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The 2010s: The Decade of Shitty White People
Last edited Fri Jan 3, 2020, 12:36 PM - Edit history (2)
https://medium.com/@buckdown/the-2010s-the-decade-of-shitty-white-people-a264cf24b80cThanks sl8 for fixing the link. I tried deleting my link and cutting/pasting your link, but the same thing happened. Readers, the proper link is in sl8's post below.
We were so close.
For a minute there it seemed like America had come to its goddamn senses. It closed out the first decade of the new century by electing its first African-American president, while simultaneously handing him healthy, veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate after a decade of letting The Fear drive us into the arms of a half-witted dufus by the name of George W. Bush, who seized that opportunity to fail spectacularly at virtually every conceivable measure of the public trust in return.
...
To be clear — Shitty White People doing Shitty White People Stuff isn’t anything new. SWPs have been on a pretty hard roll for at least the last six centuries. But for about forty of the last fifty or so years in America, we have at least made it impolite to be openly racist in most rooms. Usually, that didn’t comprise of much more than at least taking a cursory glance over each shoulder before making a racist joke, but when you consider we aren’t that far out in geologic time from when a white person could buy and sell black people out in the open market — it’s at least some sort of progress.
...
But then Barack Obama came, and SWPs lost their fucking minds. Its possible no single person in American history posed a greater existential threat to every pillar of white supremacist orthodoxy than Barack Hussein Obama, and that’s when they realized it was time to up their game.
...
Donald J. Trump stumbled in to this shit zeitgeist like every other accident of success in his life. It’s a glowing testimony of how good it is to be rich. The only thing that ever separated Trump from being a 3rd rate used car salesman bouncing from one sketchy lot to another across Long Island was the Scrooge McDuck pile of money his father accumulated as a openly racist slumlord in the 1960s and 70s.
After burning though whatever money he inherited, along with all the money other people loaned him, It was the dumb luck of a Hollywood writer’s strike (and the end of antena-based television in rural areas) that helped launch his stupid reality show into the homes of slack jawed yokels in the flyover states, where he cemented his status as a poor person’s idea of what a rich person was. The longer Trump could keep a camera and a microphone in front of his face (things that Trump needs more than water or oxygen to survive) the longer they realized that Trump, for all his money, was a Shitty White Person just like them. He spoke their same language of perpetual victimhood and grievance, even in the midst of a game they were clearly doing so much better in than the people they were blaming for their perceived lack of success on. It turns out privilege is just like money — you can never have too much of it, especially if you believe in a zero sum game where your every failure is the result of someone else’s success. This is exactly why equality feels like oppression to people accustomed to privilege.
For a minute there it seemed like America had come to its goddamn senses. It closed out the first decade of the new century by electing its first African-American president, while simultaneously handing him healthy, veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate after a decade of letting The Fear drive us into the arms of a half-witted dufus by the name of George W. Bush, who seized that opportunity to fail spectacularly at virtually every conceivable measure of the public trust in return.
...
To be clear — Shitty White People doing Shitty White People Stuff isn’t anything new. SWPs have been on a pretty hard roll for at least the last six centuries. But for about forty of the last fifty or so years in America, we have at least made it impolite to be openly racist in most rooms. Usually, that didn’t comprise of much more than at least taking a cursory glance over each shoulder before making a racist joke, but when you consider we aren’t that far out in geologic time from when a white person could buy and sell black people out in the open market — it’s at least some sort of progress.
...
But then Barack Obama came, and SWPs lost their fucking minds. Its possible no single person in American history posed a greater existential threat to every pillar of white supremacist orthodoxy than Barack Hussein Obama, and that’s when they realized it was time to up their game.
...
Donald J. Trump stumbled in to this shit zeitgeist like every other accident of success in his life. It’s a glowing testimony of how good it is to be rich. The only thing that ever separated Trump from being a 3rd rate used car salesman bouncing from one sketchy lot to another across Long Island was the Scrooge McDuck pile of money his father accumulated as a openly racist slumlord in the 1960s and 70s.
After burning though whatever money he inherited, along with all the money other people loaned him, It was the dumb luck of a Hollywood writer’s strike (and the end of antena-based television in rural areas) that helped launch his stupid reality show into the homes of slack jawed yokels in the flyover states, where he cemented his status as a poor person’s idea of what a rich person was. The longer Trump could keep a camera and a microphone in front of his face (things that Trump needs more than water or oxygen to survive) the longer they realized that Trump, for all his money, was a Shitty White Person just like them. He spoke their same language of perpetual victimhood and grievance, even in the midst of a game they were clearly doing so much better in than the people they were blaming for their perceived lack of success on. It turns out privilege is just like money — you can never have too much of it, especially if you believe in a zero sum game where your every failure is the result of someone else’s success. This is exactly why equality feels like oppression to people accustomed to privilege.
Great article. Read the whole thing. There much more good stuff. Happy New Year!
27 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Fri Jan 3, 2020, 01:29 PM - Edit history (1)
If you replace the "@" in the URL with " & commat; " it should work. Leave out the quotes and spaces.
Don't hit the "Preview" button before saving the changes. It will look OK, but you'll get the bad link back when you do save changes.
