#yes billys actions were racially motivated

[suwunnysideup]

anyways, if the reblogs and tags didn’t clarify enough: this blog is fucking NOT a welcome space for billy stans.

he’s a fucking racist and abusive asshole of a man. yes he was abused, but that gives us the reason for his actions, it does not fucking excuse it. y’all do triple backflips through flaming hoops to defend this man while demonizing female characters (mainly nancy) for literally being teenagers. nancy called a relationship bullshit bc she was drunk and in agony over losing a friend and having everyone act like it never happened. she pointed a gun at steve to scare him off because a fucking demogorgon was coming and he didn’t know. she takes up arms to defend the kids from so many different threats while also dealing with her own fucking issues. billy threw lucas against a wall and threatened to break him just bc he was black and hanging around max. yes, he definitely could’ve used a support system like jonathan had, but he never fucking tried to make one. he and max could’ve tried to bond together under the abuse of neil. he could’ve talked to somebody - anybody - but he chose not to and instead lash out and take his rage out on anyone and everyone. did the narrative treat him weirdly? yes, i think so. but that doesn’t make him into this uwu soft boy y’all want him to be so desperately. like, this is the man who wanted to beat on kids and literally tried to bash steve’s face in with his fists. he intimidates and pushes around anyone he can, namely max and lucas. the duffer brothers and caleb confirmed his actions were racially motivated towards lucas. i’m not saying he deserved to die, nor am i ignoring the obvious trauma he went through, but i’m not using it to justify his actions and make excuses for his shitty behavior.

idc how y’all headcanon him but it’s fucking weird how much y’all wanna change about him to make him into ur sad boy of the month. anyways, rant fucking over with.

[henrysglock]

unpopular opinion: the people who say Billy is an irredeemably evil character are the same people who fail to see that there's no actual explicit scene where Billy keeps Max away from Lucas for racially motivated reasons (he's mostly just trying to cover his ass to avoid getting beaten up by Neil, who's likely the bigger racist influence; Billy isn't racist by default so much as it would likely be learned behaviours from Neil. Don't even get me started on how Billy's effeminate Glam Rock aesthetic is likely seen as a huge Disappointment to Masculinity in Neil's mind as well, but I digress) and in the same breath as saying "Billy fans are evil for supporting a character who doesn't have a shred of good in him", will turn around and write multiple paragraphs about how Henry isn't evil by choice because he's a victim of Brenner's abuse, the Upside Down is what made Henry so evil, etc etc. While completely ignoring the fact that most of Billy's notably problematic behaviour was a result of the Mindflayer and likely wasn't a conscious decision. Or if they were conscious decisions, Billy made those decisions because he was raised in an environment that didn't allow him alternative ways of thinking. Just. Like. Henry. My point being... the people who idolize Henry but demonize Billy at the same time are straight up hypocrites.

You see, Anon, that's the inherent tragedy in characters like Billy and (in my own pet addition) Jason. They were both around the same age: teenagers. Did they do horrible shit? Absolutely. Was any of it excusable? Absolutely not.

Did they still have a whole life ahead of them to turn it around? Yes, and that's the tragedy.

Billy was a racist, though. There's that scene in ST2 where he tells Max to stay away from "certain types of people", and that type of person is Lucas, the black boy. So yeah, he's a racist. Undeniably so. He was also abusive to Max in major ways in ST2. And yes, he's got some major masculinity issues. That's no excuse for his behavior. This is all pre-Mindflayer. This was just Billy. However. He was 18. He was 3 months into adulthood, and while his actions are his own and there would have been necessary reparations/people who wouldn't and shouldn't forgive him...Billy's response to those old memories of being loved showed us that he had a chance, however slim, to turn his shit around if he got a proper bonk on the head (several, perhaps). His chance at changing was taken away from him. That's the tragedy of his character.

Jason is much the same. He was grief-maddened by the death of a girlfriend he refused to admit he didn't actually know. He watched his friend die under incomprehensible conditions. He was not 'evil' from the get-go. He wasn't even a proper antagonist until Chrissy died. He was looking for someone to blame and maniacally set his sites on the police's scapegoat club leader. Hellfire club wasn't even on his radar re: Chrissy until the cops leaked it. He's more complex than most people like to admit. Was any of his shit excusable? Absolutely not. Is it explicable? Yes. There's a logical progression to the things he does, despite his behavior being properly unhinged...and that wasn't the type of behavior we really see him engage in before Chrissy's death. Therein lies the tragedy: He wasn't always that way, and any chance (however slim) at walking it back was taken from him.

