White delusion is both dangerous and often comical.
It’s dangerous because white delusion gave us Donald Trump’s presidency. For four years, we watched a tangelo-flavored white commander-in-chief say things that were demonstrably untrue and easily fact-checked, yet we saw an entire political party and a strong majority of white Americans treat the things he had to say as if they had some kind of merit.
White delusion caused the Caucasi-D-day rebellion of Jan. 6, at the U.S. Capitol. Trump spent months successfully spreading propaganda about an election being stolen, which was a lie. Dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts and supreme courts got tied up in entertaining the “stop the steal” campaign. Entire states had to do recounts and audits of their election results that they wouldn’t normally have to do just to appease white delusion. White people heard Trump say that voting machines were rigged with some type of Skynet-ish algorithm programmed to eat up Trump votes and shit out Biden votes and they said en masse: “Yeah, that sounds legit.” They believed it for one reason and one reason alone...
White people are crazy.
As I said, sometimes white delusion is comical. Sometimes the shit is just funny. The comedic stylings of white head-ass-ness occur especially when white people—in the media, on social media or anywhere else white people gather to swim in their own tears—complain that it is they who are now marginalized and oppressed, which they only believe because they are just now discovering in-depth discussions on race and racism that have been going on years, decades and generations.
This, of course, brings us to Fox News, which is basically NASA for out-of-this-world whiteness in all of its delusional glory.
On Wednesday, the hosts of Fox & Friends—aka Great Value Three Stooges, aka Dollar Store Alvin and the Chipmunks, aka The View if the entire panel was Meghan McCain—sat down together for an erroneous bitch-o-thon about how white people are the real victims of racism, how white men are now vulnerable to racism and sexism, and how straight white people are now ostracized for, well, being of the only sexual orientation that was considered normal for the vast majority of America’s existence.
“The big difference between now and the 1960s: They’re not acknowledging any improvement in our culture, the gains made, how we are more equal, even despite our faults, than any other country,” host Brian Kilmeade said. “The other thing is they are not only trying to raise up minorities and make sure the playing field is even, they’re trying to take down the white culture.”
Already, Kilmeade is doing that thing people do where they say something ridiculous knowing that if they just keep talking without giving their statements room to be scrutinized they won’t have to actually back anything they say up with substance.
Who, besides delusional white people, were actively acknowledging racial progress in the 1960s? We’re talking about the height of the civil rights movement when white people were still bombing Black churches and assassinating Black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.—who is currently white people’s favorite play daddy for Black people even though the vast majority of them still hated the man during the period Kilmeade thinks was rife with racial progress acknowledgment.
You know who was talking about racial progress in the ‘60s? Paul Weiss—a Yale professor of whitesplainology who, two months after MLK’s assassination, tried to school James fucking Baldwin on being less divisive when talking about racism in America.
Here’s what Baldwin said of white people’s idea of progress during what Kilmeade thinks was the progress acknowledgment golden era:
“Insofar as the American public wants to think there has been progress, they overlook one very simple thing: I don’t want to be given anything by you. I just want you to leave me alone so I can do it myself. And it also overlooks another very important thing: Perhaps I don’t think that this republic is the summit of human civilization. Perhaps I don’t want to become like Ronald Reagan or like the president of General Motors. Perhaps I have another sense of life… Perhaps I don’t want what you think I want.”
Anyway, Kilmeade’s white nonsense only got worse.
“This generation of Americans wonders why aren’t we all Americans.” he continued. “Why are we being marginalized on a daily basis based on our gender, our sexuality, and the color of our skin. And it’s not even subtle! It is actually out there! It is written in black and white!”
Even in his own comment about white marginalization, Kilmeade has done what America does in general and identified white people as the default.
“This generation of Americans wonders why aren’t we all Americans.” Nah, this entire generation doesn’t wonder that—white people who aren’t used to mainstream discussions around systemic racism wonder that. White people who pretend they “don’t see color” wonder that. White people who are just tired of hearing about race wonder that. Most polls show that more than half of Americans think racism is still very much alive and well in America, and that percentage widens significantly once you take white opinions out of the equation. So, when Kilmeade cites “this generation of Americans,” he’s literally only talking about white conservatives...while complaining about marginalization.
Hell, just Tuesday, Fox News allowed conservative economist and “trickle-down” economics architect Art Laffer to generalize “minorities”—as in everyone who isn’t white—as people who “aren’t worth $15 an hour in most cases.” No host on the show even blinked at that white nationalist nonsense, but the next day, hosts on the same network got together for a circle-jerk against anti-white generalizations.
But the larger point is this: In what world are white people marginalized? Certainly not in America, where you can hock a loogie in any direction and you have a 99.999999 percent chance of spitting on something that is controlled by white people.
Surely, Kilmeade is not crying, “Won’t somebody please think of the disenfranchised whites?” in a nation where white people dominate nearly every pillar of western popular culture from TV to film to broadcasting. Not in a nation where congressional lawmakers, law enforcement officers and state and federal judges are still overwhelmingly melanin-less and male. Not where white people control nearly 90 percent of America’s wealth because they basically are corporate America.
Of course, let co-host Steve Doocy tell it, none of that overwhelming white representation matters because “the biggest entertainers, the biggest sports stars are African-Americans.”
Doocy also, in true white denial form, cited the election of Barack Obama as proof of a post-racial America.
“It was just a couple of years ago where the United States of America elected an African-American as president of the United States,” he said.
This comment always tickles me coming from white conservatives because, first, it glosses over the fact that 45 out of 46 American presidents have been white men. Secondly, they’re acting like they are the ones who elected him. In both of Obama’s elections, well under half of white voters voted for him, and the Republican base spent all eight years of his presidency claiming he was a Muslim who was not a U.S. citizen. Only around a quarter of Republicans believed he was a legitimate president.
Anyway, there’s only one way a white person can live in this world and believe that white people are on the wrong side of systemic oppression: They must be crazy.
Mind you, the whole “boo-hoo for the hueless and clueless” Fox & Friends segment revolved around the right-winger war on Critical Race Theory—another display white delusion becoming white power.
Right now conservative lawmakers and elected officials—who have not demonstrated that they know even a single thing about the academic study that has been around since 1989 and is developed through research that dates back to what Kilmeade thinks is the “of course we can all just get along” era of racial progress acknowledgment—are drafting actual laws to ban CRT into oblivion. They’re taking a thing that began as a way to study how race affects law, and they’re proposing and signing racist laws to ban it without catching even a whiff of their own cauc-irony.
But this isn’t just about Kilmeade, Doocy or co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who basically said during the segment—and I’m paraphrasing here—“We don’t see color in my house because we have the bible.” These three represent most of white America. They are the living embodiment of the statement, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
In all honesty, and despite the theme of this piece, it isn’t delusion or craziness—it’s white supremacy.
Period.