The chart above is from the Galvanize Action Poll - done on September 20th of 8,006 white women in 10 battleground states (WI, PA, OH, MI, ME, NE, AZ, NV, MT, and FL). It has a margin of error of 1.42 points.
In 2016 and 2020, a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump. If this poll is right, that may not happen in 2024.
This is unacceptable, and much more needs to be done to insure all Americans citizens enjoy the same equality. Whites must recognize the institutional racism that exists, and fix it.
White people typically move through life unaware of all the head starts, resources and access the color of their skin affords them. They don’t recognize these unearned advantages until they’re pointed out — and even then, some white people will try to deny the existence of their privilege. . . .
We talked to educators, activists, therapists and professors about the things white people often say that highlight their privilege without them realizing it.
The following is part of an essay in The New York Times by writer Dante Stewart:
Mr. Walker is part of a long tradition of Black people willing to distance themselves from the humanity and dreams of their community in exchange for white praise and white power. Black people betraying Black people has a legacy stretching from the plantation to today. Mr. Walker has willingly, as he did in the N.F.L., taken the handoff from the likes of Mr. Trump, Ron DeSantis and Lindsey Graham, shucked and juked and jived over Black people’s real needs, just to hit the end zone and win at the white man’s game. . . .
No matter how perfect or upstanding we are or how well Black people lead our state, white people seem to always become indifferent when we shout: This is not good for us! Once again Black people have to prove that we are trustworthy and that Senator Warnock is the best choice not just for us, but for America.
Politics aside, positions aside, I have to wonder: what is it that so many white people see as desirable in Herschel? A recent letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times suggested that it was the power of “celebrity” — that there was something alluring about Mr. Walker dancing his way to the end zone before winning a Heisman Trophy. For others, Mr. Walker is someone who represents Republican exhaustion with what Democrats have to offer. But it is not just celebrity or exhaustion. The race and runoff is a reflection of who white people believe is best for Black people and the nation. Herschel Walker is a very visible and violent symbol of just how far many white people in America will go to preserve a dying world of whiteness they refuse to let go of.
What a sad thing it is to watch a man’s and a people’s desire to destroy even themselves in an attempt to control what America is, means and can become. It is not just white supremacy. It is not just white hatred. It is white ingratitude.
White ingratitude is bent on breaking people’s hearts. It is white ingratitude that refuses to appreciate what Senator Warnock means to Georgia and this country and forces him to prove himself once again. It is white ingratitude that desires the stereotype of the ignorant charismatic Black athlete. It is white ingratitude that disrespects and disregards the Black tradition of faith that wants to both heal the soul and save society. It is white ingratitude that refuses to acknowledge just how deeply racist a vote for Mr. Walker actually is. White ingratitude is not just about open hatred and violence, it is also the everyday ways many white people make life so much harder for those who don’t look like them.
White ingratitude is very real and it is the heart of white power and white supremacy. If you are ungrateful for another person’s humanity and freedom, then you will do all types of things to devalue and disrupt it. Many white people are ungrateful for what Black people mean to America, what we have been, what we have done, what we have given them and what we have endured.
It seems that Reinhold Niebuhr’s words from “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” published in 1932, still ring true: “However large the number of individual white men who do and who will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.”
We have done the forcing, again and again. And now what we are left with is not just rage, but the sadness associated with exhaustion. An exhaustion that none of us deserves.
Senator Warnock just might win. The celebration will ensue. A sigh of relief will be had. People will dance and declare how this country “works.” And yet, he just might lose. That is life, American life, American fragility.
No matter what happens the ingratitude and grief will still remain.
And I want America free of both.
The chart above is from the Economic Policy Institute. It shows that poverty increased in the United States in 2020. The poverty rate rose by 0.9 points to 11.4% for the entire population. It was even worse for children -- rising by 1.7 points to 16.1%. How can the richest nation on the planet justify over 16% of its children living in poverty?
The poverty rate was also different for different groups, even though it rose in 2020 for all groups. Poverty among Whites rose by 0.9 points to 8.2%. Poverty among Hispanics rose by 1.3 points to 17.0%. And poverty among Blacks rose by 0.6 points to 19.3%. We still have a lot to do to make the economy fair to everyone.
The percentage of whites in the United States has been decreasing for several decades now, and for the first time, the number of whites actually decreased in the last decade.
