If there has ever been a single statistic that made me despair of the fate of the human race, it's the finding in recent surveys that white Americans believe there is greater prejudice against whites in the United States than against African-Americans. I suspect that some of my initial shock at this finding will linger forever; that it will always feel like the worst statistic in the history of the world, suggesting a socio-political catastrophe of Biblical proportions: of history flowing backwards, of victors perceiving themselves as victims and the victims as oppressors, of delusion overcoming reason, of fiction beating out fact. It is also profoundly, darkly funny, in that the denial of the relative extent of white prejudice towards African-Americans in itself might be viewed as validating and verifying that very prejudice. It is delusion on a society-wide scale, a virtual conspiracy of self-pity and paranoia. In short, it is shocking to me in the way that the election of Donald Trump was shocking, betraying a sense of historical progress and shattering a belief that America has moved beyond its darkest impulses (though of course it bears some connection to his election).
Luckily, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists are made of sterner stuff than myself, able to bear the troubling nature of their own findings and to press on with their research. Studies like the one that sent me reeling provide invaluable evidence of 21st century racial dynamics that are profoundly shaping our society and our politics; a future in which white Americans will no longer be a majority in this country. The election of Donald Trump and the rise of a Republican politics of white supremacy embodies the dark path the U.S. can go down as a response to this change.
As depressing as attitudes like the one I started with can be, and even as I semi-joke about my own weak-kneed inability to face a reality of racism and denialism, there is in fact no way for this country to move forward in the coming decades if we do not collectively acknowledge our demographic changes and the fears they are provoking. In the first place, the demographic transformation of America is something that currently exists in a sort of twilight consciousness: deeply felt by millions of Americans, yet at the same time not explicitly discussed nearly enough in proportion to the unease it is causing. Donald Trump’s demonization of Latino immigrants is the single most dramatic example of this dynamic. By primarily attacking undocumented immigrants, he channels the fears of his white base about larger demographic change: after all, it is not undocumented immigrants but documented immigrants who over the years have most seriously shifted the ethnic make-up of our country. The president attacks the idea of America changing without having to say his beef is with non-white immigrants and new Americans, which would be more explicitly racist.
As a country, the United States has short-circuited any discussion of our changing demographics, moving swiftly from an era when we might have seen general discussions about this fact straight to a narrative driven by extremism, scapegoating, and white fears of no longer being the majority. The idea of a United States no longer being majority white has not been sufficiently talked about; instead, the public debate is driven by the racist and xenophobic backlash to this fact, without the fact itself being fully acknowledged. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that Donald Trump in particular has short-circuited our discussion, exploiting the fears of change before we’ve been able to have a more rational, public discussion of the fact of the change, in which we could have an airing of not only the anxieties, but also the great possibilities, of such a change. Instead, the actual underlying changes remain occluded, repressed, making it easier for white Americans to project all manner of fears onto them.
As even casual readers have likely picked up on, The Hot Screen has frequently argued for a view of our political reality that carves out a large role for economic malaise as a negative force supercharging racial and gender revanchism in our country. Simply put, economic insecurity is real, and opens up our politics to racial scapegoating in a variety of ways, from unscrupulous politicians using racism to distract workers from the way the rich gobble up the lion’s share of our country’s wealth, to low-income workers’ fear that immigrants will take their jobs. Throw in difficult to define but real fears of “cultural” changes, and the overall situation, as it more fully embraces reality, accordingly reveals itself to have many interrelated and moving parts.
Both a bottom-up and top-down approach is needed to navigate our current crisis. That is, we need to tackle these challenges of race, economics, and culture at both their individual and interrelated levels. We can reduce irrational white racial anxiety by fixing our economy so that it works for all, and we can improve our economy by making the case that immigrants and other newer Americans make our economy stronger, not weaker. But perhaps particularly with racism, as this is the most fraught and emotional of the various realms of social conflict, we need to publicly explore the dynamics head on. If Donald Trump has more successfully mainstreamed racism into American politics than any other previous president, then to counter it we need a strategy that opens up to public scrutiny the unacknowledged factors that enable him to do so, and that identifies and disassembles the forms that white racism takes.
As I discussed recently, the task at hand is not so simple as calling out racism wherever it happens, though some form of this is surely part of the solution. But the psychology of prejudice, and the way that racial resentment is supercharged by economic fears in particular, means that we need to fully understand the nature of white racism and racial fears if we are to collectively work to transmute these attitudes into a renewed sense of connection and solidarity among all citizens, regardless of skin color or place of origin. Because it has functioned as my own point of extreme disbelief and discouragement, the statistic I began with — the white perception that they suffer greater prejudice than African-Americans — feels like the right place to start, at least for me.
I’ve already expressed my visceral sense that this attitude on the part of so many whites is deeply absurd. But the architects of the survey I noted above were also exploring a theory of racial perceptions that is both fascinating and a potentially huge clue to the persistence of racism in America: that white Americans have “a view of racism as a zero-sum game,” in which any gains for African-Americans necessarily come at the expense of whites. This zero-sum mentality would be a more essential problem than whites seeing more bias against themselves than against black Americans.
Obviously, there’s more than a grain of truth to the idea that whites will be more powerful collectively in a regime of white racial dominance than otherwise. What’s interesting to me, though, is the sense of ongoing and perhaps never-ending diminishment due to a perception of growing African-American success. It raises the possibility that white Americans’ sense of racial threat is so deeply ingrained that they can’t imagine any other possibility than that African Americans’ success is somehow diminishing their own prospects.
The picture is complicated by the fact that since the 1970’s, our economy has seen both an increasing stagnation and a shift of economic rewards to the top of the economic ladder, irrespective of race. Is it simply all too easy for white Americans to ascribe their increasing economic anxiety, and related sense of diminishing power, to perceptions of African-American success? I say “perceptions” because the negative effects of the 2008 financial crisis and aftermath have fallen much harder on African-Americans than whites, putting an end to any sort of factual basis for arguing African-Americans are somehow doing enviably well in today’s economy.
Or could it be that the zero-sum mentality is closely connected to the perception of prejudice against white Americans? Could there be a sort of white guilt or perhaps white pessimism at play here, a sort of assumption that African Americans and perhaps other racial minorities are sure to mirror the same racial animosity towards whites that whites had historically shown them? This feels like a hideous twist to the cycle of racism: whites imagining that minorities will essentially seeking payback, a hallucination of certain revenge that in turn justifies the perpetuation of white racism.
Perhaps we are still at a point where there really is no clear path to unknotting an attitude of white racism that's as old as our country; but surely there is no way forward that doesn't involve bringing it to light, and puzzling over it together. There is an optimistic part of me that thinks even survey results like the one I started with might be part of the solution, if enough whites would only realize how absurd their fears are when stated so openly. At any rate, we will never move forward if we let demagogues and bigots like Donald Trump frame the discussion.