Here is the full transcript of public intellectual Theo E.J. Wilson’s TEDx Talk: A Black Man Undercover in The Alt-Right at TEDxMileHigh conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio: A black man undercover in the alt-right by Theo E.J. Wilson at TEDxMileHigh
Theo E.J. Wilson – Public intellectual
I took a cell phone and accidentally made myself famous. I was just talking about the things I cared about, but with a click of a button and an incendiary viral video, I propelled myself into overnight stardom.
When I say overnight, I mean I literally woke up the next morning with so many notifications on my phone, I thought I slept through a national tragedy. It was the craziest thing, but when it came to my influence, to my exposure, I literally took a quantum leap.
So, I made more videos. And the subject matter of my videos was often the most divisive subject in American life. But it is the way that I articulated race that made me somewhat of a digital lightening rod.
Being a survivor myself of police brutality, having lost a childhood friend, Alonzo Ashley, at the hands of the police, I had a little something to say about the topic. You see, this was at the height of Black Lives Matter furor, and people seemed to be turning to me to articulate their view points.
Honestly, it was sort of overwhelming because nothing trips you out like being a political star on the Internet. There is no class to teach you how to deal with people treating you like a messianic figure, a prophet, a new school charismatic leader for the digital age. Folks treating you like T’Challa, the Black Panther from the Marvel Universe, is flattering at first.
But down the road, it gets a little troublesome.
I remember being a kid, and all this Utopian propaganda was being dumped on us about how the World Wide Web was going to span the reaches of people across the globe. But, as it turns out, people are people, and this magical superhighway also took the demons of our nature and gave them Ferraris.
You see, technology is a lot like money: it brings out what was already inside you and amplifies it. So, I soon became familiar with the phenomenon of an Internet troll. These guys seem to live beneath the bridges of said superhighway.
They also missed the memo about the enlightenment of the Internet age. I remember being called highly colorful racial slurs by those who use the anonymity of the Internet as a Klan hood. Some people were pretty creative, actually, but others were pretty wounding, especially navigating the post-traumatic world of a police brutality survivor at the height of Black Lives Matter, with all of these people being killed on my timeline. To these trolls, I was not a human; I was an idea, an object, a caricature.
I admit, this race stuff can be kind of divisive. You see, I am an innately curious person. And as I drew my sword to engage in epic battles in the comments section, I also began to notice that a few of my trolls actually had brains, which made me even more curious and want to understand them even further.
Although the supposed morons engaged in what appeared to be original thought, I said to myself, “These guys are highly misinformed, at least according to my knowledge.” Where are these guys getting their arguments from? Was there some kind of alternative universe with alternative facts? Was history and gravity optional there? I don’t know.
But I needed to know, I wanted to know. It turns out, I had no idea about digital echo chambers, that same target marketing algorithm that feeds you more of the products you like to buy, also feeds you more the news that you like to hear. I had been living in an online universe that reflected my worldview back to me.
My timeline was pretty liberal: I had no Breitbart, or InfoWars, or Fox News. No, I was all MSNBC and the Daily Show, CNN and theGrio, right? But these trolls were hopping the dimensional doorway, and I needed to figure out how.
So, what I decided to do was to trick the Facebook algorithm into feeding me more news that I didn’t necessarily agree with. And it worked fine for a while, but it was not enough, because my online footprint had already established the patterns that I like to hear.
So, with the anonymity of the Internet I went undercover! I set up this ghost profile and went crazy. On a practical level, it was very simple, but on an emotional level, it was kind of daunting, especially with the racist vitriol that I had experienced.
But what I did not realize is that my trolls were inoculating me, thickening my skin, making me immune to view points that I did not necessarily agree with. So, I did not react to the same things as I would have several months prior. So, I pressed on. Noticing that this stuff also worked on YouTube, I became Lucious25, white supremacist lurker. Digitally I began to infiltrate the infamous alt-right movement.
My doppelganger was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter character, a sci-fi hero, who was once a confederate soldier. And think: years ago, I would have needed acting training, and makeup, and a fake ID, now I can just lurk.
I started with a little InfoWars, went on into some American Renaissance, National Vanguard Alliance. I started to comment on all videos: talking bad about Al Sharpton and Black Lives Matter. I started bemoaning race-baiters like Eric Holder and Barack Obama, just mirroring the anti-black sentiment that was thrown at me.
And to be honest, it was kind of exhilarating. I would literally spend days, clicking through my new racist profile. Goofing off at work in Aryan land, it was something else.
I then started visiting some of the pages of my former trolls. A lot of these guys were just regular Joes: a lot of outdoors-men, hunters, computer nerds, some of them family guys with videos of their families.
For all I know, some of them could be in this room right now, right? Not here! Not here! Not here! But when I went undercover, I found a lovely plethora of characters, luminaries like Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer and David Duke. All of these guys were thought leaders in their own right, but over time the alt-right movement ended up using their information to fuel their momentum.
And I am going to tell you what else led to the momentum of the alt-right: the left wing’s wholesale demonization of everything white and male. If you are a pale-skin-penis-haver, you are in league with Satan! Would you believe that some people find it offensive. The fact is the millennials get a life time of diet brand history.
I mean, America seems to be hellbent on filling its text books with CliffNotes versions of its dark past. This severely decontextualizes race and the anger associated with it. And that is a fertile ground for alt-facts to grow. Add in the wild landscape of the Internet, and it is easy to sell re-branded Mein Kampf ideas to a generation who has been failed by public schools. A lot of these ideas are easily debunked.