One is much the same in a multitude of ways: He wasn't always like this, his circumstances pushed him, and his actions remain inexcusable.

So I completely agree that it's confusing to see people treat the three of them so differently from each other. They're the same guy in different flavors.

Send me unpopular opinions!

[btswrckd]

I saw a post when I was scrolling through the Stranger Things tags that was defending Billy’s actions and brought up episode 9 when he beats the shit out of Steve. The post said that Billy was just concerned about the fact that Max had taken off and was found at some random house with Steve Harrington, and here’s my take on it:

As I’m rewatching Stranger Things, I noticed a little something about the universally hated Billy Hargrove. This guy went out of his way to be an asshole to Max and just about everyone else unless he’s trying to get into a girls pants, but even then he’s pretty douchey. Now Billy seems to despise Max and her mom, that’s what I took away from his every interaction with them. And yes, I’m well aware that he targeted Lucas from the get go (it’s racially motivated, guys, let’s not try to sugarcoat it or see it as something else), and spends a majority of his time threatening Max with harming Lucas if he saw them together, and he stormed into Joyce’s house to make good on that threat. But what I’m getting at is that throughout the entire second season, he tells literally everybody that Max isn’t his sister and to never refer to her as such. Now I’m at episode 9 of the season when he drives up to the Byers home and confronts Steve about Max’s whereabouts, and I noticed that after he caught Steve in his lie, he said “My 13 year old sister” not step-sister, not Max, not any of the names he’s called her so far, but sister. It sucks that we never got to know Billy as a character or how damaged he truly was. Yeah, we got a bit of a backstory in season 3, but we never got any real reason as to why he hated Max and her mom so much. I think he honestly cared for Max, I truly do, and given how broken up Max was about his death, I think he showed it to her more than we were allowed to see as viewers. Not all of his actions are excusable, certainly not the way he treated Lucas but I truly believe that he was an ass simply because he never wanted anyone to get close to him again.

[barbara-gordons-glasses]

some of yall in my st post about billy are concerning me. just to be clear

1.) Billy was racist--it was confirmed by the Duffers that his act against Lucas was racially motivated.

2.) Yes, Karen takes all the blame, seeing as how she was the adult, but that seems to be the only part y’all are focusing on. Care to tell me how his other acts of violence and abuse towards the characters of the show are justified?

3.) He abused Max since his father and her mother got together, which, in season three, showed Max as a five year-old, and Billy as a twelve-year old. He has been abusing her for years. That has been clarified multiple times by the actors and writers of the show.

4.) Now, onto the good stuff, and I want you all to listen very carefully--

Billy is a racist abuser who tried to kill the children multiple times. Just because he was abused doesn’t excuse his actions. Just because he saved El doesn’t excuse his actions. He is still a bad person. He has no room for a redemption arc. And don’t bother fighting me on that, because you know that if he were casted by an ugly person, y’all would be agreeing.

[hawkinsschoolcounselor]

Billy’s redemption arc pleeeeease

Let me preface this by saying I am a sucker for a good redemption arc. The idea that a person who did terrible things could atone and be forgiven is such a powerful thing to me. I will gladly discuss Billy and his redemption arc, and I will use another famous redemption story for comparison.

Billy was shown to be a number of things in Season 2, none of them good. He was abusive, controlling, racist, and belligerent. He did not know how to go through life and approach a problem without using violence and fear. This is a classic villain, complete with the lack of concern for the aftermath of his wrath. He taunts Steve, and makes it a point to dethrone him as the King of Hawkins High. He’s top dog, and he won’t settle for anything less. He uses fear to control Max, going as far as to make it seem as if he would run over a group of kids. He warns her to stay away from Lucas. One could argue it’s not racially motivated, but we seem to be meant to see it as such. He makes an actual attempt to assault Lucas, a 13 year old, simply for interacting with Max. 

These are the actions of a violent man, but, more importantly, an unstable man. Billy is constantly on edge, ready to fly off the handle. It was not surprising at all to find him the victim of an abusive father. Billy shows his own fear as his father tears into him for not taking care of his sister. It’s not really unrealistic for him to twist this into controlling her, as that would be a means to avoid his own abuse. It’s not something he should be forgiven for, but it does change the context significantly. Billy isn’t a purely evil villain at this point, he’s someone trying to keep himself free of abuse. His actions are ultimately rooted in fear and insecurity. The seeds of pity begin to be sown. This man didn’t need to end up like this.

