Racism & Orange Juice (Seriously, Stay With Me)

What if the left had promoted orange juice as aggressively as anti-racism?

Virtually every piece of Democratic messaging I see these days makes my butt clench and my gorge rise. All for the same reason too: it misses the point.

I can count on one hand the number of outspoken liberals I know who actually appear to understand what’s happening right now, or the role they’ve played in it.

To try to dispel some of this confusion, I’m going to deploy an extended analogy. More of an allegory, really.

Fair warning: it’s going to get obnoxious. You’re going to suss out what I’m up to quickly, so I’ll try not to draw it out.

But contemporary liberal values are so woven into the moral fabric of the people who hold them, I’m not sure there’s really another way to do this. If believing as you believe, and acting as you act makes you a Good Person, what are the implications if or when you have to change course?

Let’s retrace the path we’ve taken over the last 10 years, but in a parallel reality where the goals of right and left are things that seem ridiculous and trivial to us.

And let’s see if we can’t spot where the left took its wrong turns.

What would things have looked like if the left’s commitment to anti-racism, feminism, trans acceptance, the whole social justice kit, had instead been focused on something dopey and banal: the importance of drinking orange juice?

Imagine it’s 2015, and things are looking pretty rosy.

There are political divisions, of course, but the left seems to be winning the war of ideas. The most popular liberal president anyone can remember is in the home stretch of his second term, and he looks set to hand over the reins to the first woman ever to hold the job.

Yeah, there’s another possible contender, and he’s pretty horrible. But he’s such a long-shot, legacy media regards him as mostly a joke, and it’s not even clear he disagrees.

The calm is almost eerie though.

It feels like a big, long, group project has just been completed, and folks are having trouble switching gears into idleness. They can’t relax. There’s just not enough to do. It’s boring, actually

To keep things interesting, the left decides to dust off an old preoccupation: drinking orange juice. Because drinking orange juice is good. It’s really good. And we should get more people to do more of it.

This is an arguably weird concern for this political moment, since not only did we all grow up hearing the virtues of orange juice extolled by our parents, teachers, and priests, but we just voted twice for a president whose orange juice bonafides outstrip those of any other executive ever to sit behind the Resolute Desk.

So it’s not really clear why there should need to be a renewed push in favor of orange juice consumption just now. But hey, whatever. Orange juice is actually good. Basically everyone likes it and basically everyone agrees that it’s healthy. So much so that it’s a reliable staple of balanced breakfasts all over America, and has been for years.

Orange juice is so popular now, in 2015, that when the left chooses to take it up as its new cause célèbre, very few object. What could possibly be the harm? How could this ever turn ugly? We’re being asked to promote something we already like anyway, so hey, let’s go for it! Let’s get on the train!

This couldn’t possibly get fucked up, right?

Okay, so it’s getting a little competitive now.

Folks are starting to one-up each other over their orange juice routines.

Oh, you drank a glass of orange juice with your Cheerios? Well, I drank TWO!

But that’s to be expected. It’s mostly the college kids driving this thing after all. We were college kids once. We know how it is. And it’s ultimately still a force for good, isn’t it?

Example: a hurricane hits the Florida coast and threatens the orange crop.

In response, liberals start posting aggressively on their socials in favor of orange juice. Many change their profile picture to an orange. Some even scold others for failing to do so. Which, a little excessive, but still for a good cause. Orange juice is still a good, healthy thing, and this seems like a good time to be on the right side of history.

It’s getting heated though.

It’s not enough to drink orange juice at breakfast. It has to be lunch now too. And really, why not dinner?

If you’re not drinking orange juice for these meals, what are you drinking? Do you just hate orange juice? Do you hate the people who like it?

So it has to be every meal now. And people have to see it. You’ve gotta be visible and consistent. You have to tend to your Insta feed, making sure there’s at least a few pictures of you every day with a glass of orange juice. Otherwise, folks will wonder.

Hitting the art museum? Seeing a movie? Attending a concert? Reading a book?

What was the orange juice situation like?

Did the artist demonstrate sufficient fealty to the pro-orange juice movement? Because if they didn’t, even if they died 100 years before anyone even thought of a pro-orange juice movement, it’s hard to overstate the importance of you shunning them forever. You cannot be associated with a person who doesn’t understand what you understand: the necessity and centrality of orange juice.

It’s at your workplace too. And your kid’s school. The cafeteria, the gym, the bathrooms, the break room, the classroom. There’s orange juice wall art. Everywhere. Decals on the doors and windows. An orange on every desk. An orange-related lesson in every chapter of the textbook.

It’s getting a little extreme.

You hear about a guy who bought Coke from a vending machine and got fired. A university professor is filmed, surrounded by angry students, trying to hide his box of apple juice. He resigns.

The Nazis drank apple juice.

It’s time for the election now. That guy who everyone thought was a joke? The guy who could literally never be president? He communicates a simple message: you can drink whatever the hell you want.

He wins!

But it only fuels the orange juice fires. His ascension seems to prove the original thesis: America needs orange juice, and needs it now. This is an existential crisis. We are living in the End Times.

Supporters of the president start to sour on orange juice altogether. Pineapple juice is now transgressive. Posting a picture of a tomato can get you banned from Twitter. A video about grapefruits gets you demonetized on Youtube. Sprite-drinkers are forced into digital exile.

Online spaces fall under the boots of a kind of auxiliary thought police. They go back years, decades even, to find evidence of people expressing enjoyment of beverages other than orange juice and they destroy them.

College humanities departments can publish on no other subject. Funding is only available for projects that advance a pro orange-juice narrative. Professors lose tenure for failing to perform their obedience. Student mobs break the windows of coffee-drinking fraternity houses.

