Blaming Whitey

Before the Romans and Caledonians clashed in the Battle of Mons Graupius, a warlord named Calgacus delivered a speech to his men, an opprobrium of Pax Romana. The Romans had come to lay the garlanded chains of civilization on the countryside of what is now north-east Scotland, home of free Celtic tribes.

“To robbery, slaughter, plunder,” Calgacus said, “they give the lying name of empire; they make a wasteland and call it peace.”

This was a first-century rejection of the “bitter clingers” view articulated by Barack Obama in our time. Small town Americans, like those in the Midwest bearing the long brunt of globalization, he said, tend to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” The plunder of neoliberalism, from Ronald Reagan to Obama, left a wasteland called “progress.”

More than a decade later, Obama’s vituperations have only taken on a more explicit edge.

“What’s always interesting to me is the degree to which you’ve seen created in Republican politics the sense that white males are victims,” Obama told “The Breakfast Club.” “They are the ones who are under attack, which obviously doesn’t jive with both history and data and economics,” he went on. {snip}

The irony is that the GOP did no such thing. If anything, in fact, they took their white voters for granted as an expendable demographic. {snip}

The GOP’s neglect is part contempt, part fear. For more than half a century, whites have been conditioned to see themselves as the bearers of a litany of singular crimes in history. {snip}

But what does Obama mean by data and economics? These things in fact paint a portrait not of privilege but of despair.

Starting around 2000, whites and white men specifically became virtually the only group to experience a shortening lifespan. “For white Americans between 45 and 54, average life expectancy was no longer increasing; in fact, it was actually declining—in a pattern seen almost nowhere else on Earth,” Jim Zarroli reported in NPR. “This reversal has come almost entirely among white Americans without a four-year college degree, who make up 38 percent of the U.S. working-age population.”

{snip}

Does Obama mean, then, that whites are simply more “racist” than others? It’s not even clear what that term means anymore, but available data indicates Obama is wrong here, too.

A Rasmussen survey conducted July 21-22 found that Americans think blacks are more racist than whites, Hispanics, and Asians, paralleling surveying from 2013. {snip}

Data from a September 2017 GenForward Survey indicated that among racial groups whites were lowest in in-group preference. In an October 2017 GenForward Survey, a plurality of Hispanics (59 percent), blacks (46 percent), and Asians (61 percent) said demographic changes projected to make minorities the majority of the U.S. population by the middle of this century would “Strengthen the country,” compared to 35 percent of whites who agreed.

{snip}

When asked “which threat facing people in the United States is most concerning to them,” 39 percent of whites responded: “People in the U.S. inspired by foreign extremists.” Twenty nine percent of whites said “Individuals and groups from outside the U.S.” On the other hand, Hispanics (44 percent), blacks (55 percent), and Asians (52 percent) overwhelmingly identified “White extremists” as the greatest threat facing the U.S. Just 32 percent of whites agreed.

{snip}

All of this is not to give credence to the slur of “racism,” an almost meaningless term that now functions only as a cudgel to bat away the legitimate grievances, views, and tastes of white people. It is, instead, to show that by Obama’s own metrics, the group he resents the most also happens to be composed of people most likely to be victims of today’s American regime.

{snip}