Avoiding Facebook Jail and My Friend Bryan

My friend Bryan seems to have this recurring problem lately of ending up in Facebook jail. If you don't know what that is, it's a large social media website that was created by Mark Zuckerberg.

It turns out that Bryan keeps getting put into jail because he is racist. I don't want to anyone to get the wrong impression, though. He is racist in the positive sense of the word, which is that he is racist like I am racist. As long as we agree on what is acceptable racism, Bryan is okay in my book.

The type of racism Bryan and I agree upon is that we both despise white people who despise people who aren't white. However, Bryan is not as philosophical as I am, and he just blurts things out that violate the rules regarding hate speech. Calling people names based on their races is racist hate speech even if they are stereotypical white right-wing tea party warmongers.

Names like honky, cracker, white supremacist, KKK member, Nazi, and Bryan's favorite, white trailer trash, are totally inappropriate names to call even those people. By using a broader and more acceptable term, like Trump supporters, not only are the aforementioned white racists implicitly included, but it serves to cover other types of people who fit under that umbrella.

Using that broader term also encompasses other groups who also support Trump but are not evangelical older white people who sympathize with America's defeated enemies. Others who fit under the umbrella of "Trump supporters" are the Uncle Toms (a term I personally find quite offensive and would never use), the foreign influences who are taking advantage of America while the village idiot is in charge, and world leaders like Kim Jung Un (and too many others to list) who once were despised but who suddenly and relatively look like brilliant strategists to other world leaders. 

My point is that It isn't just racist white people who support Trump, but it is only racist white people who are being referred to as "white trailer trash." Even dropping the adjective "white" may give you plausible deniability, but you likely lose the benefit of the doubt once you've risen above the first level of the Facebook censorship game. After all, it is generally accepted that even the term "trailer trash" refers to racist white people, and not the good people who actually live in trashy trailers. 

If one examines it critically, since many of the people who are trailer trash in the figurative sense are older white people, I'd guess that you'd be more likely to find trailer trash in nice double-wides that are situated in those 55-and-older mobile home parks with strict rules about appearances. The karens and chads of the world are more likely to confront people of color because of their appearance in one of those places than the people who live where the trailers are literally trashy. The people in those places are often happy to share what they have, and don't ask questions.

If you need a cup of sugar, they don't ask whether it is needed for cereal or baking, and if you need a cinder block, they don't ask whether it is needed for auto maintenance or to replace a rotten stair. If they have it, it's yours if they aren't using it and you need it.

There are a lot of nuances to staying out of Facebook jail. Many of them are as subtly different as are charging and blocking fouls in basketball, which is simply whether or not the defenders' feet are planted or moving. Bryan knows that about basketball, but his second term in jail earned on his first day out of jail was like drawing his fifth foul for punching someone in the face after the coach sat him for three days because he had four fouls.

He says his next violation will cost him thirty days in jail. That's like starting a game with one technical foul already assessed against him. Perhaps if I take the time to explain how things work, I can help my friend Bryan not become the Rasheed Wallace in the game of social media. If you don't know what that is, it is an umbrella term for websites like Facebook that allow social interaction with other members. 

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