How to make everything worse, racist cops edition

The South Bend Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge #36, recently posted this image to their Facebook page:

You will note the Santa in the lower-right corner is making That Gesture. This was posted to bring attention to the police union’s Elficers program, which is a toy and food Thanksgiving donation thing.

You can probably write the rest of this post on your own.

I believe the following things:

  • That’s a stock image, and was found by someone Googling “Cool Santa.”
  • That there is no real reason to believe that the image itself was meant as a stealth white power thing. Now, blah blah blah deniability and all that, I understand the point of why these assholes adopted this gesture, but still. I feel like that’s probably innocuous.
  • I’m a little less willing to cut whoever chose the image the same amount of slack, but I’m still willing in principle to cut them said slack, depending on how they react to being told about the image.

Go ahead, take a guess. What do you think happened when the local police union was told that the Santa they picked to help promote their Thanksgiving charity drive was making a racist gesture?

I’ll give you a minute.

Did you choose “double down” of fucking course they doubled down:

So, uh, here’s the thing, guys: It would’ve taken y’all less than ten minutes, max, to redo that image with any other Santa on that Google search list. There is no reason– no reason at all— to get defensive about that one. It’s a fucking stock photo. There are hundreds of other available images to choose from. You could have replaced the image, issued a literal two-sentence apology (“It was brought to our attention that a portion of this image featured a gesture many find offensive, which was not our intention. We apologize and have replaced the picture.”) and been done. Everybody would have forgotten about it in no time flat and, well, there wouldn’t be an article in the Goddamned paper about it today. I wouldn’t even know about it, and I wouldn’t be posting this today.

But nah, y’all couldn’t do that, could you?

And that is what makes it clear that y’all are racist as fuck. Because now there’s no deniability. Because you were told that Santa was making a racist gesture and you could have fixed it in seconds and instead your response is “Nah, it’s fine, fuck y’all.”

ACAB, even when they don’t have to be.

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Luther M. Siler


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