Macabre Monday: "The Confessions of a Virulent Racist"
Or: How to Disarm Hideous Hatemongers with Raucous Laughter
This essay’s going to be a little bit different from my standard fare. I honestly don’t have a particular want to talk about this as it involves dredging up a years old issue that doesn’t directly relate to the fiction that I prefer to keep as the focus of my Stack. However, the inciting incident does have a direct tie with my secondary focus of tabletop gaming and the whole stupid situation is just the type of thing that many an average Joe and Jane are still quite nervous about being on the receiving end of, so I may as well use the excuse of Macabre Monday to get this obnoxious brain worm out of my head.
Those of you who’ve been following me since I started writing essays with more regularity, and particularly those among you who’ve come to know my love of the hobby of tabletop gaming, have probably seen me mention the YouTube channel I used to run once or twice. It’s a relic of not so many years past that was chiefly used as a creative outlet to engage with one of my preferred hobbies when I couldn’t engage with it through direct play. Well, as is so often the case, it eventually succumbed to the same scheduling issues that trying to organize games within the hobby tend to and thanks to the COVID lockdowns playing the reverse card on my life and causing my work week to expand to 60-80 hours for almost 2 years, limited time and my passion for video creation burning very low at that point forced me to accept that the whole tabletop gaming YouTube channel thing just wasn’t something I wanted to do anymore. It was a fun project while it lasted, one that lead me to meeting some pretty great people that I still occasionally talk to almost four years later, but its time had passed.
It was an interesting experience, though, and an educational one. I never made it into anything close to resembling the big leagues - I didn’t hit my first 100 subscribers until somewhere within the two-three year mark of my channel’s five year life, but I did manage to balloon to 1.5k by the time I was forced to pull the plug. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but considering the niche I was covering and the numerous points of inconsistency with which I could cover it, I like to think it’s respectable. It certainly gave me some fantastic insights on how to handle a growing subscriber base and the kind of balance an online creator needs to strike between audience interaction, quality of content, and maintaining that ever important sense of authenticity. Not to blow my own horn, but the authenticity side of things was the one aspect I had pretty well nailed down. No matter what topic I chose to talk about, I wasn’t about to shy away from sharing my genuine thoughts on it and that hasn’t changed.
Needless to say, that lead to me experiencing more than a little bit of friction from time to time. I’ve waded into rough waters within the hobby on more than a few occasions because I thought the discussions at hand were worth having. Of course, when those discussions involve polarized topics, you’re bound to get polarized ideas and opinions out of it. I shared more than a few of those on my old channel, with the last of them being a defense of Ernie Gygax from a crowd of invasive hobby colonizers on Twitter after a 10 second quote from an hour long podcast interview was taken out of context to smear him as a racist. Ernie Gygax may not be the sharpest lightbulb in the crayon box, but it’s pretty damned clear the man’s not the hateful person that the disingenuous invaders that keep trying to upend our hobbies tried to paint him as.
But I digress. This incident isn’t what this essay is about. Rather, this is to do with an incident from 2020, if my memory serves me correctly.
can probably correct my timeline here, since he’s also familiar with the event in question - Arch’s (formerly Arch Warhammer’s) community driven “Warhammer is for Everyone” movement. Or protest. However you want to phrase it.A far-too-quick primer for the uninitiated: somewhere in the middle of 2020, the customer relations team at Games Workshop - the company behind the Warhammer IP - released the below statement to the public. It’s a brief statement, but for those of you who don’t wish to read it in full, I’ll include a brief summary beneath it:
To summarize: Warhammer is for everyone unless you disagree with whatever it is Games Workshop wants to do with it, in which case you’ll be tarred as hateful and ostracized from the hobby.
Make no mistake - just like Marvel, DC, and Wizards of the Coast, Games Workshop is a company that’s been more than willing to pick up the cudgel of so-called progressivism to try and distract from their numerous shady business practices. This announcement was just one of many such incidences of the company doing exactly that.
Naturally, this drove quite a bit of discussion and backlash from the greater fanbase. Swathes of Warhammer enjoyers recognized this as exactly what it was - a demand that they either get in line with the opinions of the nags who forced themselves into the community to demand changes that no one in the larger fanbase wanted, or they make sure not to let the door smack them in the ass on the way out. As you might expect this led to quite a lot of well deserved pushback against Games Workshop, a major corporation that’s quite similar to Wizards of the Coast in terms of how frequently it manages to step in human waste and piss off its fanbase with its apparent inability to deliver on products and its hyper-litigious behavior. (To the point they’ve had entire court cases thrown out because they tried to copyright historical terms like “warhammer” and “pauldron,” among other things.)
Arch was one of the men at the forefront of the pushback against this, going so far as to successfully encourage a public campaign against Games Workshop for engaging in this overtly divisive behavior. Emails were sent, videos released, and eventually Games Workshop realized they screwed up pretty royally with this one. I can’t recall if the statement was ever rescinded or not, and if it was I’m sure they did so quietly, but the actions of Games Workshop going forward showed that the pushback from their customers base at least severely slowed their support of this idea, if not halted it in its entirety.
That’s not to say this situation was by any means a quiet one. Much like Hazbro/Wizards’ OGL scandal from last year, the Warhammer is for Everyone scandal got cacophonously loud and vitriolic. Anyone who was caught speaking favorably of Arch’s campaign, and even a few who weren’t, ended up on the receiving end of some very nasty words and more than a few cancellation attempts. As you might’ve guessed, I’m able to count myself among those who were hated on, though my channel was small enough at that time that a proper cancellation effort never manifested.
