Humanity Has a Serious White Man Problem

Have you ever watched reality TV shows such as Hoarders? A disgusting but all-too-common urge to both glamorize and demonize, all in the name of entertainment and celebrity?

Have you ever wondered why pop culture often turns our gaze on these people (or any group deemed profitable fodder for such filth)—and thus, turning our gaze away from other groups?

This didn’t take much effort, but let me try my hand at a similar technique, although I am merely working here in words. Consider the following:

Feel free to let me do the heavy lifting here, but also, I invite you to wade into the above for yourself: The thread running through these pieces gathered quickly and easily the day after Columbus Day is the violent, rapacious white man who hoards money and power at the expense of and on the backs of others and then uses that money and power too often to abuse and even kill those deemed weaker or lesser than these white men.

That we have failed to address the white man disease in humanity is not some great accident, however. Once with power, white men have carefully orchestrated how we view the world through keeping our gaze elsewhere, such as our manufactured fear of Muslim terrorists and centuries-long narratives of violent black men.

This slight of hand has mesmerized us into worshipping these horrible, often soulless men—Hugh Hefner, Christopher Columbus, Donald Trump—because of their bravado, wealth, and power.

White men, often themselves mediocre, have parleyed their amassed wealth (typically begun in eras characterized by the very worst of human nature) into assuring that the general public has developed a skewed system for evaluating self-worth: white men are forgiven any and every flaw because “he built this,” but everyone else cannot survive even one flaw, unless s/he is conveniently associated with the right white man.

The power of the arrogant white man is so intense, so capable of charming a people, that in the U.S. many excuse Trump minute by minute for the deplorable human he proves himself to be while following his Pied Piper lead to demonize Colin Kaepernick.

And while the rise of Trump is one of the most disgusting and oft-repeated narratives of U.S. history, it is a slow-boil story, and we are the willing lobsters who gleefully offer ourselves up for the pot.

More catastrophic—and all the more hard to understand as worthy of our disregard—is Stephen Paddock, murderous white man who is the most recent recipient of the inordinate passes white men receive: media headlines never offering his race and refusing to call him “terrorist,” family and friends shocked and confirming he was just your Average Joe, and the ultimate tone-deaf claim that there was simply nothing to tip us off about his reign of horror (because a certain kind of white man can walk through this world without any sort of scrutiny, even as he amasses an arsenal—or systematically sexually abuses women).

So let’s turn here to thinking carefully about this world built by white men—because the architects have insured this world protects them and as a consequence it works against everyone else.

While these rapacious white men use “I built this” as their shield, we must recognize it as supreme distraction; they are hiding something very insidious behind that shield, in fact: their mediocrity, their soullessness, their monstrosity.

As a white man, I speak from experience; the shield is powerful, more powerful than we tend to admit.

But also as a white man who believes to my marrow in a better world where equity and justice are achieved for every human, I am left with a disturbing quandary.

I have a fantasy that one day every worker in the service industry simply refuses to work; this act of resistance would highlight the inherent scam that is capitalism (the white man’s paradise), the false narrative that the owners and bosses are worth more than the workers.

That fantasy has a new version—one in which every black athlete in the NFL takes a knee and refuses to play a down of any NFL game so that the league and our so-called political leaders are forced to eat their words, called on their bluffs as the blow-hard balloons they are.

But these fantasies are the musings of a white man who recognizes that it is not the responsibility of the oppressed to end such inequities. yet, this system built by white men is a trap: workers are enslaved by hourly wages and tethered to work-bound insurance and retirement so that those workers have no real humanity left, no option to assert their dignity, their voices.

Even very wealthy black NFL athletes who are taking ethical positions are being cast as the bad guy—a perverse rebooting of the white hat/black hat Hollywood whitewashing of cowboys and Indians:

It’s the propaganda that irks [James Baldwin] most, the betrayal of the imagination. Baldwin has predictable issues with John Wayne, but the squeaky-clean Gary Cooper puts the most deceptive face on the killing of Indians. If you’re black, Baldwin says, you identify with Coop until you realize that the Indians are you, and that Coop, and Wayne, is a symptom of a culture that won’t “grow up” and face a history that has “no moral justification.” It’s “the lie of pretended humanism.” It’s Coop and it’s — wait for it — Doris Day.

Like Baldwin, we need this moment of recognition—that we have been duped, conned, hypnotized.

It no easy thing to admit that we are patsies, but we are being used.

