Chud the Builder and America’s Tradition of White Racial Terror

The latest trend among white livestreamers for generating “content”? Approaching Black strangers minding their own business, repeatedly calling them “niggers,” labeling whatever way they respond as “chimping out” and—of course—collecting a pile of money from fans who literally pay to be entertained by racial humiliation.

The biggest star of these “ragebaiting” videos, as they’re called for obvious reasons, is 28-year-old Tennessean Dalton Eatherly, better known online as “Chud the Builder.” Eatherly’s sizable fanbase is built on livestreams in which he sidles up to random Black people, provokes them with racist abuse and dares them to react while threatening to shoot them with the gun and bear mace he carries. This little routine realized its Chekhovian inevitability this past Wednesday, May 13, when Chud shot a Black man—reportedly a disabled veteran—outside the courthouse where he was appearing in one of two criminal cases for which he was already out on bond. (Those cases include an early May incident when Chud refused to pay a $371 restaurant bill; the livestreamed footage of the incident, which you can still watch here, features him berating restaurant employees, including a South Asian server he calls a “jeet” and instructs to go “shit in the street.”) On Friday, the judge overseeing the shooting case announced charges of attempted murder, employing a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, as well as a $1.25 million bond. Along with a Black stranger, according to reports, Chud also shot himself in the arm. As writer Dixon D. White notes, there may be no more perfect metaphor for the self-inflicted wound of white supremacy.

The charges may sideline Chud for a bit, but a crop of copycats are scrambling to take his place. There’s Hexumlite, a 23-year-old looksmaxxer whose old shtick was insulting anonymous women on the street, but who’s now pivoting to asking random groups of white women what they “think about niggers” and advising others not to “get attacked by any niggers.” (Sidenote: If you’re unfamiliar with the phenomenon of looksmaxxing, maybe read this.) Then there’s Onlyusemeblade, real name is Brian Russo, a 40-something gaming streamer who in a recent video calls an unknown Black woman a “weird nigger bitch.” Others are surely vying for their time in the spotlight, and they’re joined by white people who aren’t livestreamers but have nonetheless been inspired by them. For example, in a clip widely circulated last week, a white man tells the Black security staff outside a Nashville restaurant they’re “chimping out” after they refuse to let him take his dog inside—which is to say, after doing their jobs. Hexumlite, who just happens to catch the altercation, signals his appreciation by shouting, “Chud the Builder!”

I expect the think pieces implicating social media are being written right now, bemoaning its tendency to reward outrage, humiliation, and spectacle. But I dunno. I actually think the bigger problem might be the racism that has always existed, shaping and grossly contorting American social, economic, and political life. Chud and his imitators aren’t some shocking new aberration wrought solely from the excesses of social media but an old American archetype given new breath by the bully pulpit of his time. White terror—the harassment and intimidation of Black people by white people confident they’ll face little to no meaningful repercussions—is a longstanding American tradition. The brief post–civil rights movement era when this behavior was widely considered socially unacceptable for white people— that’s the actual historical anomaly. A tiny blip along the timeline of an American history featuring a far older pattern of public anti-Blackness.

Every technological advance this nation has ever produced has inevitably become intertwined with the country’s oldest and most cherished traditions, of which the practice of anti-Black racism is perhaps the most salient. Photography gave us lynching postcards; film gave us Birth of A Nation; the Internet offered racists the anonymity that even Klan hoods could not. We are not in unprecedented territory. We are returning to form.

Also not new? The extremely tired reasons white people have historically used, and continue to offer, to justify these behaviors. Chud has cast himself as a crusader for a white race oppressed by the request to not publicly use the word “nigger” or to taunt and traumatize Black folks with it. “I am simply weary after 6 months of being attacked by our government for expressing the constitutional freedoms our ancestors fought and died for,” he whined on social media after his arrest for stiffing the restaurant. “It’s not illegal for White people to say the same word they say to each other.” In a message posted immediately after last week’s shooting, he declared, “We should all have the same right to free speech regardless of what color my skin is.” This has landed him guest spots on Alex Jones’s InfoWars and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’s show. His videos have likewise been bolstered by Twitter’s algorithm, which, under owner Elon Musk, favors all things white supremacist. But even a right-wing media ecosystem sustained purely by self-pitying white grievance—and demands for Black people to be put in their place—aren’t new. White Americans have, quite literally since the end of slavery, claimed to suffer under the “outrage of Negro domination,” to quote an 1868 newspaper, and claimed that their own violence toward Black folks, from verbal harassment to lynching, is justified by that threat. “The Klan…saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule,” a white woman wrote in 1914. All these years later and Musk, the world’s richest man, is tweet-complaining that Lupita Nyong’o’s being cast as Helen of Troy is evidence of anti-white racism. Black freedom is somehow always tantamount to white suffering.

Also worn out is the old American lie that Black are uniquely dangerous. “Chimping out,” the favorite slur of these livestreamers, is itself a decades-old online slur rooted in a centuries-long American tradition of animalizing Black people as impulsively violent, driven by instinct, and subhuman. The irony is positively breathtaking given what has always been the actual direction of American racial violence throughout history. If any of these people genuinely believed Black folks were half as dangerous as they claim, they would never make a day job out of harassing and verbally assaulting them. They count on Black restraint even as they pretend to believe it doesn’t exist! They know full well that most Black folks aren’t violent, and that even if they were (they aren’t), and even if their racist abuses are captured on video, the legal system has their backs. These are the same people who mock Black folks for talking about biased policing or systemic racism, even as they know no Black streamer could get away with doing this long enough to make a living off it. This asymmetry isn’t lost on them, as much as they pretend to be victims. “Series finale is dead chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free,” Chud wrote on social media less than a week before the shooting. “Stay tuned.” The power imbalance is the point.

And there’s nothing new to see either in white people using Black people as entertainment, with other white people tuning in to watch, and the whole spectacle being monetized. White Americans have been pay-per-viewing the dehumanization of Black people since minstrel shows became this country’s first original form of popular entertainment (before then, the country produced only derivatives of European and British theater) and lynchings served as white people’s favorite reasons for a Sunday picnic. The pleasure of consuming Black humiliation is worth the price because anti-Blackness is less an ideology than a psychological salve for a people long paranoid about status loss and the potential for revenge. Secure people don’t need to publicly humiliate strangers to feel good, and people who genuinely feel superior don’t pass their days trying to provoke people they claim to view as inferior. The obsessive need to publicly degrade Black people speaks to a profound lack in those who feel compelled to do it—that’s true for the audience who can’t get enough of it, too.

But white supremacy has always masqueraded as strength, while actually being a transparent psychological effort to manage the deepest of insecurities. Which brings us to the truth at the core of all this, which is the profound and pathetic insecurity that drives it. Hexumlite, the aforementioned heir apparent to Chud’s throne, posts an endless stream of videos in which he admits deep self-loathing, saying in one that “deep down inside, man, I’m still miserable” and confessing to feeling like “a piece of shit” in another. Onlyusemeblade—if I’m actually reading this right—recently had to have some of his toes amputated due to years of alcohol abuse. Chud himself is a jobless deadbeat dad with a rap sheet, an estranged baby mama, and a son he doesn’t live with who had to start a fundraiser last year because of his inability to hold a job. If he were Black, his supporters would call him a stereotype. (Instead, since the shooting, they’ve surfaced the old link and flooded it with donations because of course they have.) My point is, these aren’t secure people expressing confidence in their superiority. They’re losers and failsons who use Black people as scapegoats for their own shortcomings and failures.

“There is something distorted about the psyche” of racists, Toni Morrison famously said. “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is: White people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it.”