Public statues of presidents who owned cherry orchards or vineyards are pulled down. Orange-wielding demonstrators block traffic and close bridges. Anyone who complains is told to read ‘Letters from a Birmingham Jail,’ and understand it this time.

There’s a new president!

He institutionalizes orange fever. He promises to nominate an orange grower for SCOTUS, and follows through. His administration is chock-a-block full of citrus fanatics who busily set to work remaking the federal government in their image. Hiring and promotional preferences, across all agencies, even the military, will reflect adherence to orange juice ideology. It spills over into the private sector.

It’s a new day!

Except it’s not… Because the orange juice thing is getting kind of played out now. The normies are spooked.

The importance of orange juice has been clearly demonstrated, and fully embraced by the most powerful people in the country. Why then is the tenor of the conversation not changing? Why do the orange juice people still think they’re the underdogs? Why do they all think they’re victims?

How can orange juice be “marginalized” if it’s impossible to swing a dead cat without knocking over a glass of it?

It’s too much. Americans want their old president back. The one who told them that liking milk didn’t make them evil.

They vote him back in, but shit gets weird again. Fast.

The anti-orange juice backlash is here. And it’s a veritable blitzkrieg.

Orange juice is banned from federal buildings. Any federal employee with a social media history of liking orange juice - and that’s like, all of them - is fired.

It’s uncomfortable. Folks are kind of happy to be able to live through a day without somebody pouring a glass of orange juice down their throat, but this feels crazy. This feels almost like what it felt like under the Reign of Orange Terror.

The normies just want their orange juice back. At least for breakfast? Some days?

The resistance assembles. They put their heads together. The nation waits with bated breath.

Can some orange juice be okay again? Can it be okay without it having to be our whole entire world?

Where are the left’s thought leaders? What will be their new marching orders?

The Democrats and other pro-orange juice holdouts have decided on a strategy. One that will heal us. One that will save us from the orange juice-less apocalypse. They reveal it.

It is:

Make everyone drink more orange juice.

Stepping out (finally) from our analogy, to my left leaning friends: can you see what you did wrong?

Can you see how you took an idea that virtually everyone agreed was good (not being a bigot) and wore folks out with it? How you made that good idea seem like a bad idea because of how pointlessly overbearing you were in pushing it?

However much you like orange juice, don’t you think you’d get a little tired of it if, on pain of cancellation, you had to drink it for every meal, for 10 years running?

The people in our analogy were perfectly happy to be told that drinking orange juice was good for them. They were happy to tell others the same thing. They just didn’t really believe that a calamitous social crisis could only be resolved by their doing so.

If it feels like I’ve trivialized an important issue with this allegory, good. That was the point. And it means you’re starting to understand. Perceived triviality was always central to the problem.

Liberals who aggressively pushed anti-racism, gender justice, trans rights, and the like never successfully convinced their audience of the necessity of it. People just didn’t feel the urgency. It wasn’t obvious that every rotten thing to happen was evidence of a rotten system, or that the system needed to be torn down.

And if your counter to that is, “Well, Dave, that’s just your white, male privilege talking,” perhaps that’s true. That isn’t a falsifiable claim, so I can’t really defend myself against it.

But then even by your own logic, you should see the problem associated with this rhetorical strategy: the people whose support you needed were people (like me, I guess) who fundamentally didn’t understand why it was so important for us to become activist crusaders all of a sudden. We didn’t see the scale of the wrongs that needed righting. By your reckoning, we literally couldn’t.

And if you were one of the many, many, many people accusing members of your same identity group of blindness to the realities of other identity groups, then allow me to heartily suggest that you go fornicate yourself with something pokey.

Have you the foggiest idea of how annoying it is to be told to check your white privilege by a fucking white person?

If some of us were struggling to see the conditions that were so dire as to justify your fevered intensity, well, that was easily explained by you. Turned out, we were all just stupid, bigoted, and self-centered!

Unlike you, of course.

You were listening. You were tuned in. You were doing the work. And doing better.

The rest of us simply lacked access to the level of empathy, conscientiousness, and oh, really just basic decency exhibited by you, our moral superiors. Because it certainly couldn’t have been the case that we just didn’t trust or agree with you.

For those of us who never joined you in chugging the Kool Aid, please understand that it is very hard to pity you right now. You brought this on. You are 100% responsible for the cultural backlash through which we are now all living. And most of you don’t even seem to know that it is a backlash.

To see you all determining now that this reaction, this violent thing that your lunacy created, nursed, reared, and unleashed upon us, is actually proof that you were right all along is just…wow, dude.

I understand that this is a painful moment for many of you. And that confronting the truth of your own complicity would make it even more painful. You’ve been desperately pumping the patient full of medicine for 10 years, only to have the medicine, not the disease, kill them. It’s devastating. I get it.

But we’re going to try something different this time around.

Since I just had to endure 10 years of you telling me to take a seat, to stay in my lane, to listen more, to talk less, to check my privilege, to not talk over you, and since it turns out that, in fact, I was right the whole time and you were wrong the whole time, we’re going to be *all done* listening to you for a while.

You’ve made a big, poopy mess, and now the grown ups need to clean up after you. If at times during this process, it feels as though folks like me are impatient, rude, or otherwise intemperate with you, that’s only because - and please don’t take this the wrong way - you are a useless fuckup who ruined everything and cannot presently be trusted to make important decisions for yourself or others.

The very best thing you can do right now, especially if you want people to ever drink it again, is to shut the hell up about the damn orange juice. The problem was never the message. The message tastes just fine.

It was always about the messenger. It was always about you.