by Amy Chua
Especially in our age of political correctness, it’s hard to imagine this kind of language being applied to any other group. The truth is that white Americans often hold their biggest disdain for other white Americans—the ones on the opposite side of the cultural divide. In January 2017, Silicon Valley executive Melinda Byerley created a stir when she tweeted out her explanation for why “we”—referring to people like herself, “who won’t sacrifice tolerance or diversity”—don’t want to live in middle America: “[N]o educated person wants to live in a shithole with stupid people”—especially “violent, racist, and/or misogynistic ones.”
The antipathy and disdain are mutual. Trump supporters in the country’s heartland see liberals as smug, elitist, hypocritical, condescending, and pampered. Many genuinely believe that liberals “hate America.” The number one New York Times bestselling author Ann Coulter has accused liberals of “treason.” In her words, “Liberals hate America, they hate ‘flag-wavers,’ they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religious groups except Islam (post 9/11). Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America likes liberals do.”
In other words, white America is itself divided. Indeed, there is now so little interaction, commonality, and intermarriage between rural/heartland/working-class whites and urban/coastal whites that the difference between them is practically what social scientists would consider an “ethnic” difference. They think of themselves as belonging to distinct and opposing political tribes. As Appalachian writer J. D. Vance puts it in Hillbilly Elegy, “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree . . . [whose] ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that.”
Tribalism in America propelled Donald Trump to the White House. If we want to understand this tribalism, we have to acknowledge the impact of inequality and the wedge it has driven between America’s whites. “Coastal elites” have become a kind of market-dominant minority from the point of view of America’s heartland, and, as we’ve seen all over the developing world, market-dominant minorities invariably end up producing democratic backlash.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Democracy and Political Tribalism in America
There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
—JOHN ADAMS, letter to Jonathan Jackson (1780)
America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. . . . Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.
—RALPH ELLISON, Invisible Man
At the core of American political tribalism, however, is race. This has always been true, but the present moment is especially fraught. We are on the verge of an unprecedented demographic transformation, which will place intense strain on the social fabric.
America is a super-group—the only one among the major powers of the world. We have forged a national identity that transcends tribal politics—an identity that does not belong to any subgroup, that is strong and capacious enough to hold together an incredibly diverse population, making us all American. This status was hard-won; it is precious.
The destructive, fracturing tribalism that is seizing American politics puts this in jeopardy. The United States is in no immediate danger of actually breaking up, unlike the United Kingdom and the European Union. But America is in danger of losing something even more important: who we are.
The Left believes that right-wing tribalism—bigotry, racism—is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism—identity politics, political correctness—is tearing the country apart. They are both right.
THE BROWNING OF AMERICA
For the first time in U.S. history, white Americans are about to lose their status as the country’s majority.
In 1965, whites were still a dominant majority in America (84 percent), with the rest of the population mostly African American. But since then, there has been an immigration explosion; over the last fifty years, nearly 59 million immigrants have arrived in the United States (legally or illegally), the largest wave of immigration in U.S. history. Unlike previous waves, these immigrants have been largely from Asia and Latin America. Between 1965 and 2015, the Asian population in America grew exponentially, from 1.3 million to 18 million, as did the Hispanic population, from 8 million to almost 57 million. As a result, the complexion of America is “browning.”
Already, non-Hispanic whites are a minority in America’s two most populous states, Texas and California. They are also a minority in New Mexico; Hawaii; Washington, DC; and hundreds of counties across the country. By 2020, more than half of all American children under the age of eighteen are expected to be nonwhite. According to Pew Foundation projections, whites will cease to be a majority in America by 2055. The U.S. Census predicts that this will happen by 2044.
To be sure, the “browning of America” is not set in stone. The current projections for when America will become majority-minority depend on certain assumptions that may not hold. For example, the Census typically categorizes multiracial, multiethnic children as minority, but many of them might self-identify as white. And with Asians outpacing Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants, perhaps “browning” is already outdated and “beiging” is more apt, raising different fears, connotations, and dynamics.
The fact remains—it’s going to happen. Whether in 2044, 2055, or later, non-Hispanic “whites,” as we understand the term, will cease to be a majority in America for the first time.
How whites in America feel about this is extremely hard to measure. To begin with, some white Americans, especially in the country’s many multicultural pockets, may genuinely welcome America’s changing complexion. In 1998, President Bill Clinton said the following in a speech at Portland State University:
In a little more than fifty years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time. . . . [N]ew immigrants are energizing our culture and broadening our vision of the world. They are renewing our most basic values and reminding us all of what it truly means to be an American.
