Blaming Whitey

“What’s always interesting to me is the degree to which you’ve seen created in Republican politics the sense that white males are victims,” Obama told “The Breakfast Club.” “They are the ones who are under attack, which obviously doesn’t jive with both history and data and economics,” he went on.

The irony is that the GOP did no such thing, in fact, they took their white voters for granted. The GOP’s neglect is part contempt, part fear. For more than half a century, whites have been conditioned to see themselves as the bearers of a litany of singular crimes in history. But what does Obama mean by data and economics? These things paint a portrait not of privilege but of despair. Starting around 2000, whites and white men specifically became virtually the only group to experience a shortening lifespan. “For white Americans between 45 and 54, average life expectancy was no longer increasing; in fact, it was actually declining—in a pattern seen almost nowhere else on Earth,” Jim Zarroli reported in NPR.

Does Obama mean, then, that whites are simply more “racist” than others? It’s not even clear what that term means anymore, but available data indicates Obama is wrong here, too. A Rasmussen survey conducted July 21-22 found that Americans think blacks are more racist than whites, Hispanics, and Asians, paralleling surveying from 2013. Data from a September 2017 GenForward Survey indicated that among racial groups whites were lowest in in-group preference. All of this is not to give credence to the slur of “racism,” an almost meaningless term that now functions only as a cudgel to bat away the legitimate grievances, views, and tastes of white people. It is, instead, to show that by Obama’s own metrics, the group he resents the most also happens to be composed of people most likely to be victims of today’s American regime.