When he has his fight with Steve, Billy becomes completely unhinged. Steve starts off winning the fight. In Billy’s mind, if he returns from that house, battered and bruised in defeat, without his sister, he may as well reserve a bed at the hospital for when his dad is done with him. He’s fights as if he’s impervious to pain, and it’s likely due to running on absolute adrenaline. Losing is not an option here. In the end, it took Max threatening to take away his masculinity, which he worked hard to build up, before he relented.

After Season 2, we’re not meant to forgive Billy, but we are meant to see there is more going on there than meets the eye. He’s an asshole, but not evil.

Season 3 picks up with Billy continuing to court Karen Wheeler. Billy could theoretically pick up any woman he wants, so why go for Karen? I hate Freudian analysis, but I can’t help myself here. We’re later shown that Billy loved his mother, and it irreparably changed his life when she was driven away by his father. Billy is looking to satisfy that emptiness in his life. He wants a loving mother again, even if it’s not his own. He isn’t simply attracted to Karen, and this is why we are shown him resisting the urge to attack her, but not Heather.

Billy is also shown as terrified when the monster attacks him. He’s depicted as helpless. All of his masculinity, his strength, was powerless to save him. He’s supposed to be a tragic figure at this point. He’s being torn down, slowly but surely. He cries as the Mindflayer threatens El through him. He grovels and laments his actions in the sauna before the Mindflayer activates. He’s horrified at what he’s being made to do. Again, we’re meant to see him as not evil. Not good either, but not evil.

This has the workings of a classic redemption story. If we look at Darth Vader in the Star Wars saga, we see a man who followed a similar trajectory. He was a happy enough child, but his fears twisted him into something horrible. He caused tremendous amounts of pain and terror. In the end, though, he was redeemed through his actions. But his redeeming action wasn’t killing the emperor. No, it was saving his son, Luke. He knew doing so would kill him and require him to betray his master, but he prevailed. The important thing here is that Vader was redeemed because he earned forgiveness for his actions. Luke was able to see the side of Vader that he always believed was in there. He did penance for his destruction of the Jedi, the ultimately fatal attack on his wife, and the violence against his children. 

Billy’s redemption is not complete, and unfortunately never will be. The problem here is that while he gave his life to save El, it was never El’s forgiveness that he needed. His biggest victim in his reign of terror has always been Max. Curiously, Max was seen as being worried about Billy to a degree that depictions of their relationship doesn’t support. Sure he’s her brother, but she fears for him as if she loved him. This was a characterization change that we would have needed to witness to allow us to fully forgive Billy and redeem him. Yes, we get to see that Billy was a much different person with his mother in his life. He was happy, and he’s spent most of his life burying that memory due to the pain it causes him. Not only is the memory of his lost mother painful, but being that happy, carefree child resulted in his father’s abuse. 

What we needed, but didn’t get, was for Billy to sacrifice himself for Max, rather than El. We needed to see him struggle against the compulsion to attack Max, but instead we see him one-shot her as she tries to get through to him. There’s no warning Max to step aside, no hesitation to suggest he tries to resist, he just decks her and keeps going. 

The writers could argue that El had to be the one because only she saw the memory that got through to him. (Side note: the Mindflayer seems weak to happy memories).They could have found a way around this though. Instead, we get a jarring end to Billy in that we’re meant to believe that Max would be that devastated at the loss of her abuser. Billy’s redemption falls short because of this, tragically ending an already tragic character. He dies human, but not redeemed.

One thing I would like to point out is a (perhaps unintentional) parallel to Will. In addition to their similar names, both come from broken families with abusive fathers and loving mothers. In Billy’s case, he ends up with the abusive father, but Will gets the loving mother. To me, Billy is a dark reflection of Will. Could Will have ended up like Billy if he were forced to be with Lonnie? Would Billy have been more like Will had he been able to stay with his mother? 

[theconservativebrief]

President Donald Trump is trying to fool evangelicals like me. This time, it’s using a false threat of an invasion from a “caravan” of poor people marching through Mexico to seek asylum legally. It should be obvious to everyone. But it isn’t — research shows that evangelicals tend to have strong political opinions when it comes to immigration, so they are distinctly open to this fear-driven message.

