Submitted by KingGath in AntiFascistAction
I'm a 15 year old heterosexual white male who was born in England and currently resides in Scotland. I moved to Scotland around the time the Scottish independence referendum was taking place and it's and understatement to say I stood out with my strong Birmingham accent, I was targeted and bullied for my nationality by my fellow country men and my self-esteem tanked. But one day when I was in the library and I came about a book that made me... curious, It was called Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World and it gave me a reason to be proud of my background I saw how Britain once ruled the world and soon after I read Empire I became a UKIP supporting, SJW loathing, Immigrant hating, Brexit and Trump supporting loony who was hell bent on reuniting the British Empire no matter the cost. But one day after watching my fair share of Thunderf00t and The Amazing Atheist I discovered a certain YouTube channel called Hbomberguy who pulled me back to the light with his amazing videos. Shortly after that I had binged watched Hbomberguy, contrapoints,Shaun and Three Arrows filling up my maturing brain with leftist knowledge and soon indulging in leftist literature and worshipping Jeremy "the virtuous" Corbyn. But the real pull for me was the Anti-Fascist forums like this that showed the light on how the alt-right are scum and need to be expelled. I'm now a willing son of socialism who will help defend minority's,women's,LGBTQ's and worker's rights without hesitation and when fully matured will become a prideful member of Antifa. Thank you guys :) P.S sorry for any bad grammer
GaldraChevaliere wrote
It's real easy to fall into the trap of taking your ancestors' accomplishments for your own while shirking responsibility for the consequences of them. I'm glad you managed to dodge it, most boys stateside just eat that shit up.
Thing about a lot of the right is that they're dumbass kids like you who got in with a bad crowd and made wrong choices thinking they'd avoid the consequences of it forever. As many of them, and a lot of centrists, can be reached by kindness and patience. But you gotta know when to draw the line too. Talk to the stupid kid your age who got sucked in by the aesthetic of fascism, but don't give a committed racist skin the chance to hurt you or someone else.
If you wanna see things from perspectives that aren't similar to your own, you should try looking into the women and queer folk who helped build anarchism up to what it is now; Simone Weil and Emma Goldman are good places to start. Weil fought for the catalan revolutionaries in the spanish civil war, and Goldman went around the US talking to working folk and advocating for groups that in her time were untouchables. There's also a ton of stuff written by modern folk of every stripe that gets published online or in zines but wouldn't be considered in 'academic' circles, but has some real substance to it.
Last bit of advice? Kill your idols. Don't 'worship' a particular author or philosopher or speaker or whatever, but take everything they say critically and pick it apart. Take what you need and discard what doesn't work. I like Contra, but she can be painfully off about a lot of things from my perspective. You don't gotta be a 'son' of anything, you just gotta be a good lad and do the right thing when you know you can.
You're also gonna have to accept that a lot of folk aren't gonna trust you in meatspace circles, because you're young and because you had some suspect beliefs before, and because you're literally of the tribe that invented the whole stupid concept of whiteness in the first place. I mean, I'm a gael and I still get super fucking leery around english because they make a bigger deal of my ethnicity than I do. And I'm still in the white club as far as everyone sensible's concerned. People are gonna take time to warm up to you, and you're gonna have to work a little harder to prove you're worth trusting and you're not gonna relapse just because things get hard. That's not a special condition placed on you just because you're white and a breeder. It's the basis of any kind of healthy relationship with a group.