I’ll admit here that, while all of this serves to provide necessary context to the situation, I have somewhat buried the lead with this essay. The Warhammer is for Everyone situation isn’t what this is really about. Rather, it’s the fear that still comes with the kind of response that I and many others received for daring to stand firm by our principles. Names of all sorts were flung at just about everyone who called out the post from Games Workshop. Death threats were included among those, as were promises to do terrible things to family members and the like, to say nothing of the attempted cancellations of larger creators. Nothing really came of these efforts this time around, at least not that I can recall, but I remember this situation well because it was the first time in my brief stint as a YouTuber that I had that kind of hate directed at me.
Honestly, I’m kind of amused by the fact that I remember this so well, because I distinctly recall only feeling the occasional nervous twinge about nasty comments at worst. I think a lot of that was due to the fact that I was already used to getting into it with certain aggressors and instigators within my own family. I shan’t dig deep into that personal drama, but suffice it to say I dealt with a couple middle siblings who had a tendency to frequently instigate conflicts or engage in physical violence with my youngest siblings. In the face of that, internet bad words rank pretty low on the scale of importance.
Yet, I still distinctly remember the first vitriolic comment that my video on the topic got. The comment doesn’t exist publicly and that’s not by my choice. YouTube automatically flagged it as either spam or hateful and completely blocked the comment from appearing under the video, but I was still able to see it on my creator dashboard. It read as follows:
“This is fucking great. It’s the confessions of a virulent racist.”
The irony of this was so thick that I burst out laughing the moment I read it. Then I read it a second time, and I laughed even harder. Why was it ironic? Well, for one thing, it was proof positive that the commenter didn’t listen to a single thing I said in the video. I knew that even before I tried to confirm the time at which the comment was posted, which was before the intro music for my video had even ended if memory serves. The other thing is what that accusation would mean if it were true - it would mean disowning my own family.
You see, my family is mixed race. It may not entirely look that way on the surface since my youngest sister is the only one of us who very obviously holds a different complexion, but I do come from a mixed family. The reason for this is due to the fact that all of us are adopted, and that includes my older half-siblings from my Dad’s first marriage. Now most of us are of different varieties of European diaspora with myself primarily being of Northern European descent; my shit-stirring younger brother having mostly Russian and Slavic ancestry; my Mom’s being Austrian, French, and English; my Dad being of Jewish ancestry and faith; and my middle sister being primarily Irish and French with some Northern African in there. However, my older half brother and my youngest sister both have clear Central and South American blood in them, and it shows in their complexion.
Now, why am I going on about all of this? Well, I ran across the following Note from
, wherein she goes over a repeat hate mail line she got anytime someone who vehemently disagreed with her would unsubscribe from her publication. It’s a short and applicable read to what I’m writing here, so I recommend everyone give it a once over:I experienced a very similar form of hate for standing by my principles numerous times across my brief time as a YouTuber, and I can say without exaggeration that every single time it happened, I reacted the same way she did: with laughter.
Maybe that makes me seem like a troll on the surface of it. I’ve certainly had people tell me that when I first explained these situations to them in the past, but I think that people who are willing to look at these situations with a bit more nuance will recognize that’s not the case. I laughed at these situations because of the patent absurdity of them. I laughed because I knew how blatantly wrong they were, and I knew my friends and family would understand that, too. I laughed because it acted as both my best shield and best weapon against their feeble attempts to smear me, and it’s the single best way to disarm the types of people who would try to smear those they disagree with for the crime of daring not to be on their side. It’s also a tool that’s equally effective no matter which side of the political aisle a smear merchant happens to be coming from.
I laughed because, ultimately, their words didn’t matter. Their cancellation attempts didn’t matter. I laughed because I’ve dealt with people in the real world who treated me far worse than some nobody on the internet would ever be able to, and I’m still standing. I know that mileage can and will vary with this. I know that bigger creators with bigger audiences can sometimes feel that pinch more simply because the volume is higher and the weight can feel heavier. But that weight can still wash off your back, you don’t have to carry it as a burden. You can always laugh at it, always remind yourself that it’s a peanut gallery of people who don’t know you and almost guaranteed never will. If you can do that, then you can also learn to parse legitimate criticism from the hate, then learn to accept that with grace, and then further prove the haters wrong by improving even more.
No matter what we choose to do, there’s always going to be someone out there that hates who we are and what we’re doing. It’s unavoidable, even for those of us who aren’t putting ourselves out there. Hate is something that’s intrinsic to the human experience. It’s never going away, not completely, so the best thing you can do in the face of it is to laugh at it. Laugh at it with yourself. Laugh at it with your friends. Then ignore it, whenever and wherever possible. Starve the hate mongers of the attention that they crave and keep moving forward with your life and your passions. The peanut gallery can’t dictate how you run your life, only you can do that. So take it from someone who dealt with this kind of shit in the real world: you don’t have to accept what shitty people online are trying to feed you. They’re not present in your life, they’re just noise and text on the internet vying for your precious time and attention. They’re not worth either of those things. Your work, your passions, your family, and the people you love are what matter.
Don’t fear the mob. It’s just obnoxious white noise.
The Macabre Monday crew:
Every time there's another one of these dumbass "Such and such is for eVeRyOnE" movements, my first thought is always, "Well, who the fuck said it wasn't?"
"They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom/for trying to change the system from within".
(Leonard Cohen, "First We Take Manhattan").
Applicable to everyone who tries to change an entertainment business without consulting its most fervent adherents first.