I’m a professor, pastor, and writer who serves at the flagship school of institutional evangelicalism, Wheaton College. I’ve spoken and researched the topic of evangelicals and immigration for five years, due to my concern about how this community seems to reject their deeply held values when it comes to welcoming refugees into our country. As I’ve seen the anti-immigration fervor rise among evangelicals, I’ve hosted an evangelical leaders summit and rallied evangelicals to the engage on these issues.

The Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, where I currently work, partnered with LifeWay Research in May 2018 to poll 3,000 Americans about their voting in the most recent national election. The purpose was to understand evangelical voting patterns. We found, as other research projects support, that white evangelicals are highly motivated to support President Donald Trump around the issue of immigration. As his rhetoric around the caravan shows, President Trump clearly knows this.

As evangelicals prepare to vote, we need to consider how this messaging has found purchase in our pews and, more importantly, how our faith calls us to respond. It makes little of the depth of God’s love for us in Christ by teaching us that our love for others is conditioned by country, race, or ethnicity. Regardless of political affiliation and positions, evangelicals need to see this culture of fear of others for what it is: un-Christian.

Before I dive into the research, it’s important to explain how we determined the evangelical label in our surveys.

Evangelicalism is one the poorest defined political and religious terms, yet is ubiquitous today. One reason for this is a lack of consensus among pollsters as to how to determine and measure evangelicals. Today, many pollsters rely on combinations of self-identification, belief, denomination, or race as drivers of evangelical identity. The patchwork nature of the label means that many journalists and pundits are often working off different definitions.

In an effort to balance these different approaches, our study surveyed evangelicals by belief and by self-identification. To determine if they fit the profile of evangelical by belief, they had to “strongly agree” with four separate statements:

1. The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.

2. It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.

3. Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.

4. Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.

On questions of immigration cited below, differences between self-identified evangelicals and evangelicals by belief were statistically negligible. But for simplicity sake, we will use the numbers from evangelicals by belief only. I should also note that this study occurred prior to the conflict over family separation at the border.

Using these constructs, we found that for evangelicals, immigration was a major factor in voting for Donald Trump in 2016. Sixty-two percent of evangelicals who voted for Trump listed immigration as one reason for their vote; 15 percent saying it was the single most important factor.

We then asked these evangelicals what they thought of the Trump administration’s actions on immigration since he took office. We found that two out of three evangelicals said they support the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce illegal immigration, while 63 percent support recent reductions in the number of legal immigrants to the United States.

However, we found the most significant splits within evangelical responses on these questions when we broke it down by race and ethnicity. White evangelicals overwhelmingly back more hardline positions on immigration, with three-fourths wanting a reduction in legal immigration and 82 percent supporting the administration’s efforts on illegal immigration.

But few evangelical people of color agreed. Only one-third of African-American evangelicals and half of Hispanics supported reductions in legal immigration, with slightly smaller percentages supporting the administration’s efforts on illegal immigration — 35 and 47 percent respectively.

It is hard not to conclude that far too many white evangelicals are motivated by racial anxiety and xenophobia compared to evangelicals of color. More research certainly is needed, but undoubtedly white evangelicals would do well to turn off cable news and listen to their sisters and brothers in the increasingly diverse pews of evangelical churches for a different view.

When it comes to immigration, evangelicals tend to be more anti-immigration, supporting reductions in immigration, tightening of borders, and (as other studies show) positions on refugees. How should Christians respond to these numbers and, more importantly, how should Christians think about immigration and refugees?

These numbers tell me is that many evangelicals are not particularly good at loving strangers, aliens, and pilgrims. Yet throughout scripture we find this value is a central pillar of the Christian faith. In what Christians call the Old Testament, God places hospitality and protection of foreigners at the core of Israel’s ethical identity.

In two passages, God gives us the justification for why this is so important. In Leviticus 19:34, “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God,” while in Deuteronomy 10:19, “So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

Notice this commandment is conditioned by Israel’s history: They were to welcome the foreigner because they too had been foreigners in a strange land. This same conditional theme is picked up in the New Testament, this time in relation to how Christians are supposed to live in light of Christ’s love for us. At its most basic level we are called to love others unconditionally and sacrificially because Christ first loved us in the same way.

