Perhaps the single most important phenomenon in the United States in this still-young century is that white people are on their way to becoming a majority-minority — less than 50% of the population — by the next decade or so. This is not an opinion. It is a fact. There is nothing white people or anyone else can do to stop it. It will happen, because it is happening.
The United States has always been a country with a violent, racist streak, but this not-so-simple fact of the white majority-minority has taken us to new heights — which is to say new depths. Think about it: Everything that has happened in the past few years can be seen through this prism — the hatred and stymying of President Barack Obama; the election of President Donald J. Trump, who stoked white fears; the stacking of the Supreme Court with conservative justices, who would rule against Roe v. Wade in the idiotic presumption that white women would have more babies and women of color would be controlled when in reality there will be even more people of color as poor women of color are forced to have unwanted children while their wealthier white sisters abort unwanted pregnancies. (And if the white nationalists are worried about being replaced by the Other now, just wait 20 years when there’s a seething, resentful majority of color ready to take on the white, ruling minority. It will be South Africa in the 1980s all over again. Oh, the irony — white fear creating the very thing it is afraid of.
Even Covid and the war in Ukraine can be seen through the prism of white angst. Why do we care more about Ukraine than we did Syria? Not that we shouldn’t care about Ukraine, but didn’t Russian President Vladimir Putin devastate Syrians, too? Yet they’re not white Europeans as the Ukrainians are.
What Covid has done is to lay bare tribalism and the viciousness and violence it can engender. I love all these people like the very entertaining royalist River who’s always railing against the woke mob that cancels everything and stifles free speech. But there’s a reason that the woke crowd — which, I acknowledge, can be so annoying with its endlessly inaccurate pronouns — is woke. At least the woke understand that you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater that’s not on fire and get away with it. Hate speech is not free speech, and hatred of hate and hate speech is not unjustified hate. All the First Amendment protects is your right to say what you want from government suppression and oppression. The First Amendment doesn’t say I have to tolerate it.
Writing comments on the internet can be fulfilling, but each of us has a responsibility to civil, illuminating discourse, not to enflame fear with falsehoods and incite violence as in the case of the latest racist shooter jacked up on replacement theory (the supposed replacement of straight, white Christians by Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ community and anyone else who is the Other.) (Note that he livestreamed the attack on Twitch as if it were a video game.) And now in part because of our cavalier attitude toward weapons and the weapon of words, 10 are dead in Buffalo and three are wounded. The fabric of a community is rent. The soul of America is, once again, rent.
What is wrong with us? This kind of crackpot behavior used to be part of what President Theodore Roosevelt called “the lunatic fringe.” Now thanks to Big Tech looking to cash in, the conservative media looking for eyeballs and the Republicans looking for votes, it’s all the rage. There are many factors that have gotten us to where we are, but it all boils down to one thing — the culture of narcissism that says that I must win and you must be crushed and that if you gain at all, even that which has been unjustly denied to you, then that diminishes me.
But when others gain the rights that have been denied them, we all win. That’s not how our nation sees it, however. It’s become a country of the zero-sum, dog-in-a-manger game in which we fear the person at the southern border will take the job we wouldn’t do anyway. We’ve become a land of the complacent, resentful of those who display the passion we once had.
The United States is no longer a country that says “give me you tired, your poor” but one that takes pleasure in the unhappiness of others. Read this extraordinary, smug statement from Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp, a Roman Catholic literary journal, writing an op-ed piece In The New York Times about being OK with the socipeconomic and psychological upheaval that rolling back abortion protections will cause: Here’s his chilling conclusion:
“No matter what we do, in a post-Roe world many children who would not otherwise have been born will live lives of utter misery, and many of our fellow Americans will be indifferent to their plight. If we wish to dispel the noxious argument that only happy lives are worth saving, we will have to be honest about the limits of social policy and private charity in regulating the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.”
What he’s saying is that he’s fine with deliberately creating lives that are bound to wind up miserable since it allows the expression of what he believes to be right. And that is where we are in American society: As long as I can express what I believe to be right, it doesn’t matter what happens to you.
Many of the people who think like Walther wouldn’t wear a mask or take a Covid vaccine. They won’t try to control guns and climate change or oppose the death penalty. But they have no trouble controlling your body.
For them, freedom is a one-way street, in which they seek a form of identity and self-expression that depends on their ability to control and even sacrifice your life.