Right wing memes are like right wing comedy. They are not funny. They are mean spirited, illogical, and often prove the point they are disputing. Take, for instance, the below meme posted on Bookface by a high school acquaintance of mine, who is all teabaggy.
Fittingly enough, it's shared from a page called "Right Wing News." This currently has close to 33k 'likes' and has been shared close to 12k times. There are so many things wrong this this that trying to make sense of it from a right wing perspective almost makes my head explode. However, it has one very positive benefit--it is clearly a racist litmus test. If you think these two are comparable, you are a racist. If you are willing to twist reality to fit this warped view of the world, you are a racist. There's no wiggle room.
There is no comparison here--maybe if Al Sharpton owned a NASCAR team, or a Hockey team and then went off on whitey you might have the grounds for some comparison, but even then they are not the same. I don't even know what it is that Al Sharpton was supposed to have said, and I expect most of the 33k who liked this don't know either. They don't need to know--he's a vocal black male and he must hate whites like they hate blacks. That's about as close to empathy as they get--assuming that everyone else thinks in the same warped way that they do. What they will not recognize--because they are aggrieved, put-upon white victims of whatever--is the power differential. Every inconsequential statement by someone who fights for minority rights is filed away to be used years later to exonerate people like Donald Sterling, or Lou Dobbs, or whatever racist jackhole the right rushes to defend (Ducky Boo Boo, Paula Deen, Zimmerman, Limbaugh, ad nauseum, ad infinitum--the whole pantheon of right wing heroes). They cannot acknowledge that racism IS a one-way street!
When 29% of young white males will spend time in prison during their lifetime--you can get back to me about the unicorn of reverse racism. When housing, loans, jobs are denied to white people due to their whiteness, you might have a case. When violence, discrimination, Jim Crow voting laws, uneven drug crime sentencing, and targeted stop and frisk policies are meted out to white people based on their whiteness, I'll join your cause. When white people are far and away overexposed to the burden of pollution and toxins, you might be making some sense. And lastly, when white people have been enslaved for hundreds of years, then face another century of a more subtle form of slavery, and then finally gain some measure of equality at the cost of a generation of leaders, or when whites are disproportionally drafted to fight non-whites thousands of miles away at a time when urban racial injustice was off the charts... I could go on and on. It would take a much longer diary than this to list all the nefarious ways that racism works in the USA. It would take another extremely long diary to list all the privileges granted to these whinging cry-babies, solely due to their whiteness.
I'm very tempted to unfriend this guy and it's not the first time he's posted batshit crazy stuff. But for now I'll tolerate him because he teaches me about the crap these people believe, and he keeps me abreast of the latest overwrought right wing freakout talking points (BENGHAZI!!!). But the main reason he's still my FB friend is that I think he's really not a bad person inside and that he's been warped by right-wing media into this caricature of Archie Bunker. For his part, he tolerates my Islamocommunofascistatheist Facebook posts. At times I become cynical and think that there is no hope for people like him (and I have unfriended a handful of childhood friends who were intolerable), but the optimist in me thinks that maybe reality will seep in at some point. Maybe the ACA will save a friend or a loved one and he'll start to question all the lies he's been fed. Having hope is important, and it's also important to me to extend them the empathy they deny to others.