"Why Do Minorities Join the Far Right?"

This short article is adapted from a Twitter thread I wrote a few years ago, which you can see here but also don’t because Twitter is garbage.

The presence of women and people of color in far right movements is really confusing for a lot of people but it has never been confusing for me.

It is 2008 and I'm at WLC, which is a training thing you have to do in the Army to get promoted to Sergeant, at Fort Bragg, NC, which means I am even more surrounded by men than usual. The thing about being a woman in the 82nd Airborne in 2008 is that we exist openly only in the support battalions. Most of the division is infantry so the moment you got into division-level training it's wall-to-wall testosterone. I am one of two women in a class of 150ish.

So I walk into my assigned classroom on Day 3 after lunch and the other woman is off somewhere, I dunno, it's like 30 dudes and me, and they're sitting around telling jokes about women. The old misogynist classics. "What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? Nothing! You've already told her twice!" That kind of shit.

Even back then you weren't technically supposed to tell jokes like this. In theory, you could get in trouble. In practice, the person who complained would be ostracized and shunned. A couple months after arriving at 508th STB, someone who outranked me grabbed my hair, bent me backwards, and pretended he was going to kiss me. When I complained—to him, privately, with no chain of command involvement—many people in my unit were furious and disgusted with me for being a joyless bitch. It took me a long time to claw my way back from it, reputationally speaking.

"Hey, I have one," I say from the doorway.

The room goes deathly silent. I am fixed with 30 pairs of eyes, just waiting for me to kill the vibe with some feminist bullshit.

"What's the first thing a woman does when she gets back from the domestic violence shelter?", I say.

"......what?"

"The fucking dishes, if she knows what's good for her!"

I've told a lot of way better jokes in my time on this planet but never, NEVER, have I gotten a bigger laugh than I did that day, and I probably never will.

It felt amazing.

I had proven, with my deeply fucked-up joke, that I was one of the dudes. I could hang, I could be in the boys' club and get my stripes and gain power and have status beyond "fuckable." I degraded my own gender to do it but so fucking what, that was their problem: I was up here now.

(it was definitely not just their problem, because every time I denigrated women I denigrated myself, further internalizing deep self-hatred and reinforcing the kind of toxic masculinity that leaves one unable to regulate one's emotions healthfully or enjoy one's own body. Still working on it.)

Male acceptance is tenuous. You have to prove yourself over and over. And I did, for years, with good success. But it never fully takes. You never truly transcend wretched femininity. Becoming an honorary man while female is a seductive fantasy, but not an achievable one.

So yeah, I think I get why people not white and male sign onto the far right movement. It looks like a shortcut, a way to get privilege without race/gender/class consciousness, and it can feel amazing.

But they don’t really have it. And someday, if their side wins, they’re going to find out just how stuck they really are.