The thing is, the continued omnipresent existence of racism in America is quite obviously still very, very real. But... What if the same forces that sit in insanely rich and powerful boardrooms, and stoke perpetual rightwing fear and outrage via outlets like NewsMax and FoxNews (thus keeping their trump-loving minions in a virtually perpetual state of frenzy, on the right), are doing a slightly less obvious variation of intentionally and subconsciously inducing nonstop outrage into the minds of tens of millions of people on the left as well. What if the amount that we're hearing seemingly endlessly about brutally racist cops attacking unarmed minorities (and them being members of far right organizations); never-ending stories about heartless and manipulative Karens targeting innocent POC; blatantly racist Republican politicians (and their proposed throwback Jim Crow policies); COVID responses being disproportionately dictated by skin color; and 2022 (and 2024) being a virtual referendum on race, is being disproportionately covered by outlets on the left for a specific purpose too?
A great many of us on the left are aware of the long-held historical theory that we are all being manipulated by very wealthy 1%ers, intent on “dividing and conquering” society according to race, while they mercilessly pillage the wealth of society in the meantime. But what if that very old narrative has been quite intentionally kept alive for the last 50 years, to keep tens of millions of folks on the left from recognizing a whole new scheme that has been at work? Except, this time, it's not just about dividing black and brown from white? What if the rise of Nixon and Reagan, and the Southern Strategy wasn't just about continuing age-old schisms between blacks and whites, but secretly also between rich whites and all other “non-job producing” whites too? And that plan has also been to very, very intentionally keep whites on the left believing that this is a continuation of a supposedly “progressive Democrat versus racist Republican” fight? Only more intense since the days of Nixon and Reagan. But it's not! And it actually hasn't been just that alone for more than half a century.
Because in the days actually even before Nixon and Reagan, a very, very powerful shift started happening. In the years following WWII, America created the biggest middle class that the world has ever seen. (Though full disclosure: Very, very disproportionately white.) With one massive problem attached to it. That's wealth that the top 1% was now suddenly being forced to share with “ordinary” people. So long before the ink was even dry on FDR starting the process of creating this vast new middle class, rich and powerful men began aligning themselves together to either stop it or undo it. But after 250 years of institutionally dividing and conquering along the lines of black versus white, a new method had to be found to make it appear to strictly be a continuation of the same age-old battle for white racial superiority. But again, it's not...this time!
Because right around half a century ago a very pivotal (and highly invisible) twist in this fight began to occur. The slow but relentless dismantling of the vast post-WWII, FDR initiated, social safety net (and middle class too). But under the guise of keeping unearned benefits out of the hands of “lazy and freeloading” black and brown people. And an extreme majority of white people absolutely ate it up! But there was also a single (but enormous) deadly and hidden catch! The overall numbers of white people partaking of those programs has, from day one of their creation, always (and intentionally) greatly exceeded the numbers of POC allowed to partake. So, while white Americans cheered these “reforms”, what they actually served to do was to gradually siphon all that new post-WWII middle class wealth out of the hands of the new, mainly white, middle class, and back into the pockets of the top 1%. And for half a century, that process has been brutally effective against white people. And yet, virtually the entire time white people have mostly continued to cheer it on. Because they were being endlessly conditioned to focus only on what those “reforms” were doing to POC. And therefore mostly indifferent to it.
And that brings us to the main point of this diary.
The slow and quiet destruction of that social safety net over many decades has actually decimated many times the overall number of white lives than it has POC. But because the narrative has been very relentlessly presented as strictly inflicting harm on POC, very few white Americans have bothered to question in the least what it has been doing the entire time to them instead. So for an entire half century these mechanisms have been tacitly allowed to run almost total roughshod in the lives of tens of millions of white Americans virtually without question. Because for most folks it's always simply been enough to believe that it's hurting some of those “others”. And after 50-plus unbroken years of mindlessly allowing it to happen to what they thought were “others”, it turns out the overall accumulated damage has been truly catastrophic in the lives of white Americans far more. Because just about every conceivable metric of white “quality of life” has declined greatly in that time. But because the narrative has almost religiously been to measure their quality of life against POC, almost no one white has really bothered to notice the severity of the change. And still to this day, we continue being intentionally and endlessly reminded of what the “mean, evil, and especially racist Republicans” are supposedly doing to POC. But they're not! It's insanely rich men who want their insanely disproportionate share of the post-WWII money back! And after half a century of being tacitly allowed by their victims to perfect their techniques, they've cumulatively done many, many times more damage to the lives of their supposed fellow white Americans themselves than POC. Under the guise of a frighteningly simple and dark philosophy:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
It's been a powerful reassurance for a very long time to be able to point and stare at all the black and brown houses that “mysteriously” seem to keep ending up on fire. But it turns out that for 50 years now, there have quietly been increasing millions of figurative fires that aren't happening in the black and brown parts of town anymore. And after ignoring them in the force-fed belief that fires only happen to POC for so long, these seemingly new white fires are a lot bigger and much more destructive, after being allowed to burn out of control for so long out of disbelief.
It's time to wake up!
Because on top of everything else, there eventually will come a tipping point. A point where the extreme sociological damage that's been willingly allowed to happen unabated for more than half a century (under the willing illusion of it only being done to POC) is growing closer and closer to becoming irreversible...for white people! So the time has arrived...for white people alone...to start questioning what the insanely rich, increasingly siphoning off more and more of the money that went into building the middle class after WWII, is doing to the lives of white people...alone! And the fact that it's been going on unrecognized for over 50 years makes the urgency far greater. And here's the psychologically almost impenetrable and totally brain-twisting part. It's urgency is now thousands of times greater than the almost universally accepted narrative of what the supposed “mean and evil Republicans” are trying to do to POC. Because however toxic one can imagine that the process has invisibly been thus far for white people, it's already been allowed to progress untouched through a variety of deadly stages for 5 whole decades, before now. Similar to a cancerous tumor being well into Stage 3 or 4 before anyone notices it.
So the necessity to wake up and acknowledge the rest of the picture of what's been going on for decades now has long ago passed, mostly unnoticed, past the point of being urgent for white people.
Quite simply the long-comforting illusion of institutional white supremacy only harming POC, has now grown into an insanely and uncontrollably cannibalistic monstrosity over the last 50 years. And the machine that is institutional white supremacy is no longer even close to exclusively targeting POC anymore. It has now gone so insane in it's thirst for violence that it's now consuming tens of millions of white lives too. And it's time for the majority of white people to begin to recognize the jeopardy that they're now in too. And to fight to turn that white supremacy machine off, once and for all...for their sakes!!!