Whiteness is a pay cut

Whiteness always amounts to a pay cut. That should have been the conclusion from data released last week showing that inflation is so high that it wiped out wage gains over three years. A majority picked Donald Trump because he said implementing tariffs and deporting "illegals" would make whiteness great again. However, the result of those policies, in addition to his war against Iran, has been inflation climbing to nearly twice the target rate. Some economists expect it to reach 4 percent next month and stay there for the rest of the year.

Again, the lesson should be clear: If you choose whiteness, you choose to cut your own pay (and the pay of everyone who did not choose whiteness). But that won't be the lesson most people draw, especially Democrats who are courting disillusioned Trump supporters. They won't believe whiteness backfired, because they won't believe that can happen in America.

In America, whiteness (or proximity to whiteness) often yields real material results. Some deny that reality, but we all know it's true. Kamala Harris was right. Tariffs are taxes, deporting migrants is inflationary, and Trump was vulnerable to foreign entanglements. However, it didn't matter, and not only because it was a Black woman warning us. It didn't matter because the idea of whiteness as wealth is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.

Ironically, it's thanks in part to Joe Biden that the idea of making whiteness great again had mass appeal after 2020. The Democratic president and his party grew the economy from the bottom up and middle out. Wages rose. Unemployment fell. The policies of multiracial democracy put the government on the side of workers and consumers. That resulted in Black prosperity (as well as in prosperity for nonwhites generally) – and there's your problem. If whiteness is wealth, Blackness is theft. When some white people saw Black people doing well, they thought they were witnessing a crime. Trump's reelection restored "justice."

But now those same people are very, very confused. Instead of the restoration of glory, as advertised by the Trump campaign, gas prices are soaring, groceries are extortionate, health insurance is out of reach, and everyone is getting a pay cut, even as jobs are getting scarce. The president returned to their proper places the virtue of whiteness and the vice of Blackness, but it's not working! Something is seriously wrong! Someone do something!

Whiteness has led the American economy to ruin every four to eight years for the last 50 years. If there's a Republican president, expect a disaster. Yet most political commentators won't put whiteness at the center of their thinking. It's as if doing so would violate a kind of unwritten agreement to believe collectively that everyone wants equality, no one has bad intentions, and anti-Black prejudice is a thing of the past. It's punditry that treats white people as if they were children who can't handle the truth about themselves or their country.

A minority of Democrats choose to play along with the myth of "the people" as pure and innocent. Playing along is less risky than taking the responsibility of slapping these voters into adulthood, for their own good. But the make-believe can run so thick that some Democrats make a serious mistake. They convince themselves that Trump supporters who are angry about whiteness backfiring on them are going to be open to Democrats. Fact is, they think Democrats stand for Blackness. These voters will most certainly stick to the devil they know. Their expressions of anger are not a sign of openness. It just means they're mad.

I may sound hopeless, but I'm not. Though their dream turned into a nightmare, they won't give up on it. However, they might stay home. Liberals and Democrats should spend less time asking themselves how to appeal to disillusioned Trump voters with this or that economic policy. They should spend more time asking themselves how to deepen the disillusionment. They are not going to trade whiteness for prosperity because, to them, whiteness is prosperity. That whiteness ruins prosperity does not change the fact that they want it both ways. They can't not want both, even though they have never had both, yet liberals and Democrats keep trying to change their minds. We should use their minds against them.

Let me put it like this. Whiteness is a drug. Only the addict can choose to be free of it. That doesn't mean everyone else in our political community doesn't have choices. It just means we should be careful with the choices we have. Among Democrats, the current trend is to accuse Donald Trump of breaking his promise to America. However, that doesn't help break the addiction. It affirms it. It suggests that if Trump were a better president, the whiteness he promised on the campaign trail would have increased pay. We should not enable addiction. We should treat each other like adults. Whiteness has never increased pay, but multiracial democracy has. If adults can't handle that truth, they should stay home.

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