Finally, someone has stood up for the downtrodden and mistreated.
Donald Trump last week, during an interview, said what so few people have the courage to say out loud: That white people have been very poorly treated since the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
“White people were very badly treated,” the president said, without a hint of sarcasm or irony, “where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university or a college.”
Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for finally standing up for people who look like me, who have names like mine, who have suffered through the indignity of discrimination and unfair treatment.
I recall a time not so long ago that I went looking for work, filing application after application with employers all over the state of Alabama. At various major companies. With banks and car dealerships and big box stores.
But alas, I was turned away or simply never contacted because my name simply sounded too white.
No. Wait.
My mistake, that wasn’t me. That was actually Black applicants across America. A 2021 study found that applicants with white sounding names (names that are most likely to be used 90 percent of the time by white people) were more than twice as likely to receive a return call from an employer—even the biggest, most prestigious employers—than applicants with Black-sounding names who had similar skills and work history.
Ah, well, that was just one instance. And really, is 56 years enough time to truly judge?
What about those unfair lending practices? White people have been getting shafted by lenders for years because of the color of our skin, locked out of the American dream of home ownership and all of the benefits that go with it.
Oops. That’s not right either.
Actually, a whole slew of banks and big lenders have been caught by the Department of Justice over the last few years redlining certain minority neighborhoods and unfairly denying Black and Hispanic borrowers. Bank of America paid $335 million to settle claims in 2011. Wells Fargo paid out $175 million in 2012. City National Bank paid out $31 million over redlining specifically.
OK, OK. That all happened. But what about the colleges? You can’t deny that colleges were keeping us deserving white folks out and giving spots to underperforming Black applicants.
Weeelllll. In reality, the racial quotas and Affirmative Action policies of most universities only pushed the population of minority students on campuses to something close to the minority populations of the cities and states in which they were located. And prior to those quotas, Black folks were forced to create their own universities in order to receive a college education. That’s those historically Black colleges that so many white people complain about all the time.
But now, at least under Donald Trump, we’re back to a “merit-based” system of acceptance.
Pfft.
That’s enough with the sarcasm. Because this is all actually infuriating to this white person who is so utterly sick to death of my fellow white people whining and moaning and complaining about fairness, when what they’re actually looking for is a continuation of the advantages they’ve always had in this country.
Higher education is the perfect example. Because all of a sudden we want to focus on merit. We want a fair, unweighted application process that doesn’t favor anyone.
Unless, of course, your daddy is an alum. Or a booster. Or an important political figure.
But isn’t it interesting when we start counting merit and start leveling the playing field? Not when the children are first born and we didn’t guarantee that the kids in the poorest neighborhoods had access to quality early childhood education. Not in elementary school, when we deemed some schools (mostly in Black neighborhoods) failing and gave the affluent a pathway to attend elsewhere. Not when we dished out taxpayer money to send wealthy kids to private schools. Not when we allowed for breakaway school districts and a regressive tax structure that deprived schools with high minority populations the proper funding.
We also didn’t care much about an even playing field when we locked Black men and women out of the top paying jobs in this country, making it highly unlikely that they would be able to afford the tutoring and resources necessary for their kids to compete with affluent white students in the classroom. That includes, of course, paying for assistance in preparing for the SATs and ACTs—tests that have historically been the barrier between impoverished students and top universities.
All of that unevenness was just fine. That lack of merit didn’t raise an eyebrow. It was “just the way things are.”
And that, in a nutshell, is the fallacy of the disenfranchised white American. It’s a myth made up by whiny, self-important white people who see anything less than a leg up as a slap in the face. It’s the dudes whose daddies stacked their Little League teams and dumped money in the booster club to make sure their kids started over better players. That’s who’s running America right now—the silver-spoon, stacked-team frauds who have never experienced true discrimination or unfairness.
They’ve spent a lifetime running this scam—blaming everyone else when the slightest thing doesn’t go their way. They’re masters at it. So good, in fact, that they’ve convinced a whole bunch of working class white people that the unfairness extends to them too, that the minority folks are taking from everyone. Their food stamps and health care subsidies are what’s driving up taxes, and certainly not those billion-dollar corporate subsidies and trillion-dollar companies paying no taxes at all.
Some people have definitely been treated very poorly over the last 60 years. But sure as hell isn’t white people.
