How White Resentment Fuels Trump’s Openly Racist Agenda
Catering to and protecting white Americans, as they go from majority to minority in the United States, is this far-right administration's organizing principle.
In 2011, amid the fierce Tea Party backlash against America’s first Black president, social scientist Robert Jones began exploring white grievances in a different way.
Jones, who heads the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), asked a new poll question about racial discrimination in a PRRI Pluralism Survey, which yielded a revealing answer. Six in 10 Republicans – though not most other Americans – called present-day discrimination against whites as big a problem as discrimination against Blacks. They saw themselves as victims.
It was a perverse, if not shocking, result. Then and now, Black Americans lag behind whites in virtually every socio-economic indicator of well-being: income, wealth, employment, educational achievement, health, and life expectancy.
Even more perverse is what Donald Trump’s presidency has wrought 14 years later.
‘So Over-the-Top, So Obessive’
After decades of fitful attempts to ameliorate the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the federal government has now made catering to and protecting whites its organizing principle.
And Trump pursues that objective with fanatical intensity.