Anonymous Racist Mockery

I don't sound like I look. I was born in London, and moved to Sydney when I was eight. My parents are North Indian, but they were born in Kenya. Identity, culture and race are important to a lot of people, but they do less for me than the average human being, I suspect.

There is much more to me than the pigmentation of my rubbery outer layer. In fact, making a generalisation about someone based on this physical feature is delusional, and appealing to race when trying to offend or insult is profoundly lame. 

So, I was having a glance at the latest post from 'Stop These Things', an anonymous anti-wind blog with an unambiguous agenda: 

"We are not here to debate the wind industry – we are here to destroy it."

A few months back, they included me on their 'These People Don't Get It' page, but not after failing to check their facts before publishing them. They also listed the 'followers' of a fake Twitter account, but used a screenshot of the 'Following' list. Frequent failure is no impediment - anonymity means the author can quite literally publish anything, about anyone, and face no repercussion. Their most recent post is, in my eyes, a good example of this. 

Toying with the benefits of anonymous racism

Rogan Josh is a popular Kashmiri Indian dish. It's a direct, punny taunt related to my race (determined, surely, from one my many selfies). This isn't the first time I've seen a weirdly irrelevant reference to race when it comes to wind energy. This example is taken from a post on an American anti-wind website: 

Perhaps a more relevant example is the curious case of the anonymous twitter troll '@Journo_realdeal' - still tweeting fierce racist, homophobic and sexist abuse. A few months back, I tweeted something to both him and journalist George Megalogenis, but honestly, I can't remember what it was (the original thread has been deleted). The response of the anonymous troll, though, was stored by software engineering student Dan Nolan on Storify: 

Racist taunts are curiously jarring. I wonder if the author of 'Stop These Things' would have used the taunt were it not for the advantages afforded by anonymity, or the unchecked ease of typing words into a computer. 

It's clear one of the main aims of the blogger is to incite, irk and irritate members of the wind industry - hence, a focus on condescension and insult. Being reduced to one's race is unnerving, and having one's family name used as a racist jibe actually feels truly rancid.