Scene: You scroll through streaming options and find The Roses. “Oh, a new marriage thriller!” you think, unaware you or your parents already paid $12.50 to watch it in 1989. Hollywood just repainted The War of the Roses, updated the cinematography, and made more money from your forgetful wallet.

Congratulations. You just got scammed by the entertainment industry's most reliable business model: wait long enough for everyone to forget, repackage the same product, profit.

Now here's the uncomfortable part (and we're doing this because it's Black History Month, which means we're legally required to make you uncomfortable): racism runs on the same playbook.

Instead of box office receipts, it's collecting actual human casualties, complete with names. Emmett Till. Medgar Evers. Fred Hampton. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Real people who died—not “passed away peacefully'—but murdered because society decided to test the same failed ideas again.

So no, we're not going to use our inside voice for this one.

Welcome to the Reboot Nobody Needed

Strip the millennial aesthetic from today's racist rhetoric reveals the same toxic script that failed with your great-grandparents, leading to the Holocaust and Jim Crow. But sure, let's try again.

It's about culture, not race.” (Translation: same hierarchy, updated branding)

“We're just being honest about crime statistics.” (Translation: we're cherry-picking data like it's a buffet)

“Some groups just can't assimilate.” (Translation: eugenics, but make it a podcast)

“You're not even allowed to discuss this anymore!” (Translation: I'm being silenced, which is why you're hearing me on every major platform)

These arguments aren't controversial because they're brave. They're controversial because they're documented failures that got people killed, got thoroughly dismantled by every academic discipline that bothered to look, and are now back on tour because apparently we've decided that learning from history is for nerds.

The arguments haven't improved. They just got better lighting and a Substack.

Watch the evolution: Eugenics → “race science” → “human biodiversity” → “just having honest conversations about IQ.” It's the same toxic product in increasingly premium packaging. Same hierarchy. Same scapegoating. Same selective reasoning that only works if you pretend contradicting evidence doesn't exist (spoiler: it does, and there's a lot of it).

And here's where we're all complicit—yes, you, reading this on a device specifically engineered to make you forget things: we built these systems that reward amnesia. Algorithms that prioritize “new” over “true.” Media ecosystems where context doesn't trend, and history doesn't monetize. Every scroll resets the conversation to factory settings. Every click serves up a fresh audience that thinks intellectual history started when they opened Twitter this morning.

We did this. We built the infrastructure that makes genocide-lite profitable again, provided you wait out the cultural statute of limitations.

(Don't worry, it's not that long. Our attention span peaked somewhere around 2007.)

The First Contact Scam (Or: How to Sell Murder to Teenagers)

Modern racist rhetoric isn't aimed at convincing those who are aware of history. That ship has sailed, sunk, and now serves as a warning at the Holocaust Museum.

No, it's targeting people encountering the argument cold—usually younger, typically online, often driven there by an algorithm that discovers outrage keeps viewers engaged and doesn't particularly care what kind of outrage.

To that audience, this garbage feels transgressive. Forbidden. Like intellectual contraband. The person delivering it positions themselves as the brave truth-teller, “saying what society won't let you say anymore.” (Never mind that they're saying it on the world's largest communication platforms with millions of subscribers, but sure, very silenced, much oppression.)

That framing does all the heavy lifting. The actual argument doesn't need to be sound, or well-evidenced, or even internally consistent. It just needs to be new to the person hearing it.

And that's the part that should make you absolutely furious: these ideas aren't winning on merit. They're winning on amnesia.

You can't argue with someone unaware that their claim has been countered, buried, and marked with a headstone saying “THIS GOT PEOPLE KILLED: DO NOT DISTURB.” Debunking works, but no one remembers it. Each generation gets sold the same poison as new insight, not realizing it's the same old murder in a shiny, Instagram-ready bottle.

Both Hollywood producers and racists get offended when you point out they're doing a remake, which would be hilarious if it weren't so infuriating. The producer says it's a “fresh interpretation for modern audiences.” The racist claims they're “finally having the conversation we're not allowed to have,” despite it being recorded, academically debated, and resulting in mass graves in recent memory.

But sure. Bold. Brave. Revolutionary.

(Eye roll so hard I can see my own brain.)

Patience: The World's Most Boring Superpower

Here's what keeps me up at night, and I'm talking full-blown existential dread: racism no longer needs to win arguments; it only needs to outlive memory.

And friends? We made that really, really easy.

We operate under this pathologically optimistic delusion that once something's disproven, it stays disproven. Like there's some intellectual ratchet that prevents society from backsliding into catastrophically stupid ideas, but that's fantasy. That's believing in the Hollywood version of human progress, where we learn our lessons and roll credits.

Reality is messier: every generation has to actively relearn not just that racist ideas are false, but how they were constructed, what evidence obliterated them, and what specific horrors followed when people believed them anyway. (Pro tip: concentration camps. The answer is often concentration camps.)

Without that transmission—without deliberately teaching pattern recognition—we don't progress. We just reset to factory settings and start the whole nightmare over with slightly different branding.

And the modern media ecosystem? (Deep breath.) It's designed to make this worse. Algorithms don't reward historical continuity—they reward novel outrage and whatever keeps you scrolling past bedtime. A confident lie travels at the speed of virality. A careful truth travels at the speed of “here's a 47-minute video explaining context.” Guess which one wins.

So bad ideas don't die. They wait. They hibernate like intellectual cicadas until enough institutional memory has decayed that they can reintroduce themselves as “brave provocations” instead of “documented catastrophes with body counts attached.”

It's not persuasion. It's not dialectic. It's not even particularly clever.

