Nigger

It is not an unusual privilege, at least in Western countries, to have one’s parents hysterically cheer for them at an away-game in a sport they aren’t even half-good at. It is almost as if your parents cheer louder when you are on the losing side. This is a nigh-universal experience for working or middle-class White people and no child interprets it as proof that they will inevitably "go pro," make varsity, or be anything but mediocre. Rather, the cheery whoops of the overeager parent to their embarrassed child are implied to mean a love that goes before any proof of athletic prowess is provided and remains afterwards when it is shown absent. The love of the parent for the child is unmediated by the whole whirring matrix of social relations that the child must learn to navigate as they grow up. The child need not prove themselves deserving of the parent’s affection; instead, they are encouraged to realize their faculties out of gratitude to the parent who has so lovingly reared them. There is a deeply Christian concept of grace here, totally foreign to that idea of family grounded in “merit.” For the latter, the family is just the first implement of a cutthroat meritocracy that starts in the household but ends in the jobs market. I suspect that El-Sayed was reared in a family which demanded, from a very early age, that he "live up" to the investment that was placed upon him by his parents. This kind of childhood inculcates a kind of extrinsic and insecure personality that is unable to love anything for its own sake and only for that status that it is afforded by others. This is not surprising, as their own parents had to look to the expressions written on neighbors’ faces before fully embracing their own children. Abdul El-Sayed and Vivek Ramaswamy are two sides of the same begrimed drachma. Ressentiful and reactive, they love things only for the repute they afford and desire to possess them simply because others desire them.