Holy shit, every time I'm reminded of this book and film franchise just everything about it just fills me with absolute white-hot hate. I feel like someone superglued They Live sunglasses to my head; every single person involved in writing, filming and promoting of this filth, and their circle of family and friends, gets cultural revolutioned the moment I find a way to resurrect Mao.
:agony-limitless:
Was slightly guilty of this in HS, except for the "smell bad" part (that's just weird)
Part of the reason I got radicalized was because I grew up as an upper bougie kid with a superiority complex, except Indian. When this superiority complex clashed with the mayo mainstream, I changed my worldview
Our school was 30% Asian/Indian, 80% Asian in the AP classes, so it was almost inevitable that some kind of superiority complex would develop.
It was particularly so when looking at the East Asian kids. I'm talking 6'3" Korean guys with soap opera looks, getting straight A+s while ALSO being captain of the tennis/volleyball team AND making finalist for the state level music competition and a million other things on top of that. Meanwhile, your Italian friends in the "regular" track would be struggling to pass the class that you aced two years ago. If you went back to the late 2000s and told young-me about "white supremacy" I would literally not even understand what you were talking about--the thought literally never occurred to me.
One of the things that woke me up, and this happened while I was still in HS, was affirmative action--or more accurately an encounter with how whites perceived affirmative action.
For background, pretty much everyone knew that there was a penalty for being Asian, and that the "bonus points" hierarchy went something like Native American > Black > Hispanic > White > Asian.
Once at lunchtime, while talking about college, one of the white kids chimed in and said something to me like "well it won't matter if your grades aren't perfect, you'll still get a boost from being a minority"
To which I, and all the Asian and Indian kids sitting at the table, viscerally and immediately said "No, wtf are you even talking about?" It was literally like saying that 1 + 1 = fish.
That was basically my first experience with the "white world", by which I mean a very inertial, persistent, factually dubious, and foreign narrative which is followed by most white people in the country. Also for the record, I later came to realize that there were valid reasons for things like affirmative action (still not for whites relative to Asians though) and that it in fact didn't go anywhere near far enough