My twitter feed is currently full of
people making jokes about “Baby Hitler”.
NYT Magazine asked its readers if they could go back in time and kill
Baby Hitler would they?
This has been a common question forever and I
have long noticed people who say if they have access to a time machine they would
go back and kill Hitler. It's rarely end slavery or save Martin or Malcolm. It’s
almost always kill Hitler. It's because he's the most identifiable evil white
person ever, right? “Let's get that motherfucker off the books!” Nobody's
hypothetically going back to kill Genghis Khan. Hitler is the
biggest villain of this era and no one else is even close. Bin Laden is jealous of Hitler’s
PR team.
I sort of appreciate Hitler. Not in the
I agree with anything he said or did (I do not, to be clear), but in the what
he says about white people sort of appreciation. Hitler is still our human
embodiment of evil. He's our go to every
time we want to call someone awful or evil. Hitler is also white. Super fucking
white. You can't shake how white he is. Honestly, a part of me is really happy
that the world’s biggest villain is a white man. You just can’t ignore his
awfulness, racism, or his whiteness. (Though many people do! Racism be crazy) He
can’t be whitewashed away easily. When I
think about it more and more though I do think Hitler has endured in infamy in
part because of that whiteness. White people get to have the world’s biggest bad guy. We are a culture that loves villains. I don’t put it past racism to elevate the evil white person’s stature
over an evil minority. (I am not
complaining about that!) It’s the smaller vilification of minorities that is
more troubling. Hitler is such a big bad
white villain other white offenses are easier to overlook in white eyes. (Jim Crow and Japanese Internment)
I think the Baby Hitler hypothetical
comes up so often because if someone did go back and kill Hitler, and you’re a
white person, your world doesn’t really change much. White people get to enjoy him both ways. They
can hate him and live in the world in which he was defeated. And they can know the fact that if he had won,
they would still be on top.
Picture of the Week
No comments:
Post a Comment