One can already see this trend developing, here most of all, among disaffected blacks and liberals, who see white males quintessentially as the guilty and marked inheritors of a white supremacist centuries-long imperialist tradition of oppression of people of color.
Americans mostly think that this is mainly the view only of the citizen descendants of freed negroes here!
American liberals have been trained to think that their world will continue, and improve, progress, to higher ground, indefinitely:
"...Liberal Boomers naturally assumed that their legacy--their parents' and grandparents' achievements--would continue indefinitely...." DK
Nothing could be farther from the truth. All people of color, all 7 or so Billion of them, almost the whole planet, now share more or less the same view, based on how the colonial period has been interpreted here, on that colonial heritage itself good or bad, and on how it has been taught by liberals since the 19th Century, especially here, but widely disseminated everywhere, as one of relentless oppression and enslavement of inferior colored races.
In the future, whites will become proverbial Tar Babies, white pariahs among global racial majorities and elites, all are of one nonwhite color or another! We are already seeing this play out, on a small scale, in places like South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Americans mostly think that this is mainly the view only of the citizen descendants of freed negroes here!
American liberals have been trained to think that their world will continue, and improve, progress, to higher ground, indefinitely:
"...Liberal Boomers naturally assumed that their legacy--their parents' and grandparents' achievements--would continue indefinitely...." DK
Nothing could be farther from the truth. All people of color, all 7 or so Billion of them, almost the whole planet, now share more or less the same view, based on how the colonial period has been interpreted here, on that colonial heritage itself good or bad, and on how it has been taught by liberals since the 19th Century, especially here, but widely disseminated everywhere, as one of relentless oppression and enslavement of inferior colored races.
In the future, whites will become proverbial Tar Babies, white pariahs among global racial majorities and elites, all are of one nonwhite color or another! We are already seeing this play out, on a small scale, in places like South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Even someone like Professor Kaiser has bemoaned this unfortunate tendency, within a larger discussion of the role of race in American history, to marginalize white males among the liberal media, academia, and intelligentsia. Here are passages from three of his posts, 2016, 2017:
"...This morning's print edition of the New York Times led with an article by Nicholas Confessore arguing that the Trump campaign is fueled by the anger of white Americans who fear losing their preeminent place in American society to minorities and immigrants. Like so many pieces in the mainstream media nowadays, it repeatedly stresses that white people will no longer be a majority in America in a few decades--and bizarrely implies that tha twill solve all our problems. This reflects the kind of zero-sum thinking that has come to dominate discussion on the left as well as the right: history is simply a struggle among races (and genders, and those of different sexual orientations), and straight white males, who have caused most of the oppression and trouble in the world, are, thank heaven, losing their place of pride. At times during the article Confessore and the "authorities" he quotes seem to be saying that Trump voters are angry that they are losing power and influence, and that they are right--they will lose out to other groups--but that's a good thing. How it could escape anyone that this is bound to drive more and more of them into the Trump camp is beyond me. But they don't care. Decades of this cant, especially in universities, have persuaded our educated elite that straight white males are the problem and that anything that works against them must ultimately be good.
"To this I would reply, first, that straight white males aren't the problem--our new economic system is. It benefits a tiny group at the top at the expense of everyone else. Neither presidential candidate, sadly, seems likely to do much about that. But secondly, I would suggest, the United States and its principles of equal rights and equal opportunity cannot survive if we are taught to identify with our group--or with oppressed groups only. We will stand or fall together. That eternal truth seems just as lost on those who cannot get beyond the trope of "systemic racism" as it is on the supporters of Donald Trump...." DK
"...Belonging as I do to the left side of American politics, I am going to focus on what my own side has done to help create this mess. It is not merely that Hillary Clinton specifically rejected Bernie Sanders's class-based appeal during the primaries, arguing that decreasing income inequality wouldn't do much about racism, sexism and homophobia. She is also explicitly running as the candidate of women, minorities, and immigrants, and raising the rhetorical ante this week by labeling Trump as the candidate of racist white Americans. The whole emphasis on racial disparities in the economy, education, and the criminal justice system that began half a century ago has promoted the idea of our economy as a zero-sum game in which white males have too much and everyone else has too little. The increasingly popular concept of "white male privilege" contributes to the same view. In my opinion, this view, which is mainstream in the Democratic party and hegemonic in academia, has done a great deal to bring about the rise of Donald Trump. It has convinced millions of Americans--white, black, and Hispanic--that most poor people are minorities and that most federal programs only help them--two facts that are clearly and demonstrably false. Our problems, which are not racial in origin in my opinion, are invariably interpreted through a racial lens. The effect of this in many cases is obscure both the scope and the depth of the problems we face, and to make it much harder to address them seriously. And to illustrate this I am going to take one of the problems most under discussion: the issue of mass incarceration...." DK
