Whiteness is a sinking ship. Most white people have picked up on this, and a fair number of us are desperate to distance ourselves from whiteness. Others advocate for the language of critical race theory as a means of self-defense. We're excoriated for our perceived privilege yet powerless to express our agency and self-worth as white people. Attempts to do so are discarded as white fragility, or worse, as frank racism.
Part of the cachet that Donald Trump has for white voters of a certain age, those roughly 50 and older, is that he doesn't vilify them. His victory was in no small part thanks to his ability to tap into them as a disaffected people largely dismissed as fly over country. Traditional forms of privilege, of classism, are seen as an acceptable means to discount the white hoi polloi.
And that's a problem. White privilege doesn't take into account the circumstances of white people as individuals. We neglect to examine the privilege of say, being born in a developed country, and are instead fixated on how whiteness is a manifestation of oppression. And that's really what there is to know about critical race theory. It assigns all malaise, all fault, all wickedness into whiteness as the identity of the oppressor.
If self-respecting white people seem "defensive" about being vilified, it's with good reason.
Pick and choose your sides as you see fit. You live in the United States, and you can sense the way the wind is blowing. Demography is destiny, and whiteness as the de facto identity of the United States is no longer our present, much less our future. That's the way that it should be, too.
I can see certain parts of America that used to be virtually lily white (with a smattering of black) becoming more chromatic, and that is disconcerting to a good number of white folks. Ironically I’m quite sensitive about the ethnic composition of my surroundings, having lived in a small town Alabama and metro Atlanta. Regardless of how many Indian-owned gas stations and hotels, Vietnamese nail salons, Chinese restaurants, and Mexican laborers around, Congress is still 78% white, the Supreme Court has 7 white justices out of 9, and the president is 100% white.
The demographics of America is changing (as always), but just because it’s gradually becoming less white, it doesn’t mean that today white people are the underdogs. Not by a long shot. What’s happening is that old conservative white men are beginning to lose solid political control, and they resent having to compromise or share power with liberals and people of color.
As a newcomer I consider compromise as the norm rather than the exception. While my skin tone remains the same, I have essentially remade myself to adapt to the American way of life. Being a brown-skinned guy with a funny name in America, I have to constantly prove myself. I essentially have to work twice as hard and be twice as knowledgeable to earn the same income. As such, it is difficult for me to sympathize with white folks complaining that they have to compromise a little here and there.
I’m not even asking them to meet me halfway. I learned their language, and their culture, and their popular references, and I even adopt many of their values. All I ask in return is to accept me as an equal despite my foreign birth place, and that my views are not going to jive 100% with theirs. Apparently even this is a bridge too far for many of them.
I’m even less sympathetic because many of these same folks love to complain about ‘entitlements’, yet at the same time they expect to maintain a default dominant position in society based on their skin color alone, which they don’t earn. They’re all about merit and the free market until they lose their job to smarter and/or harder working brown people, then it’s about ‘illegal’ immigrants destroying America. They want to “make America great again” like in the 50’s, when blacks knew their place and other colors were either in reservations or across the border. For people who love to tout “personal responsibility”, they sure love to place the blame of their failings on other (non white) persons instead of on themselves.
I get it, I actually do. As a Javanese I belong to the dominant ethnic group in Indonesia. But, unlike Trump supporters I never expect to maintain an advantage in society due to my ethnicity alone.