I keep hearing this word normies. From what I can tell, a normie is a white American that is so self-absorbed and callous, that no amount of suffering or horror experienced by other people can cause them to inconvenience themselves in the slightest. They only act when they themselves feel discomfort
— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:44 AM
And Black people can't be normies, apparently. Police violence that causes 20% of the Black population of a city to protest, cannot be described as "normies" protesting. Even if it's the first protest that most of those Black people have ever attended. We're not normal I guess.🤷🏿♂️
— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:47 AM
I'm supposed to celebrate that even the normies are protesting now. I've heard this many times before. But what am I celebrating? That normies now care about other people? Because that hasn't happened yet. Or that the inconvenience has now reached the normies? Because that has happened before.
— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:50 AM
And to be crystal clear, because I know at least a few people will misunderstand this: I'm not criticizing the No Kings protests. I think they're great! I don't tell people how not to fight fascism. Have fun with it! I'm asking folks to think about what they're really saying when they say normies.
— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:55 AM
At the most basic level, we apply the word "normies" to white people because America is still a majority-white country -- 58% of the country is white.
And I think whites have the privilege of being apolitical if we choose, in a way that Americans of color don't. The system generally doesn't eye us with suspicion -- thus, it politicizes people of color in a way that it doesn't politicize us, especially if we're economically comfortable and heterosexual.
I understand why it would be appropriate to use the word "normie" to describe Black people who came out to protest in 2020 after leading apolitcal lives. But even so, the most normie normies will be white, purely on the basis of demographics.
Now I want to defend angry normie whites in the Trump era. I don't think it's correct to argue that we're incapable of responding to the pain of others.
The protesters are denouncing brutal treatment of immigrants that we aren't subject to. Those of us who are old are denouncing a war we won't be asked to fight in. We're denouncing a cover-up of sex crimes that didn't happen to us.
A mostly young cohort of protesters has been denouncing genocide in Gaza for years, even though it's happening thousands of miles away. Many of these protesters are white. Some are Jewish. Isn't this empathy?
Do whites fully understand what's happening? No. I've been to the "Say Their Names" memorial in Minneapolis's George Floyd Square and realized I only recognized a small portion of the names.
We memorialize Renee Good and Alex Pretti -- two normie whites who died because they weren't self-absorbed or callous -- but we don't know the names of others who've died in conforntations with ICE, or those who've died in federal immigration custody since Donald Trump was reinaugurated (the total is 46, according to a story just published by The New York Times).
We're trying. It's not pure self-interest. Maybe some demonstrators yesterday were motivated by high gas prices, but there were an estimated 350,000 in the streets of Manhattan, where most people don't even drive.
And there's nothing wrong with marching out of self-interest. There's nothing wrong with Black people taking to the streets to protest police brutality against Blacks. There's nothing wrong with young people denouncing a pointless war that they fear they might be conscripted to fight.
Ultimately, though, I agree with Okereke about this:
This hell ends, when 50% of the white people in the US, push in the same direction as 90% of the Black people in the US. This hell would never have started, if 50% of the white people in the US, had pushed in the same direction as 90% of the Black people in the US.
— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 8:14 AM
Pew says 83% of Black voters chose Harris -- not quite 90%, but still an overwhelmingly high percentage (92% voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and 91% voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016). The white vote in 2024 was appalling: 55% Trump, 43% Harris. (That matched the 2020 white vote for Trump and Biden; in 2016, Hillary Clinton got only 39% of the white vote, while Trump got 54%.)
Democrats haven't won the white vote in a presidential election since 1964. It's the result of racism, plus many other hatreds layered on top of that (hippies and war protesters starting in the Nixon era, sexual minorities and feminists from then until now, plus "cultural elitists" and non-Christians). By now I think voting GOP is just a habit for many heartland whites. It seems like the default way to vote.
I say that because, over the years, whites expressed less open racial animus, less discomfort with gay people, and some support for undocumented immigrants (at least pre-Trump) and still kept voting GOP.
Okereke might argue that these whites tell pollsters what they think the pollsters want to hear, and I can't disprove that. But I think at least a certain percentage of white Republicans could be shaken out of their complacency. One argument would be pure self-interest: You say you're dissatisfied with the way things are going in America. Have you tried not voting for the same party that's in been in power where you live for decades? And maybe some of these whites can see that a party rallying around a president who's indifferent to their needs can see the party's callousness toward others. Or maybe I'm just too naive, and white complacency is an insurmountable obstacle. I hope yesterday was a sign that that's not true.
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