Alt-facts have that quality. However, one thing kept screaming at me to the subtext of these arguments. That was: “Why should I be hated for who I cannot help but be?”
Now, as a black man in America, that resonated with me. I’ve spent so much time defending myself against attempts to demonize me and make me apologize for who I am, trying to portray me as something that I am not, some kind of thug or gangster, menace to society. Unexpected compassion.
Wow! Now listen, the historical source of demonization of black males and white males is highly different. And where you fall on this argument, sadly, tends to be an accident of birth. You are probably surprised by this perspective. And so was I.
Never in a billion years did I think that I could have some kind of compassion for people who hated my guts. Mind you, not enough compassion like, “I want to be friends”. I don’t have infinite olive branches to extend to people who would not want to see me on this planet, right?
But just enough compassion to understand how they got to where they are. And to be honest, there were a couple of fair points. One of them is how Liberals have this wide acceptance for everybody, except for those with honestly held conservative viewpoints. Heaven forbid, you love God, this country and mean it, right?
And another thing that they talked about was this fear that they had of something that they labeled as white genocide, that diversity would be the force to wipe them out.
Now listen, I know what it is to fear for the fate of your people. Between crack, AIDS, gang violence, mass incarceration, gentrification, police shootings, black people have more than enough reasons to stay up at night. But if nature is into diversity, and you are not, you are going to lose that fight, buddy.
You see, nature does not care about your race – that’s man-made. Nature just cares about healthy organisms, and your precious ethnic features are expendable to that end.
So, the moment that you let go of that racist identity and re-latch onto humanity, all your problems go away. I am going to tell you what race ain’t about to die out – the human race. Join the party. The water is great until the water gets too hot, but that’s another TED talk.
To get to this point of understanding, you have to let go of your fear and embrace your curiosity. And, sadly, too many people would not take this journey to see the world from the other side. Let’s be honest, that does not just go for progressives, but also to the right wing and conservatives.
As fair as some of their points were, they were still trapped in their own echo chambers, recycling old outdated points of view, never getting a diversity in perspective, not making them well-rounded in their worldview. So, they are not hearing certain anti-racist and political voices, voices like Tim Wise and Michelle Alexander, Dr Joy DeGruy, Boyce Watkins, Tariq Nasheed. All of these voices have the answers to the questions that they want, but unfortunately, they will not hear them due to the power of these echo chambers.
We have got to break out of these digital divides because as our technology advances, the consequences of our tribalism become more dangerous. This whole experience taught me something: our gadgets ain’t gonna to save us. All these technological devices are only mastery of the universe out there, not the one in here.
And so, that’s all IQ, not EQ. That’s a dangerous imbalance. Where do you get the emotional intelligence, the character development, the virtues of patience, forbearance, compassion, you know, the things that make sure that these devices, however advanced, become a blessing, not a curse? Seems to me that humanity itself needs an upgrade.
That is a big task, understandably. I don’t believe in any kind of unbeatable monster. There was no giant out there without, perhaps, a simple Achilles heel. What if I told you, that one of the best ways to overcome this is to have courageous conversations with difficult people, people, who do not see the world the same way you see the world. Oh, yes, folks, conversations may be indeed the key to that upgrade because remember, language was the first form of virtual reality.
It is literally a symbolic representation of the physical world, and through this device, we change the physical world. Keep in mind, conversations stop violence; conversations start countries; they build bridges, and, when the chips are down, conversations are the last tool that humans use before they pick up the guns.
And I ain’t talking about online safe conversations from the security of your laptop. No! I am talking about in-your-face conversations with real breathing people. And for me, this looks like running a community forum called Shop Talk Live.
In Shop Talk Live, we have the conversations that change lives. We meet the community right where they are. We’ve done everything from diverting gang violence in real time, to helping people find jobs, to mentoring homeless youth. And we needed to do this because there was a severe lack of trust in the black community due to the violence of the crack era. We ended up taking agency into our own hands, solving our own problems, not waiting for anybody else.
The truth is, from the mayor to the felon, you can find them in that barbershop. What we did was just organize what was already going on. What I started doing was mining these alternative viewpoints from these alternative digital universes, dissecting them, breaking them down into controversial talking points.
Then, with my cell phone, I flipped the Internet against itself and began to broadcast these live conversations to my online followers. This made them want to leave the safety of their laptops and meet us in person to have real conversations with real people in real life.
And we did this. Thank you. We built bridges to so many communities: from the LGBTQ community to the Arab immigrant community, and even sat down with somebody with a confederate flag on their head, and talked about the things that actually matter. For it’s time we stop trying to hack our way around the human experience. There is no way out of each other.
Stop trying to find one. We have to understand something: human beings all want the same things, and we all have to go through each other to get these things. These courageous conversations are the way these bridges are built. It is time we start seeing people as people, and not simply the ideas we project onto them or react to. Human beings are not the barriers, but the gateways to the very things that we want.
This is a collective and conscious evolution. My journey began with a terribly popular cell phone video and a fallen friend. Your journey begins right about now. Join the renaissance in human connection. It is going to happen with or without you.
My suggestion: pick a topic and start a community dialogue in your neck of the woods, meet folks back in real life. And I am going to tell you, when you trick the algorithm of your existence, you will get some diversified experiences. It is time to grow, people. And when we do this, not if, it will be clear that the key to this upgrade was always our inner world, not some device that we create, and the doorway to this experience is now, and we will forever be each other.
Thank you.
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