Now, there is no question about white men being outnumbered, but there remains a question about whether or not everyone else is really any better than these mediocre white men ruling us.

That question terrifies me nearly as much as all the Trump-hoarders ruling this world.

The Vulgar Academic Pose of President Trump

Criticism of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and then president has been intense among university-based academics and scholars across the U.S.

However, the great irony of that fact lies in how President Trump’s “both sides” approach to addressing the Charlottesville, VA, violence is merely a vulgar version of the academic pose found among those academics and scholars—the traditional call for professors and researchers to be politically neutral and objective.

second coming yeats

Having been a public school teacher for almost two decades in the rural South and now a university professor for 15 years and counting, I have lived the tyranny daily of being chastised as “too political,” as tarnishing my credibility as a teacher and professor by my writing-as-activism.

I stumbled through a bit more than a decade of teaching before I discovered an organized body of thought that defined for me what I had been practicing, although quite badly—critical pedagogy.

Critical pedagogy acknowledges two powerful and seemingly contradictory realities: (1) all human behavior, including teaching, is inherently political, and thus, the neutral/objective pose is itself a political stance, and (2) indoctrination must be avoided and rejected.

crit ped kincheloe

K-12 public education and higher education remain resistant to these concepts, continuing to demand apolitical teaching (or, actually, the appearance of apolitical teaching) and to bristle at teachers and academics as activists.

In fact, teachers and professors take great risk to their careers when stepping beyond the neutral/objective pose, even outside the walls of the classrooms where they teach.

That the norm of formal education remains entrenched in the same sort of “both sides” mentality shared by mainstream journalism is made more disturbing by the dishonesty of that expectation because educators at all levels of schooling do in fact take stances.

For example, history taught through a patriotic lens is a political choice that is allowed to appear neutral, although it is clearly not.

And there are topics, such as the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, that are taught with a clear moral imperative—no “both sides” false equivalence afforded those who believed in exterminating the Jews.

No classes ever treating as equal “both sides” of pedophilia, child abuse, misogyny, rape.

None the less, activist-academics such as Howard Zinn have been and continue to be marginalized as merely activists.

neutral zinn

Particularly in higher education, many go about their work as if the real world does not exist, and thus, the ivory tower myth and scathing phrases such as “merely academic.”

But to borrow Zinn’s metaphor, to remain in a neutral/objective pose in the classroom as an inequitable and unjust world charges on is to endorse that inequity and injustice.

President Trump’s “both sides” pose in the face of white nationalism and emboldened racism is inexcusable, but to pretend that Trump somehow sprang out of thin air is an ugly lie, a delusion.

The rise of Trumplandia confirms there is blood on the hands of neutral academics and scholars, just as there is blood on the hands of “both sides” mainstream journalists.

lady macbeth

Trump is capitalizing on a vulgar academic pose that must be refuted, but it is equally inexcusable that traditional academic neutrality remains entrenched as if it has no consequences beyond the walls of schools and universities.

The U.S. needs Trump’s vapid logic repudiated: Good causes will always have some flawed and even bad people, as well as bad decisions, but causes dedicated to hatred and racism never include good people.

If educators, academics, and scholars are somehow excluded from taking ethical stands, we have little room to point fingers at Trump and his reign of white nationalism.

See Also

white folk (switchblade)

David Brooks, All-American: A Reader

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

“The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

Like Donald Trump and his Stepford Wives sons, David Brooks embodies much of what is wrong with the good ol’ U.S. of A. and the hollow failure that is the mainstream media, notably the floundering Wizard of Oz known as the New York Times.

In short, and while I originally read this about Newt Gingrich, Brooks is what ignorant, ill-informed, and/or simply stupid people believe smart people are.

Brooks matches what the white male ruling elites have sold the American public counts as authority: suit and tie, glasses, haircut with the proper part on the side (although even his hair knows to abandon the ship of his thick and possibly hollow skull).

However, and most importantly, Brooks is a white man who holds forth on everything with a genial authority, and he has acquired a bully pulpit mostly because he is a white man who holds forth on everything with a genial authority.

The schtick here is that Brooks is doing his All-American service by making really hard ideas accessible to the much less sophisticated American public.

It is what stand-up comics have done for decades, but Brooks, especially, and the NYT take him and all that explaining very seriously.

Having taught high school and first-year college writing for many years, I can assure you that Brooks is a case of arrested development found in many more-or-less privileged white men who decide very early that they know everything.