It's just patience. And we accidentally built an entire information economy that rewards it.

(Slow clap for humanity. We really outdid ourselves this time.)

The Aesthetic Scam (Or: Why Your Murder Looks So Professional Now)

Today's racism shows up dressed like a TED Talk, and honestly? The costume is chef's kiss convincing.

It borrows all the language of serious intellectual inquiry—data, evidence, uncomfortable truths, rigorous analysis, free inquiry. It references statistics (conveniently never examining where they came from or what they actually mean). It sounds measured and reasonable. It arrives formatted like research, complete with footnotes, so we assume someone fact-checked.

Charts instead of slurs. “Concern” instead of rage. “Reluctant conclusions” instead of hatred. The whole presentation is so calm, so professional, so aesthetically legitimate that you forget these exact arguments have a direct historical line to lynch mobs and concentration camps. (Not metaphorical concentration camps. The actual ones. With the gas chambers and everything.)

The hierarchy? Still intact. The scapegoating? Still intact. The motivated reasoning that only works if you squint really hard and ignore 90% of available evidence? Still very much intact.

Only the aesthetic changed. And apparently that's enough to fool us into having the same conversation we already definitively settled multiple times, with results that included “crimes against humanity” as a verdict.

We keep falling for it because we've been trained—no, conditioned—to equate polish with legitimacy. If it sounds academic, if it cites numbers (any numbers, doesn't matter which ones), if the person delivering it isn't literally screaming slurs while wearing a white hood—we treat it like a good-faith argument.

When it's actually just the same old murder dressed up for the algorithm.

(Slow. Learners. All of us.)

Memory: The Only Defence That Actually Works

Plot twist: the most effective response to recycled racism isn't outrage. (Though outrage is valid, and I support your journey.) It's not a debate. (Debating disproven ideas legitimizes them as “both sides.”)

It's memory.

Memory exposes repetition. Memory collapses the illusion of novelty like a house of cards in a wind tunnel. Memory takes “courageous truth-telling” and reveals it as reheated failure with a Patreon and a blue checkmark.

When someone frames “just asking questions about crime statistics” as intellectual bravery, memory draws the direct line: welfare queen panic → desegregation hysteria → immigration restrictions → scientific racism → the pseudoscience that justified chattel slavery. The pattern becomes obvious. The mystique evaporates. The con gets exposed like a magician whose trick you've seen before.

This is why teaching actual history matters—not just dates and names (though those matter too), but the arguments themselves and why they failed and who died when we believed them anyway. It's pattern recognition. It's learning to spot recycled poison when it shows up wearing this season's intellectual fashion and a suspiciously good social media strategy.

When society forgets its intellectual history, old bigotry gets marketed as revelation. When it remembers, the magic trick stops working, and you're just left with a guy in a cheap suit selling snake oil.

(And yes, the suit is always cheap. Even when it looks expensive.)

The Part Where We Admit We Built This Nightmare

Real talk: racism persists not because racists are clever or persuasive. They're not. Their arguments are full of holes like Swiss cheese at a shooting range.

They're just really, really good at waiting. And we've built these systems—algorithmic, economic, cultural, all of it—that reward exactly that patience.

Systems that prioritize engagement over truth. Novelty over accuracy. “Did this make you angry enough to share it?” over “Is this actually correct?” In that environment, the winning strategy for terrible ideas isn't to improve them. Why bother? Just wait for an audience that doesn't remember watching them fail catastrophically last time.

That's not an intellectual problem. That's structural. That's a design flaw in how we built the entire information economy. And people are dying because of it—not “dying” in the metaphorical sense, not “dying” in the “oh this is bad for society” sense, but dying in the actual-funeral-with-a-casket sense, in ways that connect directly to which ideas we let recirculate without challenge.

Until memory becomes a shared responsibility instead of an optional luxury for people who “care about history” (read: nerds), these arguments will keep returning. Dressed as revelation. Marketed as courage. Positioned as forbidden truth, no one's brave enough to say (on their podcast with 2 million downloads).

Finding new audiences who don't know they're being sold genocide in installments.

And it's Black History Month, so let's be absolutely, crystal, no-ambiguity-possible explicit: this isn't abstract. The people who paid for our cultural amnesia with their lives have names. Emmett Till. Medgar Evers. Fred Hampton. The four little girls in Birmingham—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair. Trayvon Martin. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor.

The list goes on. And on. And on. Stretching back centuries, and every single name on it represents someone who died because we decided that remembering was too hard and forgetting was too easy and hey, maybe this time these ideas will work out differently.

(Spoiler: they won't.)

Racism doesn't flourish because it's intellectually superior. It prospers because we've created a society where forgetting is cheap and remembering is costly.

So yeah. Fuck the remakes. And fuck the people selling them.

Your Actual Action Items (Because Reading Without Doing Is Just Expensive Entertainment):

• Stop treating “just asking questions” like intellectual curiosity. It's usually recycling answers that got people killed seventy years ago. Pattern recognition beats politeness.
• Learn the history of arguments, not just their current aesthetic. The costume changes. The con doesn't.
• Understand that confidence and correctness are completely unrelated, especially when that confidence requires selective amnesia about what happened the last time we tried this exact same thing.
• Remember that your forgetting isn't neutral. It's someone else's business model. And the product they're selling has a documented body count with receipts.
• Do better. We owe it to the people who didn't survive our last round of collective amnesia. (And to ourselves, because at this rate, we're absolutely going to have to learn this lesson the hard way. Again.)

Now go forth and remember things. It's literally the least we can do.