Over the past three weeks, I’ve been getting hundreds of racist comments every day. They berate me for having adopted black children, they take pictures of my kids and create racist memes, and they say awful things about my boys. If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen some if it. Many people have asked me how this also started, so I wanted to provide the backstory. A timeline of the hate, if you will.

It started with a video I took Christmas morning of my girls opening their American Girl dolls Christmas morning. A couple weeks later a video went viral of two young white girls being gifted with black dolls and subsequently expressing their disapproval. I decided to upload a video of my girls receiving their dolls and the joy they felt as an alternative reaction.

The video of my girls was up for a week with very little fanfare, but then suddenly the video starting to get a ton of traffic, and with it, nasty comments. I was getting daily, and then hourly, comments about how disgusting I was, how my boys were going to kill me, how they would rape my daughters . . . all kinds of vile hate. Initially I was deleting the comments. Then they started coming in too swiftly for me to stay on top of it. I contemplated removing the comment option on the video, but then decided to leave it up. I wanted to write about what was happening, so that people could see this kind of overt racism in action in our “post-racial” society. But before I had time to do that, something else happened.

I finally figured out the source of all of the traffic on that video.

A prominent white supremacist “news outlet” had created a video defending the video of the girls reacting poorly to black dolls, making a case that it’s natural for children to only be attracted to dolls of their own race. The video attempted to debunk the famous doll study from the 50’s with all manner of pseudofacts, even suggesting that Martin Luther King Jr. was a puppet of the Communist party. After a tangent on the history of civil rights and the dangerous “Marxist” ideals of desegregation, we’re treated to about 5 minutes of irrelevant footage of white rappers that is, apparently, supposed to horrify us into realizing the ills of race-mixing. And then the video turned it’s attention on me . . . stealing footage from my own youtube channel, my blog, my TEDx talk, and the interview I did with Yahoo news. I was portrayed as a “nauseating” woman who hated her own race and who was training her daughters to be ashamed to be white. Which, listen. I do promote diversity. But I can also appreciate a good English scone, and I’ve never met a kale salad I didn’t like, which is about the Whitest thing anyone could ever eat. It’s possible to value diversity and enjoy your own heritage at the same time.

When I saw that this white supremacist organization had used images of my kids, without my permission, in a propaganda video for segregation, I was livid. So I took to twitter, asking both the organization and the “reporter” in the video, a woman by the name of Lana Lokteff, to remove the video. Until then, the harassment from racists had been contained to youtube, but me calling out these sacred cows of white supremacy on twitter created a firestorm. The racists circled their wagons on 4chan and other online white supremacy forums and came after me.

For several days, I fielded comments coming so fast that my twitter feed looked like the NYSE ticker. The comments all had a general, not-very-creative theme:

I’m disgusting I’m teaching my white kids to hate themselves I’m probably Jewish I’m probably cheating on my husband with a black man My black children will sexually assault their siblings

That last one was the worst to stomach, but after the shock wore off, the absurdity of it sank in. These men (they are predominantly men) are totally obsessed with the sexual virility of black men. It’s fetish-level obsession. They just cannot stop thinking about black men, sexually. And yeah, it’s racist as hell. But it’s also all kinds of Freudian weird. They are seriously, seriously threatened by the idea that black men are getting more action than they are.