I keep thinking of this guy. He was home schooled by his dad, who started Stormfront, and his mom, whose ex husband, David Duke, became his godfather. White supremacy was just a simple fact of life. He started the Stormfront for Kids website, and hosted a radio show with his dad. Once he gets to college, he gets exposed to ideas outside his bubble. He spends a lot of time thinking. He eventually disavows racism and tries his best to put his past behind him.
So the question, of course, is how accountable should he be held for the real harm he caused between the ages of 10 and 20?
If we are to accept that rape culture is a thing, then we have to accept that a wide swath of our population has been indoctrinated into it. That is, there are a lot of people who do shitty things because they don’t understand that they’re wrong. It’s what they were raised to believe is normal. “no” being a grey area isn’t something they just decided, it’s something they were taught.
That doesn’t excuse every bad thing that they’ve done, but in both moral and legal views, we make the distinction between accident, negligence, spontaneous outburst, and premeditated malice, based on how cognizant someone was of their actions at the time.
I think that we’re seeing a radical shift with the millennial generation actually being aware, but realistically, we have a lot of older people who didn’t grow up that way.
Everybody thinks of themselves as the good guy, and everybody wants to do the right thing- But when that conflicts with self-preservation, there aren’t a whole lot who will take the hard way. Sure, maybe you know what you did was wrong, but are the consequences for admitting it greater or less than the weight on your conscience?
I think we need to have a serious conversation about how we want to deal with the past if we’re going to move forward- And I think it’s going to involve a lot of compromises that nobody is happy with, because otherwise, we’re incentivizing people to not come forward, to not change the future for the better.