"...The new orthodoxy holds that any attempt to see ourselves as equal citizens in a civic realm is at bottom a fiction designed to preserve the hegemony of white males. It argues that every one of us is defined by our membership in either a dominant group (straight white males), or an oppressed or "marginalized" one (including all white women, all gays, and all nonwhites.) Not only that, but everyone of us is morally and emotionally linked to the perceived historical role of those groups. Every straight white male, bears the guilt for the oppression of all other groups, whatever his personal history may be, and every woman and every nonwhite actively suffers from the scars of oppression. And such oppression is expressed not only, and not merely, through specific, identifiable disadvantages in wealth, income, and opportunity, but through language and culture...." DK
"...1. The new ideology has sprouted in universities because they are safe spaces whose white male administrators adopted diversity and inclusion as their mission 20-30 years ago. That mission has become more important than any purely intellectual function, certainly in the humanities and social sciences. University administrations spend a great deal of time worrying about their facilities (which will affect their U.S. News ranking), their diversity, and the happiness of their minority students. They spent almost no time trying to develop the best humanities curriculum, and they have given up preserving the heritage of western civilization as a major goal.
2. The new ideology has, as I have said, become very powerful in the mainstream media, which accepts the idea, in practice if not in theory, that the problems of "marginalized" groups are more important than anyone else's. But it has obviously alienated more than 100 million Americans who do not live on the East and West Coasts (and a non-trivial number of those who do.) After 30 years of political correctness in the universities, we have a self-identified sexual harasser as President and a very traditional white southerner as Attorney General. Hillary Rodham Clinton in her campaign took pains to make clear that she took the concerns of marginalized groups more seriously than anyone else's. Quite a few Democratic consultants and commentators look forward eagerly to the day when whites will constitute a minority of the electorate. The reaction against all of this has been devastating and it was inevitable.
3. The constant emphasis on the thoughts and feelings of "maringalized" groups--again, everyone but straight white males--is, among other things, a denial of any common value system that unites us all. When I appeared on radioopensource.org a couple of weeks ago, I was immediately followed by a female historian named Arianne Chernok. As you can here, she peremptorily dismissed everything I had to say about Strauss, Howe, and the crisis that the US is obviously going through on the grounds that "there were no women" in the story I had told. This was, to begin with, false: Hillary Clinton had not only come up in my conversation with host Chris Lydon, but he had played a clip from her famous 1969 commencement speech. Professor Chernok was repeating the most common claim of postmodernist historians: that traditional "narratives" of history left out women and nonwhites because they focused on political leaders, who were (in the Atlantic world, anyway) white men. But whether or not that is true, it remains true that we are ALL political beings who live subject to laws and must inevitably be affected by the great political changes that occur every eighty years. Yes, some will in some ways be affected differently than others, but all of us will be affected in the same way by some of the changes that took place. We do share a common experience that is very important to us all...." DK
"...This morning's print edition of the New York Times led with an article by Nicholas Confessore arguing that the Trump campaign is fueled by the anger of white Americans who fear losing their preeminent place in American society to minorities and immigrants. Like so many pieces in the mainstream media nowadays, it repeatedly stresses that white people will no longer be a majority in America in a few decades--and bizarrely implies that tha twill solve all our problems. This reflects the kind of zero-sum thinking that has come to dominate discussion on the left as well as the right: history is simply a struggle among races (and genders, and those of different sexual orientations), and straight white males, who have caused most of the oppression and trouble in the world, are, thank heaven, losing their place of pride. At times during the article Confessore and the "authorities" he quotes seem to be saying that Trump voters are angry that they are losing power and influence, and that they are right--they will lose out to other groups--but that's a good thing. How it could escape anyone that this is bound to drive more and more of them into the Trump camp is beyond me. But they don't care. Decades of this cant, especially in universities, have persuaded our educated elite that straight white males are the problem and that anything that works against them must ultimately be good.
