Their mentality is transparently obvious, and sounds roughly like this within the echo chambers of their own ideologically diseased brains: If we can keep you and others like you constantly as junior partners in this thing called America, then we can retain our status as the prototype, the floor model, the one in the corner office, with the gold-trimmed nameplate who makes the rules, allows you in the boardroom occasionally—but only on our terms—and who, when we damned well feel like it, can send you to get us coffee. But when the nation’s political leader no longer looks like us, has a name that sounds funny, and a family history too exotic for our liking, and when the popular culture changes into one that is thoroughly multicultural, and as the economy melts down, confronting us with a kind of insecurity that hadn’t been our lot for three generations, however normal it might have become for the black and brown, and as the demographics—of the local school, the towns in which we live and even the country—change, confronting us with the possibility that, have mercy, within 40 years our kind will no longer be the majority, the norm, the walking talking definition of an “all-American boy or girl” (which is a concept we fucking created), then the patience with which we have tolerated you begins to wear thin. You are at the gates, and because we believe those gates are ours, that we built them—even though in every conceivable way you did—we begin to lose our sense of self. We cannot be special except in relation to you and your lack of specialness.
Tim Wise, from his “If It Walks Like a Duck and Talks Like a Duck: Racism, Bigotry and the Death of Respectable Conservatism”
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