instituted a fascist regime to "solve" the nation's problems. But Lewis' main target was the complacency and apathy of the public who let it happen, who actually voted away their democracy. On Nov. 8 Americans may do the same thing, while they're more worried about the price of gas than preserving their democracy. Like you, a small group of writers has started a free substack newsletter (Neo-Fascism: A Warning) where we use blogs, book reviews, and even humor to try to raise the alarm. Timothy Snyder said "Each election could be the last." We're all working to make sure that doesn't happen. We invite you and your readers to visit our newsletter
https://neofascism.substack.com/
and leave your feedback and comments. We're all in this together. So far, we still have our votes, and our voices. This neo-fascist wave must be stopped.