White Supremacy and the Battered Spouse Syndrome
Why white people can’t stop being racist
White Americans have been encouraged to continue dreaming, and black Americans have been alerted to the necessity of waking up.
— James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 1976
The purpose of this essay is to further refute the widely touted argument and what appears to be an article of faith in many left and right circles that Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris was due to overwhelming and debilitating “economic anxiety” and a renewed and resurgent “economic populism” among working-class white Americans.
I have recently covered this matter in an article wherein I highlighted Princeton’s professor Eddie Glaude, Jr.’s forceful take-down of this smelly red herring and weak-kneed economic straw man.
Here, I propose to delve deeper into the psyche of these working-class folk and their mouthpieces and unearth the roots of what at bottom is a pernicious anti-blackness — why they simply refuse to accept black people as fellow human beings no matter what incentives — “economic” or otherwise — may be offered to them to do so.
