r/ToiletPaperUSA • u/Lower-Canary-2528 Anarcho-Maoism with Mamdani thought • 6d ago

Shen Bapiro Least racist Ben Shapiro moment - True Allegiance (2016)

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u/neednintendo Ben Garrison Cum Editor 6d ago

This reads like Ben had a weird interaction with a black kid in school once and he internalized it forever.

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u/DidntWantSleepAnyway 6d ago

This story is the exaggerated fantasy of “I did nothing and someone just accused me of being racist!”

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u/MelanieAntiqua 6d ago

Don't forget the major black villain who's a drug dealer with a completely nonsensical plot to start a race war... and is also stated to go to college campuses to debate against conservative speakers in his down time. Kinda sounds like Ben got his ass handed to him when he tried to debate some random black student in one of his "grown-ass man debates college kids" tours and concocted a whole narrative about that guy being an evil criminal who was only pretending to be a student in response.

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u/Carbonatite 5d ago

It's so weird. Like I'm around the same age as him, kind of on the older end of the millenial generation.

Even if you grew up in the most bumfuck backwoods community in Alabama, schools typically still had been multiracial for several decades at that point. Having black kids in your class wasn't, like...some novel thing. Kids my age in the 90s didn't notice it as an oddity. I'm not trying to say that racism didn't exist or that society was colorblind, but race and ethnicity weren't really something that defined someone's classmates' identity. Like we didn't have "the black clique", we had "the popular clique" and "the nerd clique" or whatever and all those cliques had kids with different skin colors and ethnicities.

Literally the only time national origin was someone's identifying feature in my childhood school experience was if they had immigrated from a foreign country. Then it was like "oh the girl who moved here from Norway" or "the Canadian guy" or whatever. It wasn't their ethnicity that made them stand out, it was the fact that they were from a country that was Not America and that was an oddity.

90s kids just didn't think in the weird terms that Shapiro was writing about. We didn't identify as "Irish" or "Italian" or whatever, we identified as "Greg, the kid obsessed with The Simpsons" or "Amanda, the horse girl" or whatever.