Caleb, I am going to add to this reckoning here that deserves some consideration as well.
At the root of this misconception, in the existence of a Black man who became president, is that along with his singled out acceptance, which was within strict adherence to credentials and merit — coupled with a socially acceptable untainted public record — is that it is entirely based on standards symbolizing “white superiority” or “white patriarchy”. It made it more palpable in other words.
This acceptance was also a perfunctory nod to whites themselves — a self-pat on the back for transcending a history fraught with racial violence and malfeasance with profound evolutionary prowess that only the perception and subscription to whiteness and the white race is capable of achieving. Now add the misperception of spreading their own charitable good will and conscience — as if.
And so they must have likened Obama’s achievement as a credit to the white race — believing that it was due to white charity with education that in turn made some Blacks become so successfully evolved today, even though it was long feared that an educated slave population would threaten their authority or hierarchy.
Such moral licensing — as mentioned and defined in the Revisionist History podcast on The Lady Vanishes — that gave way to Obama’s rise is now seen as a result of this impending moral decay that has besieged us now — also known as current racial discord.
Never mind that these singular exceptions derive from being undeterred by racism and primarily self-taught in a quest for success and survival. Going by his-story one could easily be persuaded or conditioned into this sort of fallacious thinking — that literacy and numeracy is a white thing and not merely a human thing.
Punishing minorities is and was forthcoming
And so the resentment that follows signifies a smack in the face however, it made it all too easy to perfunctorily elect Donald Trump as the successor to which hardly any standard could bear. Many have remarked too that a more deserving white person was sacrificed in order for that younger Obama to be admitted in schools designed for white admissions. President Trump and AG Sessions are more than inspired to punish schools for affirmative action wrong-doing that so-called disadvantage whites.
The punishment for participating in democracy has been a rash of voter ID laws, the purging of names from the voter rolls, redrawn district boundaries and closed and moved polling places.
Affirmative action is no different. It, too, requires a narrative of white legitimate grievance, a sense of being wronged by the presence of blacks, Latinos and Asians in positions that had once been whites only. Lawsuit after lawsuit, most recently Abigail Fisher’s suit against the University of Texas, feed the myth of unqualified minorities taking a valuable resource — a college education — away from deserving whites.
For white women in this regard, taking two steps forward only to end up a mile back is just an ancillary form of punishment meted out by this patriarchal administration. It is more than obvious that misogny was marketed and promoted to deter challenging the status quo and restore America to being great again.
And disappointingly it worked!