In fact, the Brooks approach to writing would suffer mightily in a first-year writing seminar, and especially in an upper level college course requiring a student to know the material and then to work through ideas carefully.

Some of these know-everythings become pompous and rapacious—think Trump—and others become genial and perpetual explainers to the masses—think David Brooks, All-American.

The problem is that they are both horrible, both eroding the great possibilities of a free people somewhat half-heartedly pursuing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Here is a simple guide for the work of Brooks: do not read it. Ever.

A more nuanced approach is to mine his commentaries for the most simplistic and unwarranted claims about human nature, the human condition, gender roles, and most damning of all, anything he wades into about race or culture.

Again, like Trump, Brooks lumbers through this life almost entirely fueled by privilege that he believes is credibility he has earned. You can tell by the glasses and the smug look in all the pictures of him on google images.

There is a powerful but careless narrative among the “Make America Great Again” crowd that white men made this country, made this country great.

But the truth is that white men like Trump and Brooks are the worst sort of dinosaurs, surviving on their disproportionate influence and crushing everything in their paths to self-aggrandizement.

In the most perverse ways possible, the U.S. deserves both Trump and Brooks because they represent who this country is at the core.

Our only hope is that the margins can overcome that core, find a way to create a more perfect union.

David Brooks, All-American: A Reader

Reconsidering Education “Miracles,” P.L. Thomas

David Brooks Also Eats Cereal, John Warner

Course Catalog for David Brooks’ Elite Sandwich College, Lucy Huber

Explaining David Brooks’ column to a stupid coworker who’s scared of fancy meat, Sean O’Neal

I Am David Brooks’ Friend With Only A High School Degree. I Have Never Seen A Sandwich and All I Know Is Fear, W. Caplan

14 June 2017 Reader

How to Call B.S. on Big Data: A Practical Guide, Michelle Nijhuis

Mind the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, articulated by the Italian software developer Alberto Brandolini in 2013: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Or, as Jonathan Swift put it in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”Plus ça change.

Who Is Dangerous, and Who Dies?

ERROL MORRIS: I found an innocent man who came very close to being executed. [Adams’s execution was scheduled for May 8, 1979, but Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. ordered a stay only three days before he was to be strapped into the lethal-injection gurney. Ultimately, the court overturned his death sentence, but not his conviction.] I uncovered all of these appalling details 30 years ago and then opened up a newspaper recently and read about Buck. It’s as if nothing ever happened. That’s both depressing and infuriating. Mitt Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts, was told that the death penalty is problematic because it’s fallible. You could execute an innocent person, and given our current state of knowledge, there is really no way to bring them back. Once executed, they stay executed.

CHRISTINA SWARNS: And so what was Romney’s reply?

ERROL MORRIS: He said: Oh, that’s simple. We’ll just make it infallible. We’ll make it foolproof. You said it’s fallible. We’ll just fix that.

Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich, Richard V. Reeves

So imagine my horror at discovering that the United States is more calcified by class than Britain, especially toward the top. The big difference is that most of the people on the highest rung in America are in denial about their privilege. The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system. At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.

In Britain, it is politically impossible to be prime minister and send your children to the equivalent of a private high school. Even Old Etonian David Cameron couldn’t do it. In the United States, the most liberal politician can pay for a lavish education in the private sector. Some of my most progressive friends send their children to $30,000-a-year high schools. The surprise is not that they do it. It is that they do it without so much as a murmur of moral disquiet.

Beneath a veneer of classlessness, the American class reproduction machine operates with ruthless efficiency. In particular, the upper middle class is solidifying. This favored fifth at the top of the income distribution, with an average annual household income of $200,000, has been separating from the 80 percent below. Collectively, this top fifth has seen a $4 trillion-plus increase in pretax income since 1979, compared to just over $3 trillion for everyone else. Some of those gains went to the top 1 percent. But most went to the 19 percent just beneath them.

50 years after the Loving verdict, a photo essay looks back on their love, Priscilla Frank

Monday, June 12, marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark United States Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia, which quashed anti-miscegenation laws in 16 states around the nation, ushering restrictions against interracial marriage to the wrong side of history.

The date is now remembered as Loving Day in honor of Richard and Mildred Loving, the couple who defied the state’s ability to dictate the terms of their love based on their skin color. Mildred, who was of African American and Native American descent, and Richard, who was white, wed in 1958 in Washington D.C., because interracial marriage was illegal in their native rural Virginia, as well as 15 other Southern U.S. states.