Many activists and academics would go much further and agree with the radical (white) historian Noel Ignatiev that there is “nothing positive about white identity” or that the browning of America is a long-overdue corrective to what activist author William Wimsatt calls “the sickness of race in America.”
But if there’s one axiom of political tribalism, it’s that dominant groups do not give up their power easily, and America is unlikely to be an exception. Indeed, U.S. history offers sobering evidence. While a white minority in America is unprecedented at the national level, it’s not at the state level. After the Civil War, newly emancipated blacks suddenly eclipsed whites in the voting population in a number of Southern states, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In all these states, whites were terrified by the prospect of black majority rule. With blacks “in a large majority,” Southern politicians warned, “we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. . . . We will be completely exterminated, and the land . . . will go back into a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.”
Southern whites responded to this threat by ushering in the period known as Jim Crow. (There were even, as late as the twentieth century, delegations from the American South to South Africa to learn “tips” on how to disenfranchise and subjugate a black majority.) Through property and literacy qualifications, poll taxes, racially motivated redistricting, intimidation, and outright lynching, all the Southern s
tates were highly successful in preventing blacks from exercising the suffrage. In Louisiana, for example, the number of registered black voters fell from 130,334 in 1896 to only 1,342 in 1904.
Of course, that was a long time ago, in an America that might seem gone with the wind—before Brown v. Board of Education, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, before affirmative action, before the appointment of America’s first black Supreme Court justice, before the rise of political correctness, before the election of America’s first African American president.
But such progress can be a two-edged sword. Many believe that the gains and successes of blacks make some whites, especially lower-income whites, feel threatened.
“WHITELASH”
It may seem absurd to some, but two thirds of white working-class Americans feel “that discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” (Interestingly, 29 percent of black Americans agreed with this statement.) Indeed, a significant number of white Americans believe that “there is more racism against them than there is against black Americans”—even though “by nearly any metric . . . statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans.”
Strong evidence suggests that white anxiety—about being displaced, being outnumbered, being discriminated against—has fueled recent conservative populist politics in America. Stanford sociologist Robb Willer and his colleagues conducted a series of survey-based experiments to test the “decline of whiteness” as an explanation for the rise of the Tea Party. In one experiment, Willer found that white survey participants shown a picture of President Obama with an artificially darkened skin tone were more likely to report they supported the Tea Party than those shown a picture with Obama’s skin tone artificially lightened. In another experiment, Willer found that participants who were told “whites remain the largest ethnic group in the U.S.” were less likely to report their support for the Tea Party than those who were told “minorities [are] expected to surpass whites in number by 2042.”
According to numerous studies, similar dynamics fueled the 2016 presidential election. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that Donald Trump had especially strong support in counties “most unsettled by rapid demographic change”—i.e., by the recent influx of nonwhite immigrants into previously heavily white populations in small-town Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. A postelection survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which was reported in the Atlantic, found that “52 percent of Trump voters said that they feel like the country has changed so much, they often feel like strangers in their own land.”
White anxiety about antiwhite discrimination cuts across party lines. According to a 2016 Pew study, about half of Republicans believe there is a lot or some discrimination against whites, but so do nearly 30 percent of Democrats. Even so, a striking YouGov/Huffington Post survey conducted in December 2016 found that Trump voters were five times more likely to believe that “average Americans”—a term psychological research has shown is “implicitly synonymous” with “white Americans”—aren’t getting their fair share in society than they were to believe that “blacks” aren’t getting their fair share. Indeed, according to political scientist Michael Tesler, “perceptions that whites are currently treated unfairly relative to minorities appeared to be an unusually strong predictor of support for Donald Trump in the general election.”
There is in fact some justification for these feelings of white marginalization—at least among a certain segment of the white population. Poor and working-class whites have among the highest rates of unemployment and addiction. Life expectancy is declining for whites without a high school degree—something true of almost no other demographic, including high school dropouts from other racial groups. Educational prospects for poor white children are extremely bleak. Private tutors and one-thousand-dollar SAT courses are completely cost prohibitive to poor or even working-class people—and poor whites don’t benefit from affirmative action. Whereas most elite colleges do special outreach for racial minorities, they rarely send scouts to the backwoods of Kentucky. Out of roughly two hundred students in the Yale Law School class of 2019, there appears to be exactly one poor white—or three, if we include students from families living just above the federal poverty line. Administrators have described this class as the “most diverse” in the school’s history.
