White victims everywhere

The ongoing conversation about race in the U.S. has evolved in recent years to include a lament from white Americans that they are the real victims of racism. Yes, that’s a fairly bizarre interpretation of how our society operates but it’s a surprisingly widespread belief among a certain sub-group of Americans. In some ways this idea goes all the way back to the Civil War when Southern slave owners felt they were being put-upon by non-slave owners by not being allowed to expand their institution into new states and so staged the most epic hissy fit of our nation’s history. They always felt persecuted by people they believed were trying to destroy their “way of life,” but the loss of that war was the catalyst for an ongoing sense of victimization, often believed to accrue to the benefit of African-Americans. The civil rights movement and resulting federal action to deny states and cities the right to discriminate further inflamed those feelings. A part of white America believes, and has always believed, that African-Americans are at the heart of all their troubles.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s the big victimization was white children being forced to attend public school with African-American children. We all know the story of how viciously some people fought that change. Just as viciously they fought being forced to accommodate black people in business in the same way they accommodated whites. The denial of “separate but equal” was seen as a terrible affront to their decency, both because it required them to serve blacks but also because it made it appear that they were not decent people. After all, hadn’t they gone out of their way to allow blacks to have their own separate society within which they would have all the same opportunities as whites. How could they be so ungrateful for that generosity?