When the Lovings returned to Virginia, however, local police raided their home one early morning after being tipped off by another resident. They declared the Lovings’ marriage license invalid within the scope of the state, placing the couple under arrest.

What counts as language education policy?: Developing a materialist Anti-racist approach to language activism, Nelson Flores and Soﬁa Chaparro

Abstract: Language activism has been at the core of language education policy since its emergence as a scholarly ﬁeld in the 1960s under the leadership of Joshua Fishman. In this article, we seek to build on this tradition to envision a new approach to language activism for the twenty-ﬁrst century. In particular, we advocate a materialist anti-racist approach to language activism that broadens what counts as language education policy to include a focus on the broader racial and economic policies that impact the lives of language-minoritized communities. In order to illustrate the need for a materialist anti-racist framing of language education policy we provide portraits of four schools in the School District of Philadelphia that offer dual language bilingual education programs. We demonstrate the ways that larger societal inequities hinder these programs from serving the socially transformative function that advocates for these programs aspire toward. We end by calling for a new paradigm of language education policy that connects language activism with other movements that seek to address societal inequities caused by a myriad of factors including poverty, racism, and xenophobia.

The difficulties scholars have writing for a broad audience, Christopher Schaberg and Ian Bogost

Scholars have insights, experience and research that can help the public navigate the contemporary world, but scholarly work all too often goes unseen. Sometimes it gets sequestered behind exorbitant paywalls or prohibitively steep book prices. Other times it gets lost in the pages of esoteric journals. Other times yet, it’s easy to access but hard to understand due to jargon and doublespeak. And often it doesn’t reach a substantial audience, dooming its aspirations to impact public life.

How can scholars write for wider audiences without compromising their lives as disciplinary researchers?

The Confederate flag largely disappeared after the Civil War. The fight against civil rights brought it back, Logan Strother, Thomas Ogorzalek, and Spencer Piston

But what is less well-known is the actual history of these symbols after the Civil War — and this history sheds important light on the debate. Confederate symbols have not always been a part of American or Southern life. They largely disappeared after the Civil War. And when they reappeared, it was not because of a newfound appreciation of Southern history.

Instead, as we argue in a newly published article, white Southerners reintroduced these symbols as a means of resisting the Civil Rights movement. The desire to maintain whites’ dominant position in the racial hierarchy of the United States was at the root of the rediscovery of Confederate symbols.

Pride or Prejudice: Racial Prejudice, Southern Heritage, and White Support for the Confederate Battle Flag, Logan Strother, Spencer Piston, and Thomas Ogorzalek

Abstract: Debates about the meaning of Southern symbols such as the Confederate battle emblem are sweeping the nation. These debates typically revolve around the question of whether such symbols represent “heritage or hatred:” racially innocuous Southern pride or White prejudice against B lacks. In order to assess these competing claims, we first examine the historical reintroduction of the Confederate flag in the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s; next, we analyze three survey datasets, including one nationally representative dataset and two probability samples of White Georgians and White South Carolinians, in order to build and assess a stronger theoretical account of the racial motivations underlying such symbols than currently exists. While our findings yield strong support for the hypothesis that prejudice against Blacks bolsters White support for Southern symbols, support for the Southern heritage hypothesis is decidedly mixed. Despite widespread denials that Southern symbols reflect racism, racial prejudice is strongly associated with support for such symbols.

The Tribalism that Divides: “the victims of the Us v. Them years/Wrecking all things virtuous and true”

Jonna Ivin’s long-form effort to understand the rise of Trumplandia—I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump—investigates an important question about political allegiances in the U.S.:

There is an unavoidable question about places like Benton County, a question many liberals have tried to answer for years now: Why do poor whites vote along the same party lines as their wealthy neighbors across the road? Isn’t that against their best interests?

The election of Trump has spurred a seemingly endless debate about -isms: racism and nationalism prominent, but rarely evoked but enveloping of both, tribalism.

Of these three -isms, discussions of racism remain taboo, sparking often white denial; nationalism draws both support and criticism; yet, as I noted, tribalism tends to be unspoken in the context of the U.S.

As a life-long U.S. citizen old enough to have witnessed the irrational national hatred of the USSR and Russia morph into a right-wing embracing of Russia based significantly on race, I am struck now by the tribalism central to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, a fictional examination of the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-70.

