When the history of the early decades of this century is written 100 years from now, it will be recorded as a time when those who had power were challenged by those who did not.
In the United States, this tectonic shift can be seen in the refusal of some whites to acknowledge the reality of white Americans becoming a majority-minority in this country. This has manifested itself in the election of former President Donald J. Trump; the insurrection of Jan. 6,;the unending ugliness between Republicans, who represent the status quo, and Democrats, who represent change; and most recently, the irrational, illogical, unreasonable acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, whose very act of vigilantism precipitated the situation in which he found the need to defend himself by killing two men and injuring another.
Even the guilty verdict in the Ahmaud Arbery trial reinforced this nation’s racial divide. Though his death was clearly a hate crime, the clever prosecutor, Linda Dunikoski, elicited a guilty verdict against the thee men who gunned him down by recasting the case as an example of an improper citizen’s arrest. You have to wonder how far she would’ve gotten with a mostly white jury in Georgia had she brought up the racism on which the crime turned. (Maybe the prosecution could’ve used her cleverness in the Rittenhouse case.) What Dunikoski realized no doubt is that mentioning racism to white people today is an explosive subject that can get you accused of being woke at best or earn you a death threat.
You don’t have to be white, of course, to push back, In China, which has a different racial composition, the disappearance of former world doubles No. 1 Peng Shuai, after a #MeToo accusation against one of the former top brass, has sparked outraged in the way that its persecution of the Muslim minority Uyghurs never has. (As Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once reportedly observed: “One person’s death is a tragedy. Twenty million is just a statistic.”
It’s easier to put a face to an individual than it is to a group. Shuai’s subsequent smiling face and social media reassurances have fooled no one. There are those who think the Chinese Communist leaders are gauche in their attempts to assure the West that Shuai is fine. But that awkwardness is by design. By creating phony posts and appearances the Chinese are letting everyone know chillingly that they can not only make a former golden girl vanish without a trace. They can manipulate her reappearance and compliance as if she were a puppet on a string. (Don’t think for a moment that there aren’t those in America who envy the Chinese this ability to control others. Remember this is ultimately about power — those who attain and wish to retain it and those who want it, or at least want to challenge it.)
Despite being one of the most individual of sports — or perhaps because of it — the tennis world has been vehement in opposing China’s actions., with the Women’s Tennis Association suspending all of its tournaments there and in Hong Kong. The International Olympic Committee — which has a lot riding on the Winter Games in Beijing in February , already being heavily touted on NBC— and the NBA, not so much. But the WTA, along with male players like Novak Djokovic, seems to understand that when you take on an alpha like China, you are playing a power game that your opponent views as a zero-sum battle. In this, the alphas are determined to be the only ones standing.
How will all these challenges to the alphas play out? Like a snake shedding its skin, the situation is going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.