St. Louis CofCC Blog

It will be if Gregory Rodriguez keeps writing columns.

The fear of white decline

Hillary Rodham Clinton is right. She has the broader and whiter political coalition, so she should, by all rights, be the Democratic presidential nominee.

After all, in other realms of the political process, we routinely refer to “black districts” or “Latino districts” and speak of the necessity of those jurisdictions to be represented by black or Latino elected officials. Well, then, because the American population is 66% white, maybe the United States is a de facto white district that should be represented accordingly.

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Since the civil rights movement, though, it’s also been taboo to speak of the collective interests of white people in polite company. To mention whites as an interest group — in the way we do minority groups — hearkens back to segregation and worse.

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Is this white supremacy? No, in fact it might be its opposite, an acknowledgment that white privilege has its limits. With immigration and globalization reformulating who we are as a nation, it isn’t the white elites that are threatened by the changes; rather, it’s the nearly 70% of whites who are not college educated who figure among the most insecure of Americans. Many feel that their jobs are being outsourced or taken by immigrants — legal or otherwise — and that their culture is being subsumed. When Clinton promises to make their voices heard, she’s appealing not to Anglo-Saxon racial triumphalism but to the fear of white decline.

This hearkens back to a debate earlier this decade between The Bard and former San Francisco Police Department Detective Lou Calabro. The latter was (and still is) lobbying for the adoption of European-American history and heritage months/events, while the former thought that doing so would mean that white America would be accepting a demotion from being synonymous with America to being merely one of many racial groups within America.

This writer sided with Sam at first, but is now leaning toward Calabro’s mindset, because we need to have something that legitimizes whiteness, all whiteness, and whiteness alone, and something that gets white people thinking about whites. Also, it’s not as if we weren’t demoted anyway; adopting Calabro’s idea means that our demoted selves realize that we are a people and have been demoted; Sam’s ideas would mean that our demoted selves would still wander around deracinated and oblivious.

Read the rest of the article.