It is simply a fact that the “diversity” policies at the most selective American universities and in some sectors of the economy have had a disparate adverse impact on whites. Relative to their population percentage, working-class whites, and particularly white Christians from conservative states, are often the most underrepresented group at America’s elite universities. White employees increasingly feel victimized by prodiversity promotion policies that they see as discriminating against them—and the United States Supreme Court has agreed, striking down as illegal a particularly bald-faced attempt by the city of New Haven, Connecticut, to invalidate promotions for white firefighters in order to promote more minorities.
While whites generally are still extremely disproportionately represented in the U.S. Senate, the media, and the corporate world, working-class whites are decidedly not. Between 1999 and 2008, only 13 of the 783 members of Congress who served had spent more than a quarter of their adulthood in blue-collar jobs. As political scientist Nick Carnes writes, “Although women and racial minorities were still underrepresented at the end of the twentieth century, their gains during the postwar period sharply contrasted [with] the stable underrepresentation of working-class people, who made up between 50% and 60% of the nation during the last hundred years but who constituted 2% or less of the legislators who served in each Congress during that time.”
The result of all this is that working-class whites have among the lowest upward mobility rates in the nation. Not surprisingly, when surveyed about the prospects of children today, whites were overwhelmingly more pessimistic than Latinos and blacks. Just 24 percent of whites believed the next generation would be better off financially or the same as their parents, compared to 49 percent of blacks and 62 percent of Latinos.
Beyond their economic anxiety, many whites feel an intense cultural anxiety. America’s culture wars are nothing if not a fight for the right to define our national identity—and it’s a bitter, race-inflected battle. After Beyoncé channeled Black Lives Matter at the 2016 Super Bowl, half the country deified her while the other half accused her of “cop killer entertainment.” At the 2017 Oscars, the question of whether Best Picture would go to La La Land (a throwback musical that some criticize for “whitesplaining” jazz) or Moonlight seemed to have massive implications—as did the gaffe that initially gave the award to the former by mistake. White male heroes like John Wayne have given way to the clueless white male, who doesn’t even realize how racist he is, and is regularly made into television sport (as on Saturday Night Live). For tens of millions of white Americans today, mainstream popular culture displays an un-Christian, minority-glorifying, LGBTQ America they can’t and don’t want to recognize as their country—an America that seems to exclude them, to treat them as the enemy.
All this was roiling below the 2016 presidential campaign. As Van Jones put it on election night, Trump’s victory was in part a “whitelash.”
THREATENED IN AMERICA
To state the obvious, whites are not the only group that feels threatened in America today. Indeed, for many minorities the very idea that whites could feel threatened is disingenuous and infuriating. The whole premise of the Black Lives Matter movement is that our country is and has been since its founding built on unceasing violence, abuse, and terror against black Americans, that ours is a country where, as writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his “Letter to My Son,” black Americans are routinely murdered while going about the routine business of life: “choked to death for selling cigarettes,” “shot for s
eeking help,” and “shot down for browsing in a department store.”
Whites may feel threatened, but they do not face mass, disproportionate incarceration. As author and civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander has observed, “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.” In Washington, DC, an estimated “three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.” White parents in America do not live in fear, as many black parents do, that their children will be gunned down without cause by the police.
Jim Crow may officially be over, but attempts to disenfranchise blacks continue. In 2016, a federal appellate court found that the North Carolina legislature had deliberately targeted black voters in its voter identification requirements as well as in provisions restricting same-day registration, out-of-precinct provisional voting, and early voting—provisions enacted only after the legislature had collected data on racial voting patterns. The restrictions, ruled the court, “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” Similar measures were struck down in Texas.
Daily life, as psychologist Beverly Tatum has shown, differs materially for people of color in America, starting at an early age. White three-year-olds are never asked why their skin looks “so dirty.” Whites are generally not followed around in stores or asked for identification when no one else is questioned. They are not passed over by taxi drivers or subjected to constant media images of people who look like them in handcuffs. Whites do not have to see people react to them by clutching their purses and crossing the street and are not regularly subjected to police brutality. “I hope none of them ask about my spring break,” says the protagonist of Angie Thomas’s bestselling novel The Hate U Give. “They went to Taipei, the Bahamas, Harry Potter World. I stayed in the hood and saw a cop kill my friend.” If many whites feel anxiety in today’s America, many blacks feel an existential threat that seems never to end.