“In 1967, Colonel Ojukwu declared that Eastern Nigeria would be known as the Independent Republic of Biafra. The main intentions of Colonel Ojukwu were to break away from the dictatorship of the Northern Nigeria Military who were immensely discriminating the people of Southern and Eastern Nigeria.” Cole Kirkpatrick

Adichie dramatizes the power of language, education, and tribes to drive power distributions. However, the U.S. version of tribalism is segregation—both de jure and de facto—that tends to fall along racial and economic lines.

Trump and his administration has fueled a growing genre of which Ivin’s essay is among the more powerful, although ultimately inadequate—the best trying to deconstruct white voters (often narrowed to working class and/or poor white voters), but the worst masking apologist journalism uncritically blinded by its own whitewashing.

Like J.D. Vance’s deeply flawed Hillbilly Elegy, Ivin’s piece is a sympathetic read of whites in the U.S., although much more blunt than Vance about the fact of racism running through angry poor whites, captured in her refrain: “I’m just a poor white trash motherfucker. No one cares about me.”

As someone with white working-class roots nurtured in racist soil who eventually focused a great deal of scholarship and professional work on the intersections of inequity (poverty and racism) and education, I recognize that while poverty can and should unite, individual and systemic racism trumps common economic interests among impoverished whites in the U.S.

Yes, Ivin asks the right question, noted above, but her piece ultimately fails because it balks at holding poor whites accountable for being coerced into racism by the power elites; Ivin seems to see only two options: sympathy for poor whites or demonizing poor whites.

And, Ivin’s essay devolves into a Bernie Sanders plea, Sanders and his campaign a model of the ultimate failures of whitewashed socialism.

Partisan politics, like religion, is trapped in tribalism, subsets of the larger urges toward creating us versus them* in everything humans touch. Ivin and others seeking to understand angry white voters simply fail to address that ultimately those committed to tribalism (as nationalism and racism) above all else must be confronted, and held accountable.

Yes, the power elites who speak to and prime tribalism are the core problem, one that must be dismantled. Yet, to continue to sympathize with angry poor whites as if they remain more important than racial minorities is to whitewash that poor whites benefit from white racism (in the judicial system, for example), and that even though poor whites are pawns of political elites, they have the potential to assert their autonomy in order to acknowledge systemic racism and then reject racism in order to form economic solidarity.

So allow me to end with the sort of distinctions we need instead of clamoring to understand the angry poor white character.

Recently, I was confronted by a fellow academic who argued that whites voting in majorities (both men and women) for Trump cannot be called racist unless we also label as racist overwhelming majorities of blacks voting for Barack Obama.

This proves to be a false analogy if we step back from simple race to inspect the intent behind the votes. One of the most powerful aspects of Ivin’s essay is that she unpacks the racial and then racist motivations historically of many whites, again even as they are being baited by people with power.

There is much to suggest that Trump support is grounded in white fear of losing the exact privilege they deny ( a fear masked as “traditional values” and other nationalistic/tribal language); conversely, black support of Obama or other so-called progressives is a quest for equity.

“Conservative” (a tribal urge) is to keep things as the are; “progressive” is to seek change, ideally change for the benefit of all.

While demographics of partisan political support are racial, we must confront that racial can be racist (white support of Trump) or about equity (black support of Obama).

Trump support among whites is a contemporary example of the historical pattern Ivin exposes, notably instilling fear of black men in poor whites during reconstruction: “Religious and political leaders began using a combination of fear, sex, and God to paint a chilling picture of freed angry Black men ravaging the South.”

The Lost Cause Worse Than Slavery
Thomas Nast
October 24, 1874
Reproduced from Harper’s Weekly

Trump’s dog whistles about Mexicans and terrorists, and getting tough on crime (code for policing blacks) are warmed over racism from the late nineteenth century—tactics that have worked for more than a century for political and economic elites.

Trumplandia is nothing new, and white angst need not be examined in order for us to understand it. These are all old hat for the U.S.

What would be new is an honest confrontation of tribalism in the U.S. and an honest effort to dismantle systemic racism in the name of social and economic justice.

* “Ignoreland,” R.E.M.: “These bastards stole their power from the victims of the Us v. Them years/Wrecking all things virtuous and true.”

Black Power and the Rise of Trumplandia

During my formative years of the 1960s and 1970s, the political unrest driven by race and racism churned somewhat innocuously for me in the dim background. Several aunts and an uncle lived in Asheville, North Carolina, and their school lives were punctuated with protests, my mother receiving frequent updates by phone as we lived about an hour and a half south of there in South Carolina.

