Currently, there is a very real feeling that is evident in much of 2016 white America — a feeling of anxiety, of fear and of oppression. It’s a feeling that is not based in reality … it’s a feeling based on a nostalgic America, an America that never truly existed. There is a mood of a pending apocalypse, where people insist that white Americans are discriminated at the same rate as Americans of color. One where ISIS has agents all throughout America, ready to stab a knife into our “civilization.” Along with this real anxiety and fear, there is also a feeling of a loss of control and determination over one’s life in white America.
The United States and the world is changing fast and this change has become increasingly visible. There is a massive push back, on multiple fronts — against white supremacy, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. Truth be told, many of the gains are more symbolic than substantive.
On the substantive side, we have the rise of the Movement for Black Lives, which is perhaps the strongest push against white supremacy since the Black Power movement faded. It has succeeded in putting white supremacy — and whiteness — at the center of conversation across the country. The fight has moved far beyond that of police brutality against black America. It has and will continue to evolve into a push against the oppression black America continues to face.
One of the things the Movement for Black Lives has done is call out the toxicity of whiteness, or, really, the mirage that is whiteness. “White” has changed and evolved over time as Italians, Polish, and Irish were not white once, but then became white. We are pointing out the lie of whiteness, the lie that they still teach their children of their superiority and that black is something to both fear and loathe. The lie that their life is worth more than that of a black child’s, as you see when people find nothing wrong when a black child is struck down.
Or as James Baldwin wrote:
“By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defined themselves.”
We are holding these lies — this myth — up to their faces. The pushback has grown, and the delusion of whiteness has grown, so far so that I have seen multiple times a white person feel that it is racist when someone calls them “white.”
Even symbolic symbols of this change have caused uproars, as black capitalist Beyoncé caused with her ‘Formation’ video and Super Bowl halftime performance. A black women owning her sexuality and her blackness at the same time scared so much of this nation.
The election of Barack Obama is probably the perfect example of a symbolic change in America. Black America was largely left out of the so-called economic recovery and black America is in worse condition now than it was when Obama was elected.
Now, even though his election was largely symbolic, you cannot dismiss the impact the imagery of a black man being elected president of the United States had on much of white America, which had been feeling anxious for a long time now.
You add all of this with the fact that it’s long been hard on working class and poor whites. That jobs have disappeared, wages have stagnated and they have long been abandoned by neo-liberal economics. Much of America is not middle class anymore and just one-life crises away from poverty. This is real.
But, we can’t ignore the fact that the Republican Party has for years played the politics of the Southern Strategy, pioneered by Richard M. Nixon. Using the centuries-old divide-and-conquer tactics, the capitalistic origins of white supremacy was this divide of white poor and indentured servants and enslaved Africans.
Stoking this fear, the absorbing of the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party, made them the white nationalist party. The party ended up being a marriage of those benefiting off black death and oppression, and international death and oppression, with their class buffer of working class and poor whites. It just kept feeding this divide.
The destruction of their advantages and increasing mirror of their whiteness, a whiteness being increasingly racialized, is causing what one could equate to a nervous breakdown of white America.
9/11 broke America’s sense of safety of the “outside world” and has never recovered. This impacted the white American sensibility the most. This is where we see the xenophobic, anti-black, anti-Islamic fear that brought us Obama birthers and the Trump supporter who believes the man he suckered punch could have been a part of ISIS.
Trump is feeding into divisions that have long been there, but controlled. He’s letting people know it’s OK to lash out against those they fear. The hate and racism in those people has long been there and it’s a lie to say otherwise. It’s not something that’s new. The hate and racism coming from so many Americans was thinly veiled at best. But, now they have a leader to coalesce around.
This nervous breakdown is a very real problem, and not one to laugh at. It’s dangerous, as it’s something that isn’t limited to any part of the country, or really even political affiliation. This past weekend a UW-Madison First Wave student was, let’s call it what it is, assaulted in a hate crime. This campus sent out a non-descript letter about the event. Keeping this assault quiet.
These types of assaults will become more common as this continues. Lives are quite literally in danger. This inevitable push back against the changing demographics and against the Movement for Black Lives is in full swing. One can only expect that the 2016 Republican National Convention — in Cleveland, Ohio — will be at best contentious in the summer heat.
Trump is feeding into divisions that have long been there, but controlled. He’s letting people know it’s OK to lash out against those they fear. The hate and racism in those people has long been there and it’s a lie to say otherwise. It’s not something that’s new. The hate and racism coming from so many Americans was thinly veiled at best. But, now they have a leader to coalesce around.
The practice of being white isn’t one rooted in any art, culture, or positive history. There is no white culture, as whiteness doesn’t really exist as a culture outside of oppression. Outside of white supremacy, there is no whiteness. And the mirror being held up is scary; it’s scary because of the fear of losing that status. A status that will inevitably be lost.
We’re living in a nation where white is the default; everything grows out of whiteness. It is the blank oppressive and destructive canvas of America, a canvas that all others should aspire to be. It’s the centering of the white experience, safety, convenience, at the robbery and labor of black and brown bodies.
There’s an interesting aspect to this: where part of the anguish of those that fear of becoming the white “minority” is that they will reap retribution from people of color, particularly black people. There is a massive amount of cognitive dissonance here, as many of these same people feel that white people are just as — if not more — discriminated against than people of color. They like to think the history of oppression of black Americans was not and is not “that bad.” That what we say we’re experiencing isn’t in fact happening.
If that was the case, then what are they scared of? You scared of black and brown people?