"To this I would reply, first, that straight white males aren't the problem--our new economic system is. It benefits a tiny group at the top at the expense of everyone else. Neither presidential candidate, sadly, seems likely to do much about that. But secondly, I would suggest, the United States and its principles of equal rights and equal opportunity cannot survive if we are taught to identify with our group--or with oppressed groups only. We will stand or fall together. That eternal truth seems just as lost on those who cannot get beyond the trope of "systemic racism" as it is on the supporters of Donald Trump...." DK
"...Belonging as I do to the left side of American politics, I am going to focus on what my own side has done to help create this mess. It is not merely that Hillary Clinton specifically rejected Bernie Sanders's class-based appeal during the primaries, arguing that decreasing income inequality wouldn't do much about racism, sexism and homophobia. She is also explicitly running as the candidate of women, minorities, and immigrants, and raising the rhetorical ante this week by labeling Trump as the candidate of racist white Americans. The whole emphasis on racial disparities in the economy, education, and the criminal justice system that began half a century ago has promoted the idea of our economy as a zero-sum game in which white males have too much and everyone else has too little. The increasingly popular concept of "white male privilege" contributes to the same view. In my opinion, this view, which is mainstream in the Democratic party and hegemonic in academia, has done a great deal to bring about the rise of Donald Trump. It has convinced millions of Americans--white, black, and Hispanic--that most poor people are minorities and that most federal programs only help them--two facts that are clearly and demonstrably false. Our problems, which are not racial in origin in my opinion, are invariably interpreted through a racial lens. The effect of this in many cases is obscure both the scope and the depth of the problems we face, and to make it much harder to address them seriously. And to illustrate this I am going to take one of the problems most under discussion: the issue of mass incarceration...." DK
"...The new orthodoxy holds that any attempt to see ourselves as equal citizens in a civic realm is at bottom a fiction designed to preserve the hegemony of white males. It argues that every one of us is defined by our membership in either a dominant group (straight white males), or an oppressed or "marginalized" one (including all white women, all gays, and all nonwhites.) Not only that, but everyone of us is morally and emotionally linked to the perceived historical role of those groups. Every straight white male, bears the guilt for the oppression of all other groups, whatever his personal history may be, and every woman and every nonwhite actively suffers from the scars of oppression. And such oppression is expressed not only, and not merely, through specific, identifiable disadvantages in wealth, income, and opportunity, but through language and culture...." DK
"...1. The new ideology has sprouted in universities because they are safe spaces whose white male administrators adopted diversity and inclusion as their mission 20-30 years ago. That mission has become more important than any purely intellectual function, certainly in the humanities and social sciences. University administrations spend a great deal of time worrying about their facilities (which will affect their U.S. News ranking), their diversity, and the happiness of their minority students. They spent almost no time trying to develop the best humanities curriculum, and they have given up preserving the heritage of western civilization as a major goal.
2. The new ideology has, as I have said, become very powerful in the mainstream media, which accepts the idea, in practice if not in theory, that the problems of "marginalized" groups are more important than anyone else's. But it has obviously alienated more than 100 million Americans who do not live on the East and West Coasts (and a non-trivial number of those who do.) After 30 years of political correctness in the universities, we have a self-identified sexual harasser as President and a very traditional white southerner as Attorney General. Hillary Rodham Clinton in her campaign took pains to make clear that she took the concerns of marginalized groups more seriously than anyone else's. Quite a few Democratic consultants and commentators look forward eagerly to the day when whites will constitute a minority of the electorate. The reaction against all of this has been devastating and it was inevitable.
3. The constant emphasis on the thoughts and feelings of "maringalized" groups--again, everyone but straight white males--is, among other things, a denial of any common value system that unites us all. When I appeared on radioopensource.org a couple of weeks ago, I was immediately followed by a female historian named Arianne Chernok. As you can here, she peremptorily dismissed everything I had to say about Strauss, Howe, and the crisis that the US is obviously going through on the grounds that "there were no women" in the story I had told. This was, to begin with, false: Hillary Clinton had not only come up in my conversation with host Chris Lydon, but he had played a clip from her famous 1969 commencement speech. Professor Chernok was repeating the most common claim of postmodernist historians: that traditional "narratives" of history left out women and nonwhites because they focused on political leaders, who were (in the Atlantic world, anyway) white men. But whether or not that is true, it remains true that we are ALL political beings who live subject to laws and must inevitably be affected by the great political changes that occur every eighty years. Yes, some will in some ways be affected differently than others, but all of us will be affected in the same way by some of the changes that took place. We do share a common experience that is very important to us all...." DK
I am just drawing out the obvious implications, globally, going forward. Of course he would like to see, among other things, a return to a vital center, a thing I see as both impossible and undesirable; and we do not share a S & H enthusiasm.
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