After two centuries of empire-building, of conquering and enslaving other peoples, amassing huge fortunes from the fruits of captive labor, and maintaining a monopolistic grip on political power, they don't quite play the dominant role in American political, cultural, and socioeconomic life they once did. That's a good thing overall, if you ask me, but it should come as no surprise that a backlash would develop among them as the nation's social hierarchy became more ethnically and culturally diverse:
Whites believe that they have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America, according to a new study from researchers at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School. The findings, say the authors, show that America has not achieved the "post-racial" society that some predicted in the wake of Barack Obama's election.
First, extremely small sample size, so grain of salt, etc. That said, I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts that a substantial majority of the white folks who took part on in this survey rely on, oh I dunno, resources such as these to inform their worldview. And given the prevalence of this media in our society, the degree of its influence and the deference paid to it by members of our policy and media elites, we should probably be grateful that most white folks in this country aren't convinced they're the victims of ethnic cleansing, let alone racist sentiment.
Also too, let's not forget that the predominant European cultural paradigm of the last several hundred years has been the establishment of dualistic political, military, economic and religious power structures that divide people into arbitrary columns of "winners" and "losers," victors and vanquished, believers and heathens, in a "zero-sum game" that's been virtually ingrained into the white man's collective psyche at this point. It's probably one reason why our modern-day Teabilly Manicheanism---with its Christian patriots and Muslim terrorists, Real Americans and Marxist subversives, Creators of Wealth and Looters & Moochers---has exerted such a strong emotional appeal to white folks in our time since it's simply channeling the ugly side of their cultural Zeitgeist, albeit it in cartoon form. Now, obviously, it's going to take many years, if not centuries, before white people begin to gradually disabuse themselves of their God-given assumptions of entitlement, and there's no shortage of mischief---and mass shootings, and war-making---that won't erupt periodically until we reach a greater state of cultural equilibrium between white folks and everyone else. In the interim, however, suffice to say that America simply can't become a majority non-Anglo nation quickly enough. It's the one thing that might actually save the Republic, because the ascendency of blacks and Latinos to the uppermost corridors of power in this country has, at this point in our history, driven a great plurality of white people utterly mad. Know it's not terribly polite to say, but that's certainly been my recent experience.
On the other hand, I could be playing up the cultural/historical signifiers a bit too much, and that the real problem is that a lot of white Americans are just a bunch of greedy little fucks, so there's that possibility, too.
(Via.) ---Vitelius
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