Political and media narratives tell you that distrusting, fearing, or even hating immigrants and refugees is a justified feeling. But scripture calls us to see ourselves in the immigrant and to love others as Christ first loved us.

Despite this “loving your neighbor” phrase, people do not naturally love the stranger. They do not naturally open their homes, their dinner tables, their churches, and, yes, their countries to others. We have an instinct to hoard, to protect what we have, and to insist others go find their own security and provisions.

More to the point, it is hard for American Christians to grasp the depth of suffering in the world when the grocery store is fully stocked and the emergency room is just down the road for many of us. This is not to say there are not real challenges and real needs in our country. Yet, within our bubble of American evangelicalism, we often lose sight of how much suffering there is in the world.

But teaching people to love and show hospitality toward immigrants and refugees isn’t just about getting our own house in order — we must fight the counter-narratives at work both in and out of the church.

We live in a culture where many political and religious leaders are teaching believers to fear the stranger. What is clear from the data is that this counter-discipling narrative is winning in the church, particularly among white evangelicals.

One recent infamous example was the Fox News guest who claimed immigrants in the caravan traveling through Mexico was carrying leprosy, smallpox, and tuberculosis and were going to “infect our people in the United States.” Despite having no evidence of this claim — and the fact that the last known case of smallpox was in Somalia in 1977 — this claim was given airtime on a major news network. These kinds of reports are not simply false but designed to provoke animosity, leading audiences in a culture of fear toward these people.

In other words, Christians are being conditioned to see threats where we would otherwise see suffering and a window to preach the gospel; to trade-in our gospel mission for a false sense of personal security.

I have been, along with many other evangelical leaders, a strong proponent of US immigration reform. The system as currently constituted is not working and needs to be addressed. But too often politicians seem more interested in using immigration as a means of galvanizing their base and demonizing their opponents than actually coming up with solutions.

When I and other evangelicals speak up on the importance of opening our arms to refugees and immigrants, I get a flood of complaints about open borders and references to George Soros. In emails and on social media, Christians whose profiles lead with tags such as “sinner redeemed by grace,” unleash anger that often surprises me.

Love for immigrants and refugees does not mean we ignore immigration reform. Rather, it makes demands on the way we structure new immigration policy, the way we treat those who seek refuge and safety, and how we treat those already in our country.

My views — like many evangelical leaders who are part of the Evangelical Immigration Table — have more in common with former President George W. Bush’s views than George Soros’s. But in today’s world, Bush is often painted as an immigration radical by my fellow evangelicals.

Furthermore, Christians need to be careful of those who misuse Romans 13:1-4, a passage that tells Christians to live in a way that is respectful and honoring toward our governing authority, while recognizing that God is sovereign over kings and presidents.

It is not, however, a trump card for letting the government do whatever it wants. The government exists under God’s authority and is subject to God’s moral law and is not entitled to our unquestioned fealty. This passage has long been used to justify immoral, un-Christian policies under the guise of the government protecting its citizens. But it is a misunderstanding of the passage.

In future generations, I think our evangelical heirs will look back in disappointment upon our response to the refugee crisis of our time. How could we have seen the suffering, heard the cries of anguish, and done so little? For evangelicals living today it is easy to look back and say we would have fought slavery or marched along with civil rights leaders. It is altogether harder to actually make those sacrifices today in the face of suffering.

If this is indeed the “election of the caravan,” my prayer is that evangelicals will recognize the opportunity it affords us to speak about how these refugees are made in the image of God. As Christians, we should be driven by compassion for those men, women, and children. And, as Americans, we should value a system that treats them fairly, in accordance with just laws.

I suspect that Christians will wake up this Wednesday morning and the so-called dangerous, filthy caravan of invading barbarian criminals will suddenly be gone from the political coverage. Oh, the asylum seekers will still be there. But the ads, the campaign speeches, and the tweets trying to stoke fears will magically disappear when polls close.

And white evangelical Christians will be able to go back to their lives, safe once again. That is, until politicians need us to be afraid again. There will always be another caravan, another group of marginalized or suffering people.

Our evangelical witness would be in a better place if we were less easily fooled.

Ed Stetzer leads the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. His most recent book is Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst, which addresses how often Christians now are driven by fear, rather than faith.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Original Source -> Fellow evangelicals: stop falling for Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric

via The Conservative Brief