The illegal administration of the Felon in Chief has decided to allow 59 white farmers from South Africa into the country as refugees from “genocide” they say is happening in that country. Meanwhile, other, distinctly browner, asylum applicants from multiple countries are being deported or their claims denied.
This got me thinking of the methodology that got us to this point, which is a tried and true method that the “right”, by which I mean people who want power mostly to improve their own lives and deny rights to people who don’t look like them or who disagree with them on basic values, does business.
In the US, anyway, there is a “white” majority and a series of other labeled minorities that can be summarized as “non-white.” The quotes are to indicate that all of this is fiction on any scientific level. This situation developed due to colonialism, slavery, and all the events that took place since 1492 and Columbus’ voyages. From that point, Europeans began streaming to nearby shores and eventually to the North American continent, where they first usurped the autonomy of native tribes, then set up their own colonial governments and became autonomous themselves, all the while importing slaves from Africa.
“White” people then engaged in a civil war largely with each other to establish the nature of the US government that would go forward from that point. One region was determined to keep slavery viable and seceded, and the other region was determined enough to stop them when they seceded to engage in continental war to reunite the country, which was a successful operation. You can argue forever about the honorable intentions of the North or whether the South seceded solely to preserve slavery (sure there were other minor reasons, but slavery was predominant), but ultimately this was the outcome.
Post Civil War America left two very different regions, economically and demographically and in many other ways, attempting to reconcile and be governed by one federal government, and predictably, this was full of violent conflict and sweeping efforts at legislation to try to enforce the will of the winning side that the losing side fought against at every turn.
As all of this was happening, the “right”, most prominent in the South (but by no means invisible in the North) persisted in developing strategies to organize society around a racial hierarchy. Using these strategies, they could achieve and maintain power and impose their will without violent widespread conflict, attaining a level of legitimacy that they could not find in war.
“Whiteness” began expanding to basically anyone who wasn’t the ancestor of or an actual African slave. This formed a strong coalition of people who could call themselves a “majority” even in places where they were not an actual majority, aided by targeted violence and suppression of “non-whites”. Once the “right” formed this coalition, they could start consistently winning elections and assuming power at every level of government to improve their lives while making life unbearable for anyone else.
As the “non-white” people in the South realized they had been completely marginalized through these effective strategies, they began a diaspora to Northern cities and began building strong coalitions there. Of course, the success of the “white” strategies in the South did not go unnoticed in the North, and the strategy of creating “white” majority coalitions was adopted quickly as Northern cities received more and more refugees from the South.
Eventually, this became the equilibrium state throughout the entire US. Politicians running for national office on the “right,” starting with Nixon, adopted the “Southern Strategy” of appealing to the “white” coalition in that region and turning it into a solid base for winning the Electoral College and the spoils of Supreme Court nominees that came with it.
The Reagan era, employing the now highly sophisticated “white” strategies, brought a spectacular explosion of support by the “white” coalition for “right” politics of traditional values and patriotism. There was a brief backlash after the lackluster Bush presidency which brought Bill Clinton to power, and then a re-backlash to another Bush presidency, and a re-re-backlash to Barack Obama, a “non-white” politician who was able mostly with his rhetorical skills to break through the “right” strategies. This led to the ultimate backlash, where America decided that a carnival barker in orange makeup was better than any non-“right” politician. It helped greatly that his opponent was a woman, twice. I haven’t even covered the politics of gender, but that’s for another post I don’t intend to write.
And here we are. The “right” has honed their “white” strategies to the point where even a known felon, con man and utterly despicable “white” human being can (barely) win federal office. The strategies work because there are a certain percentage of “white” people who believe the “right” rhetoric wholeheartedly, and are cheering on the systematic removal of rights from “non-whites” that include mass deportation and rollback of diversity initiatives; add to that the fact that since people now identify as “white” if they can get away with it to be part of the majority, “white” people who aren’t true believers can convince themselves they are immune to the things happening around them and can concentrate obliviously on the economy or their 401K, and either not participate in politics or vote along with other “whites” to achieve a sense of security.
I don’t see any of this changing until such a time that it becomes impossible to divide people into a “white” majority and a “non-white” minority. That might take 100 years or more. The US has a unique origin story that led to our particular racial politics, but this kind of thing happens in different ways and under different circumstances all over the world and appears to be a part of human nature based on scientific experiments where people are split into majority/minority groups based on random characteristics. Skin color is such an obvious and insidious way to perform the sorting; it’s literally as plain as the nose on one’s face. Politicians of the “right” will continue to do it as long as it continues to be successful.
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