The other pandemic
As usual, most of the news we hear is bad. If it’s not the far-right storming the Capitol or mass shootings, it’s new election laws proposed by Republicans, or anti-Asian hate crimes. I am starting to see a pattern. What do the far-right, mass shootings, restrictive voting laws and anti-Asian hate crimes usually have in common?
Take a minute and think about it.
It’s okay. You can say it. White people. I’m a white man, so I can say it. And before you argue with me about mass shooters, admit it. When we hear about a mass shooting, we all assume it was a white man. Why? Because it usually is, so how about a little well-earned stereotyping?
What the hell is wrong with White people? We’ve had everything our way since America began. We enslaved blacks, butchered the Indians and mercilessly utilized Chinese labor to build the transcontinental railroad. We whites are equal opportunity racists, if nothing else. Throughout America’s history, we’ve had most of the money and all the power. Most of the politicians have been, and are white men.
We just booted the single greatest prevaricator ever to become President, and suddenly other white people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene rushed in to pick up his baton of lies, hate and conspiracies and are running as fast as they can, like Paul Revere riding through the darkness, warning “The minorities are coming…..the minorities are coming!”
I’ve tried to figure this out, and I have come to believe that it’s all about fear. White people are afraid they’ll be kicked off the top of the heap. They’re scared that minorities will treat us as we have treated them, so we cheat, lie, steal, pillage and kill to stay at the top of the social food chain. White people are fragile and afraid. This latent fear is exactly what Donald Trump tapped into with his Make American Great Again mantra and the White middle class of America. They won’t admit it, but they yearn for the days before civil rights, when blacks new their place. When the only Mexicans were invisible laborers who picked crops all day, then scurried back to their hovels at night and Home Depot didn’t have signs in English and Spanish. When Asians were so few and far between that we didn’t have to see or think about them.
White people think everything should be about them. How else can you explain why we have always called the beige crayon “flesh colored.”
It must be that we believe that we are superior to all others. We blame others for their lot in life, saying they are inherently criminal, or their culture is less advanced, so they are unable to take advantage of what America has to offer, even though our history is one filled with slavery, racism and every kind of roadblock we could invent to hinder and suppress non-whites.
White people won’t even try to understand people of color. Our lives are largely okay, so if others’ are not, it must be their fault. We don’t believe that systemic racism exists. It can’t be true, because this is the “Greatest Nation on Earth”. People have always feared what they don’t understand . . . so the best defense is knowledge.
As we sit here today, our Republican politicians are attempting to re-write voting laws all across the country, and fighting to prevent Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico from attaining statehood. All for the same reason; to keep white people in power and control. If the residents of Atlanta, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico were white Republicans, statehood would happen in a flash. . Guaranteed.
If white people were not scared, none of this would be happening.
Just maybe, racist white people are the pandemic we should fear most. The bad news is that their special brand of right-wing hate is spreading all over the world. The good news is that, like an antibiotic-resistant virus, the world will eventually find a cure. Too bad there’s not a mask that will filter out racism.
How many people have to die while we wait for the cure is the tragedy.