What’s happening in the here and now is about the toppling of one particular notion:
The pretense that white America is being illegally and immorally disrespected by those who defy their betters.
Like the transparently immature and childish sitting American President, crowds of fragile white protestors, gun-toters and Kindergarten Konstitutionalists continue to pretend that there is a hierarchy of social status.
Such have no idea that their prancing and dancing reflects ignorance; no awareness that comparatively they were born on third base with a silver spoon in their mouths rather than a broken wooden ladle.
Such folks are part of my own racial identity. I am in their category. I believe I have much to learn about notions that I ignorantly took for granted all my life.
However, many among us white folk are afraid of a mental and moral checkup – much in the same way someone who suspects they might have a terminal illness refuses to go see the doctor and learn the truth.
It’s a truth about what the internal thoughts and assumptions that generate fear, hostility and fragile thinking might be.
Given how seldom we experience racial discomfort in a society we dominate, we haven’t had to build our racial stamina. Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race.
We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses.
These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. –
DiAngelo, Robin J, White Fragility. Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
Over the hundreds of years of our evolution from a band of rebellious colonies many who look back seem to have enshrined concepts and notions that never existed;
… many deliberately ignore the good and evil sources of how status, regard and dignity were formed.
Right Wing Evangelicals with home-school textbooks insist the the Founding Fathers were the same kind of judgmental, literal-minded religious conservatives they themselves pretend to be today.
The truth is, our current representative Right Wing Evangelical Christians were spawned in the early twentieth century. The holier-than-thou notions of who is saved and who isn’t with its consequential discriminatory mindset involving holy worthiness is our own modern curse.
It’s not something social conservatives can pin on our Founders, many of whom were deists as well as slave owners.
Bottom line is that the sands of racial purity are shifting underfoot with every passing moment. The BLM movement long ago lost its limitation of being nothing more than a single racial minority making noise.
All non-whites have skin in this exploding movement. In truth white folks have skin in this game and if we don’t reset their priorities we will be left behind and left out.
Wise, truth-facing and truth-confessing whites need to stop pretending that their High Castle is forever.
Curmudgeon at Work 
Well said and totally in agreement. We will be left behind if we don’t recognize our superiority is self-consecrated and false.
I agree. We can’t dodge a runaway wagon if we keep stepping in its path.
The natural first knee-jerk reaction for people of pale complexions may be to feel that we will have no place in a non-white based social economy. Perhaps if we can recognize this as a natural reaction to a socio-economic system based on exclusion, we can get past the defensiveness we feel and ask ourselves how we could be part of building an inclusive socio-economic system. Otherwise we are going to support the very dystopian future that frightens us so.
Imagine the imagery being used, for example with what happened to the white minority after it’s social and political domination was lost. Imagine how that imagery drives pale complexioned resistance here.