Khlo Kardashian says we should show love to racists but why coddle them? | Yomi Adegoke

In the minds of many, being colourblind is seen as a type of kindness, that racism cannot exist if we are all just humans

Over the weekend, Khlo Kardashian posted on Instagram about a T-shirt that seemed, at first glance, forgivably mawkish. It encouraged her followers to love thy neighbor and listed neighbours of differing levels of disenfranchisement: Thy black neighbor. Thy gay neighbor. Thy Jewish neighbor, and so on. The penultimate line read: Thy racist neighbor.

The internet, unsurprisingly, lost it. It can easily be inferred from the T-shirt that racist is a neutral, even misunderstood, status: it suggests that, like being gay or black, it is something you are born with that the world unfairly vilifies. In Kardashians mind, a racists struggle is comparable to that of a homeless person or an addict (who were also offered a serving of love, as opposed to anything substantial). Her endorsement of that message suggests she sees racist as an identity and a marginalised one at that. This is the logical conclusion of a dangerous rhetoric that posits the intolerant as victims of a system that they seek actively to uphold.

Kardashians ludicrous faux pas puts to bed the myth that we can befriend our way to a more just world. Although she is a mother to a biracial child, with a number of black ex-beaus (including the basketball players Lamar Odom and Tristan Thompson, the latter of whom is her daughters father) and a black best friend (Malika Haqq), it seems her proximity to blackness has not cured her myopia.

Of course, in the minds of many, colour-blindness is a type of kindness. Such people believe that acknowledging racism does more harm than racism itself which is only true if you consider that white fragility is being harmed. Coddling the complicit is hardly new, of course. Colour-blindness allows liberals to lay claim to wokeness without doing the work required to undermine white supremacy: how can it even exist if were all just humans, man?

The Kardashians babies, besties and boyfriends continue to be human shields against accusations of racism laid at the door of this ever-ignorant family. They devour black culture and spit out the bits that dont sit well with them donning cornrows, but acting uncharacteristically demure when it comes to engaging with anti-racist discourse. Khlo Kardashian was accused last year of editing her daughters skin colour in pictures to make it appear lighter, a few months after she had hit back at cruel remarks made online about the toddlers complexion. It is hard to be colour-blind in this society of racists that Kardashian seeks to love when these people actively hate others her daughter included, whether she chooses to see it or not.

Would Kardashian have promoted the same T-shirt had it pleaded to love thy sexist neighbor or thy homophobic neighbor? Probably not. Thanks to Kardashian and her ilk, racism is something that continues to be touted as a cry for help from those who believe their bigotry is unfairly censored. These bigots believe it is their freedom of speech being quashed making them the ones being oppressed, rather than the oppressors.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us