The working class white racism of my family and being a son of the recalcitrant South significantly skewed the ongoing version of history occurring around me—the othering of black people (protests in Asheville were always “riots”) and the discrediting of the Civil Rights movement and its black leaders.

Then, “black power” existed for me in two forms—pop culture versions of blaxploitation media, including Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and Shaft, and real-world protest such black gloves and fists raised, John Carlos and Tommy Smith at the 1968 Olympics.

Introduced in June 1972, Marvel’s Luke Cage embodied some of the best and worst aspects of how pop culture addressed race and racism.

Shaft became iconic pop culture in the U.S., first released in 1971.

Black power as black protest in my home, and I suspect all across my community, was met with disdain, posed as offensive, not heroic.

After the election of Donald Trump as president, many have continued to scramble to explain the rise of Trumplandia, often falling into two opposing camps—one arguing Trump’s support is because more people were hurting under Obama than the pundits ever admitted and the other demanding that we admit Trump’s rise was fueled by racism, now neatly cloaked in terms such as “nationalism” and “alt-right.”

I am of the second camp because the data are overwhelmingly compelling about how white men and women voted for Trump in large percentages:

CNN Politics

We stand in 2017 continuing a corrosive tradition confronted by James Baldwin—”this rigid refusal to look at ourselves.”

“White” remains unspoken as the normal, as the given, and then any excuse is embraced in order to ignore the lingering weight of racism in the U.S.

As might be expected, “black power” in 2017 is before us in the form of economic power, a rising economic autonomy by blacks that likely played a major role in motivating Trump’s supporters who seek to keep the U.S. white.

Two recent controversies may serve as evidence of this: LaVar Ball creating a a sports brand around his soon-to-be-drafted son, Lonzo, and former president Barack Obama’s speaking engagements and fees.

The backlash against both Ball and Obama are interesting and telling since the critics are often those who elected Trump—a bravado and hollowness that dwarf anything Ball has said or done—and who worship Ronald Reagan—who earned millions speaking in Japan after leaving office.

The problems are not bravado, self-promotion, or capitalizing on political careers; the problems are when blacks seek the same avenues as whites to fortune and power.

Moments of this racial anger occurred under George W. Bush as well when his administration sought to dismantle affirmative action, racial preferential treatment for college admission; although Bush himself had benefitted from legacy admission to college.

Trump’s wealth and political success began with an inheritance, one that he has squandered and continued to grow on the backs of others, at the expense of others. Trump now right in front of the entire world works daily to pass on that unearned privilege to his family.

But we are somehow offended by Ball and Obama’s speaking fees—somehow offended that these black men are doing exactly what the capitalistic American Dream says we are supposed to do.

And swirling around all this are black superheroes returning to pop culture prominence—Luke Cage on Netflix and The Falcon as well as the Black Panther in the Marvel film universe.

And just as it did when I was growing up, as long as these black heroes generate money for the right people (“right” means “white”), all is good.

But those same people paying to watch black superheroes, as my family did about Carlos and Smith, turn their scorn on #BlackLivesMatter, rigidly refusing to look at themselves.

Twenty-first century black power is LeBron James, who demands not only the wealth he earns but the power to control that wealth.

Trumplandia is a self-defeating racist response to black power, one that is a real-world dystopia not far removed from another message of pop culture begging for our viewing dollars, The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu.

We must admit black power spawned Trumplandia, a white fright, and we can only hope, in part, black power will be able to dismantle it.

Top Democrats are wrong: Trump supporters were more motivated by racism than economic issues, Mehdi Hasan

Race, Religion, and Immigration in 2016 | Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, John Sides

Ultimately, the 2016 campaign helped make attitudes related to immigration, religion, and race more salient to voter decision making in a way that many other attitudes were not. This was particularly consequential for Clinton because a substantial number of white Obama voters had less favorable views of immigrants, Muslims, and black people. Of course, these attitudes were not the only thing associated with how people voted in 2016. Moreover, the findings I have presented here characterize the entire sample of white voters; they are not an account of how any single voter, or every voter, made his or her choice. Nevertheless, these findings suggest that, compared to the 2012 election, the 2016 election was distinctively about attitudes related to racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.

Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did, Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel

Analysis | Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism, Thomas Wood

Trumpism: It’s Coming From the Suburbs, Jesse A. Myerson