Ethnic Minorities and People of Color

When your used to privilege equality feels like oppression

An essay on this matter, though I'd say it was too optimistic

This is why “white genocide” actually does have a meaning beyond “racial integration.” If you take away a white person’s ability to live as the undisputed master of the universe—to take his own experience as normal and privileged, and to presume all others to be debased copies of his own primary existence—then you take away his whiteness. His heart will fall to the ground and he will not be able to lift it up again. After that, nothing will happen: whiteness will be dead.

We should welcome this manifest destiny. White people will not be systematically murdered, after all; non-white people mainly want to live as full human beings in the societies in which they were born, and they don’t need to kill white people to do it. In the 18th century, they did: if enslaved Haitians wanted to live as full human beings in the societies in which they were born, they did have to kill white people to do it; the only thing to regret is that enslavers laid the seeds of their own misfortune.

We do not live in the 18th or 19th or even the 20th century. Donald Trump’s generation can remember America before the civil rights movement, before California and Texas—and so many of our cities—became majority-minority, before their cause became a lost one. In a generation, Donald Trump’s generation will all be dead, and they’ll be replaced by the least white generation in American history. The arc of demographics is long, though: we’ll live the rest of our lives in a world where whiteness is backed in a corner, wounded and angry. We’ll live in a world where it has never been harder for a white person to live as the undisputed master of the universe, to take his own experience as normal and privileged, and to presume all others to be debased copies of his own primary existence, where whiteness is a plurality, still, but not a majority, where white people have dominance but no longer have hegemony. Because hegemony is dominance that doesn’t need violence to maintain itself, this is a dangerous world to live in: post-hegemonic white supremacy is organizing for war, and we will not be free of it for a long time. Because white supremacists see their morbid collectivity vanishing, they are willing to die for it, and to kill.

We can live for it, I hope. My children, if I have them, will speak Spanish, and in their life they will assimilate me into the new world we can all dream of creating together. Whiteness needs to die, because it was only ever about death in the first place. We can dream of something better, and more to the point, we can live it. A term like “white genocide” will not help us do that. But it’s good to look at what they are against, what they fear, what they hate, and remember what it is that we can be unironically for. There is probably a word for it, and I hope we all live long enough to learn what it is.