“Mongoloid”

On the Internet, a “White Knight” is someone who rushes to defend a stranger they perceive as slighted, usually for attention. The most prodigious example is lonely men, who sniff out drama in women’s online profiles like pigs hunting truffles. These guys engage in a “Backhanded Courtship”, where instead of paying compliments on a woman’s appearance, they announce that they accept her flaws, unlike “the others”.

This is because White Knights are absolute psychopaths.

One of many things I learned from the late Patrice O’Neal; you never, ever learn negative things about people just so you can use them against those people. It’s evil. Machiavellian. And yet, this is the modus operandi of the White Knight. “I’d never hurt you like that last guy did; I’d never yell at you for no reason.” Oh, good. You plastered some girl’s business all over the world’s bathroom wall. What lady wouldn’t swoon at a gesture like that? I hear wedding bells.

The problem with White Knights is that, like so many crusaders, they fight to avenge an Imaginary Victim. Despite what you saw in Fight Club, the Imaginary Victim cannot be nullified; it is powered by belief. The White Knight believes their Victim suffers, and so it does. Then they share that imagined suffering on the Internet, and it fucking takes life.

Do you see the process?

White Knight types out the Imaginary Suffering of their Imaginary Victim.
The Suffering is absorbed by readers, in varying degrees.
For a time, it’s as real as anything else.
The Suffering is validated.

Let me try another one:

White Knight wants people to be offended by something they don’t like.
White Knight wants a particular group or ethnicity other than their own to be offended, specifically, and alerts them by talking down to them in a public post.
The idea that the group or ethnicity is actually offended spreads as a rumor.
The Offense is validated.

Sharing your life with a disabled family member is one of the most taxing and difficult things a person can go through. As a result, it’s easier to become “offended”, when something “hits too close to home”. When people find out that my mother was in a wheelchair, they often think I’ll rankle at any kind of wheelchair-related comedy. This is what I’m talking about; someone knows a “negative” about you, and thus they change how they speak to you. It’s condescending as fuck.

I wouldn’t say the word “retard” aloud in public any more than I’d scream “Allahu Akbar”. A weird contingent of White Knights has gone absolutely bugfuck about it in the past ten years. They have an unreasonable emotional attachment to an Imaginary Victim, and they’ve gone insane. “Retard” is a word, it cannot hurt you anymore than a weak breeze. A fucking retard could tell you that.

Bad jokes aside, my point is that this particular form of White Knighting has been a plague since I was a child. These are the ones who loudly and slowly repeat themselves, in English, to non-English-speaking peoples. They treat disabled or handicapped people like a puppy with a hurt paw. They talk to someone with Down’s Syndrome as they would an infant.

You can’t tell if someone is being condescending or sarcastic by a handful of typed-out words. If someone has a disability that keeps them from parsing words on a computer screen, you have carte blanc to speak for them all over Facebook. And since a fully-operational Imaginary Victim is already living in the mind of the White Knight, it’s easy.

“Hey, retard! They’re calling you retarded on the Internet! Don’t you worry, though- I’ve got your back, tardy.”

If someone says “retard”, and you “get offended”, let it go. It wasn’t even a “dirty word” 20 years ago, and the nomenclature for mentally disabled people changes more often than Sean Combs’. Don’t add to your Nixonian thoughtcrime database. What did I say about giving life to negatives? Ignore the things that offend you. You’ll come to notice what’s really offensive. I’ll give you kids something to cry about!!!

40 years ago, they were using “trainable” and “retardate”! There are Americans who still say “warsh” and “irregardless”. You can’t just switch around the descriptor of an unrepresented group and expect Joe Public to keep up. We still argue over the Civil War. Be realistic.

Here’s what happens when someone insists on saying “the R-word” instead of “retard”: you give life to your impression of a retarded person, whose suffering is tantamount or greater than the ones you think of when you say “the N-word”.

That is what psychopaths do. They imagine undue suffering, and work to “avenge” it. When they’re offended, they strike at the source of the offense and try to eradicate it. They believe everyone else is as weak-minded as they are. In their estimation, they are the White Knights, the last defense of the stupid and ignorant.

They’d better keep their gauntlets off my Dead Milkmen.

It’s a part of schoolyard life, punk, and New Wave. It’s not hate crime, and anyone that would taunt a mentally disabled person with shouts of “RETARD” is an obvious piece of shit. Don’t start in with “won’t someone think of the children”, when what you really want to say is “won’t someone think of the retards?” The agenda of those who seek to censor is easily unearthed. It’s never sincere.

And leave one of the greatest New Wave songs of all time alone. When I was a lad, “mongoloid” was part of the tripartite race model. Later on it was improperly associated with Down’s Syndrome. This is called analyzing a piece of art and not taking it at face value. White Knights hear the lyrics and cry “shouldn’t somebody be offended by this?!”*