Who Will Entitled White People Blame Next?

In the world of MAGA Christofascists and angry whites, especially white working class males, everything is a zero sum game.  If someone else - read non-whites, non-Christians and/or gays - sees improvements in their life or full equality under the law, to these people, it means they have lost privilege or more typically, lost the ability to make life difficult if not a living hell for those they have a need to be able to look down upon in order to well better about themselves. Any gains in social acceptance or financial success means they have lost power or privilege.  The idea that a rising tide raises all boats is an utterly lost concept to these to these all too typically selfish and selfish people who view anyone else's gain as their lost.  Sadly, the current Supreme Court majority, including Clarence Thomas, the Court's leading dimwit, subscribes to the same mentality and has worked diligently to tear down the rights and equality of the MAGA base's perceived enemies: independent women, racial minorities, and of course gays who are now open targets for discrimination so long as bigots and religious extremists wrap themselves in claimed "religious belief"  even when totally fabricating facts. A piece in Salon looks at the phenomenon and questions who and what these people will blame next for their own shortcomings.  Here are excerpts:

Last week, the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court killed affirmative action in colleges and university admissions. These five men and one woman are political hitmen. They are zealots and ideologues who were and remain totally committed to their mission. There was no evidence or facts that likely would have changed their minds; The outcome was a fait accompli. Their decision to end affirmative action was part of a larger political judicial massacre: that same week the right-wing majority voted to void President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan and to make it legal to use religion as a justification to discriminate against gays and lesbians (and by implication Black and brown people and members of other marginalized groups) – in violation of the country's civil rights laws.

In all, today's right-wing revanchist-controlled Supreme Court is doing the work of returning American society to the Gilded Age (if not before) as part of a neofascist revolutionary political project to end the country's multiracial democracy and pluralistic society.

In her dissent Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is the first Black female Supreme Court Justice in the history of that institution, focused on the absurd reasoning and claim that American society is fundamentally "colorblind":

With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces "colorblindness for all" by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country's actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America's real-world problems.

No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today's ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority's perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain.

Of course, Donald Trump, the twice-impeached ex-president and presumed 2024 Republican presidential nominee felt compelled to issue a statement in response to the Supreme Court's decision to kill affirmative action. On his Truth Social disinformation propaganda platform, Trump celebrated that: This is a great day for America. . . . declaring that "his" justices are "gold." 

Trump's statement in response to the SCOTUS affirmative action decision is rife with white racist lies, white rage, distortions and abuses of historical facts, white racist fantasies and white victimology, prejudice, white supremacy, anti-rationality, ignorance, intellectual dishonesty, and a deeply held belief that any outcome in American society where a white person (or white people as a group) do not automatically "win" or otherwise get their way is somehow unfair and unjust. The unifying thread in Trump's statement and the racist imagination it represents is white entitlement. It is what American Studies scholar George Lipsitz has compellingly described as "the possessive investment in whiteness."

Unfortunately, Donald Trump is not just speaking for himself. He is a fountain and mouthpiece for White America (the not so "silent majority") writ large and the delusional and paranoiac belief that somehow it is white people, not Black and brown people, who are the "real victims" of racism in America. In the world as it actually exists white people in America control every major political, social, and economic institution, and by extension the vast majority of the country's income, wealth, and other resources.  

Donald Trump said that the Supreme Court's decision was a "great day for America." Who is included in his "America"? Who was it in fact "great" for? Most certainly not the Black and brown Americans and others who will be denied a fair opportunity . . .

The greatness that Trump is yearning for as the leader of the neofascist MAGA movement and larger white right is to end America's multiracial pluralistic democracy by returning the country to the "good old days" when Black and brown people were second-class citizens, women were not considered equal to men, and gays and lesbian people were disappeared from mainstream public life. 

Trump's "merit-based" society is white privilege and white power and white domination unrestrained and unchecked. America has never been a "merit-based" society. Moreover, Trump himself is a living embodiment of how American society is not "merit based". Trump inherited and was loaned large sums of money from his father that he in turn used to start his business(es). He gained admission to Wharton Business School, most certainly not based on intellectual merit or ability, but because of family connections. One of Donald Trump's professors at Wharton described him as "the dumbest goddamned student" he ever had. In many ways, Donald Trump's entire life is a story of the types of privilege and other unearned advantages afforded to rich white men in America.

He has also convinced himself that ending affirmative action programs will make America "competitive with the world." The actual data shows, however, that more diverse and inclusive groups, organizations and societies are more dynamic, innovative, successful and prosperous.

In this 2020 interview, sociologist Joe Feagin explains how what he describes as "the white racial frame" distorts how (most) white people understand the realities of race and racism in American society: For centuries, that white racial frame has provided a dominant worldview from which most whites (and many others) regularly view this society. . . .  Especially important is that this broad white framing has a very positive orientation to whites as generally superior and virtuous (a pro-white subframe) and a negative orientation to various racial "others" substantially viewed as inferior and unvirtuous (anti-others subframes).

In her book "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide", historian Carol Anderson highlights the power of white rage and the harm it causes Black and brown people: The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement. It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather, it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is Blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up.

I wonder who white folks will now blame for their life failures and other frustrations and disappointments now that affirmative action in higher education — and soon across American society — is dead? Who will they rage against when they and/or their "best and brightest" and so "very smart" and "special" and "unique" children don't get admitted into their first choice of a college or university? When they, who of course are the "best at their job", are not promoted because a "minority" supposedly "took my spot!"

Will that frustrated white entitlement shrivel and explode or will it become something else? I know the answer. It will be the same one that it has always been for centuries in America. Nonetheless, the question still demands to be asked because of what the answer reveals about the character and nature of American society and the enduring power of the color line in these horrible days of the Age of Donald Trump and beyond.

Much the same narrative applies to LGBT rights - anytime we advance in acceptance and equality, white evangelicals and Christofascists view it as a loss of their power and privilege.