Remember the mass freakouts staged by many white people over Beyonce’s videos last year? These were people who acted as if Beyonce had personally walked up to them and slapped them in the face.
Remember the mass freakouts staged by many white people when Obama dared to speak up for Dr. Henry Louis Gates? Or when he dared to endorse Black Lives Matter? One could hear the same sense of perceived betrayal.
Might I humbly suggest that these reactions have a shared root: namely, the belief by white audiences that both Obama and Beyonce would be white-centered at all times? That they would put what white Americans feel to be the nation’s default setting — whiteness — at the core of their actions and creations?
Watch the behavior of those people who seem incapable of admitting that there are families made of people of color who are just as much working class as are white farming or factory-worker families. Watch the actions of those who say that Hillary never talked about the “working class” when she very obviously did.
Watch the actions of those white people who may try to ‘improve’ certain neighborhoods by buying and rehabbing houses in them, but won’t let their kids attend the schools in them even when the schools are filled with high achievers.
Those are going to be the people who are going to be our nation’s biggest problems going forward. Regardless of their openly proclaimed political leanings, their true allegiance, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not, is to the concept and culture of whiteness, and they’re more invested in keeping America white-centered than in anything else, when it comes down to it.