Why Are the US's "Supremacists" So Weak, Scared, and Whiny?
The big news in American racism this year is that the bigots have decided to stop pretending that White men like them are being passed over in favor of supposedly inferior "diversity hires." Well, that is not quite right, because of course they will continue to whine about what they insist on calling reverse racism against (presumptively superior, I guess) White men. But the new and surprising (even to a cynic like me) addition to the White grievance canon in the US is that they are now tacitly admitting that they are afraid of a fair contest. Now, even when their competition bests them fair and square, that is still somehow evidence that the world is rigged against White men.
I made that point in the nineteenth and twentieth paragraphs of my 22-paragraph column on Tuesday of this week, which means that I violated the prime directive of persuasive writing: make the big point right at the top. Academic writing instills different expectations, and even after decades of being in the online pundit-like space, old habits die hard. Again, however, the big point -- indeed, the idea that motivated me to write that column in the first place -- is that White grievance politics has now jumped the proverbial shark by no longer even pretending to be "only" about superior White guys getting the short end of the stick.
Before exploring this point further, however, it will be useful to offer a quick recap. The conclusion that I am repeating here became clear in light of a new attack from Republicans -- not just random podcasters, but in this case the Attorney General of the State of Florida -- on the National Football League's so-called Rooney Rule. As Professor Krishnamurthi explained here last month:
The Rooney Rule, named for the former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers Dan Rooney, requires among other things that a team “interview at least two external minority candidates in person for open head coach and GM positions and at least two external minority candidates — in person or virtual — for a coordinator job.” “Minority” is defined to include ethnic minorities and women.
The key point is that there is nothing in the Rooney Rule that gives minority candidates any advantage in the hiring decision. It says that the pool of interviewees must include two such candidates, but it does not require (or even politely request) that the decision maker(s) give any special weight to race, gender, or anything else. This is why on Tuesday I referred to objections to the Rooney Rule as categorically different from most other anti-diversity arguments, which rely on some version of the claim -- sometimes implicit but often explicit -- that White men are superior (one might even say "supreme") but are being passed over for non-merit-based reasons.
Readers of a certain age might recall the infamous "White Hands" political campaign ads for the openly racist Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, in which the camera focuses on the hands of a White man holding a job rejection letter. A narrator intones: "You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?" There are many things wrong with that argument, but at the very least, it was based on the gut-level notion of fair play that only "the best qualified" people should get jobs. And although the bigots did not admit it, that argument at least clearly implied that when minority candidates are the best qualified, they should win out.
I hasten to acknowledge that the notion of a level playing field (or fair fight, or whatever metaphor one prefers) is itself a hotly contested notion. This famous cartoon depicts two notions of fairness in a way that shows how unfair something that is supposedly equal or neutral can be.
There is an even more relevant political cartoon from (I think) the 1970's that I have tried for years to track down, without success. (So please, I would be delighted to hear from any reader who recognizes what I am about to describe and knows where to find it. It might have been from Herblock, but I honestly am not sure.) The cartoon is set at a track meet, with the referee standing at the starting line of a running race. A Black man is standing about 20 yards back and a White woman is standing about 10 yards back. The referee is waving at both them to move forward to the same starting line as the White man. The White man is apoplectic, shrieking in the referee's face: "But I've always had a head start. This isn't fair!!"
To be clear, then, I am not in any way saying that the American right's invocations of "equal treatment" or neutral fairness should be taken as serious attempts to understand the many nuances of discrimination. They are pushing old ideas that have been offered in bad faith for decades, if not centuries. But they are at least minimally non-embarrassing in the sense that they say, in essence, "Bring it on! Give me a fair shake, and I'll show you who's the best."
Opposition to the Rooney Rule, then, is indeed categorically different, because it says: "Hey wait, I have to compete against them? I could win against the other White guys, but I didn't know about this." To stay in the realm of sports, this is a retread of the blatant historical segregationism in American sports. "You want Babe Ruth to play against those guys? But they're inferior, and he shouldn't have to prove that."
In a future column, I will show how this newfound weakness on the part of America's hate-mongers is showing up in other political controversies in this country. For now, however, it is worth taking the time to shine this spotlight on what is in fact an enormous self-own by the bigots of the world. They like to say something like this: "Qualified White guys are always more qualified, but the libs prefer mediocrity." But they want more.
Donald Trump embraced the move toward presumptive White male supremacy when, for example, he claimed last year (without evidence, of course) that a plane crash had been caused by federal diversity initiatives:
I changed the Obama standards [at the Federal Aviation Administration] from very mediocre at best to extraordinary. And then when I left office and [President Joe] Biden took over, he changed [the standards] back to lower than ever before. ... The FAA’s diversity push includes a focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. That is amazing… They can be air traffic controllers.
Again, that rant was driven entirely by the fact that some of the people at the FAA were not the kind of people that Trump favors. The logic, if one can call it that, is simple (and perverse): bad thing happened; some of the people involved were not "my guys"; those people were at fault. There is no need to make an actual argument based on evidence, as in: "Well, here is the proof that Biden refused to hire people who would not have allowed such an accident to occur." Instead, Trump and his kind say this: "White male supremacy is simply a fact, and we don't have to prove it."
One might imagine that the bigots would exult in the idea of a fair fight, with White men outshining minority candidates and taking every NFL head coach, GM, and coordinator position. That would show 'em once and for all, right? After all, we all saw how White supremacy was proven to be true at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Those guys never should have been forced to run against Jesse Owens, I guess.
- Neil H. Buchanan