Does this have Americans worried? Not according to this poll. About 76% said it was not a bad thing (15% saying it was a good thing and 61% saying it was neither good nor bad). And that includes 73% of whites (11% saying it was a good thing and 62% saying it was neither good not bad).
Here's how Jennifer Rubin describes the situation in The Washington Post:
The 2020 Census shows that while Whites remain the largest ethnicity group in the United States, the demographic decreased by 8.6 percent over the past decade. Those identifying as multiracial, by contrast, grew by a stunning 276 percent. Hispanic, Black and Asian American populations all grew at a rapid rate, too. Now, the country is nearly 19 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black and 6 percent Asian American.
The country grew at a slower pace than in any decade since the Depression. It is also aging. Nearly all the growth took place in urban centers (up nearly 9 percent) as rural populations shrank. The Hill reports: “Fewer than half of the 3,143 counties in the United States added population over the last decade, the new census data shows. The share of Americans who live in nonmetropolitan rural areas dropped by 2.8 percentage points, the Bureau said Thursday.”
The results speak to a truism that millions of Republicans would like to ignore: America is never static. It is — and has always been — in a state of flux, whether it comes to race, religious affiliation (or lack thereof), the divide between native-born and immigrant, or the geographic spread of the population (e.g., the Great Migration of Blacks from the South in the early 20th century or the rise of the Sun Belt population over the last few decades). Indeed, that is the essence of America — a country not defined by racial or religious identity.
That reality has, of course, freaked out a significant share of White Christians who do not see “their America” as predominate. It was never “theirs” to begin with, and the assumption that something is amiss if White Christians are not in charge is the essence of white supremacy and Christian nationalism. It is also fundamentally un-American; our country is defined, as President Biden rightly says, by an “idea.”
It is easy, then, to understand why a political party based increasingly on its appeal to White Christians has adopted so many anti-American traits. The sanctity of elections has given way to a sentiment that violence is sometimes necessary (for Whites to retain power). The decline in their numbers has led to worship of totalitarian thugs around the world and disdain for a free society. The desperation for a make-believe world of yesteryear has led tens of millions down the rabbit hole of right-wing media propaganda, where their worst fears and darkest impulses are amplified.
Less remarked upon, but equally important, is that the growth of urban areas (generally more productive, more tolerant and more diverse) leaves rural Whites increasingly at odds with the national ethos. The latter are also poorer, sicker, less educated and have shorter life-spans than their metropolitan counterparts.
A rational, pro-democracy party would recognize it needs a broader base of support and move to adjust its policies to appeal to a more diverse, more secular and more urban America. That’s not the GOP game plan.
The GOP is so dependent on the right-wing media generator of White angst and resentment, and so fearful they will lose their grip among Whites, that they have chosen instead to try to hold back the demographic and cultural tide washing over them. They resort to voter suppression, assault objective reality, disdain majority rule and weaponize apolitical institutions, such as the courts or the Justice Department. Moreover, given their White, wealthy donor base, they can offer only rhetorical populism while pursuing plutocratic economic policies (going so far as to refuse to increase funding for the Internal Revenue Service to enforce tax laws).
There is no single solution to solve the growing urban-rural divide. However, unless and until Americans in rural areas demand responsible governance, embrace the true “idea” of America and reject the temptation of racism and authoritarianism, little will change.
In the meantime, urban Americans, who constitute a greater share of the population than ever before, will lose patience with anti-democratic techniques (e.g., the filibuster, voter suppression) designed to give rural Whites disproportionate power. Demography may not be destiny, but it brings the weaknesses of American democracy into focus.
The population grew by 7.4% -- the lowest since the Great Depression. And non of that growth was among whites. Non-white minorities made up all of the growth of the country.
Predictions are that in another 20-30 years, whites will be less than 50% of the population.
If you wondered why Republicans are trying to suppress voting (especially among minorities), this can give you a clue. They want to maintain white superiority in the government, because the policies they pursue advantage whites over everyone else.
Seeing the demographic change that is happening (and is unstoppable), the Republicans had a choice -- they could change their policies to be more inclusive of minorities, or they could try to make it much harder for those minorities to vote. They chose the latter.
The GOP leaders really had no choice. After letting the racists and white supremacists into the party, they lost control over them. Now the racists make up too large a share of the party, and they dictate the whites-only policies of the party.
Voter suppression is a last-ditch effort, and it's doomed to fail in the long run. But the racists controlling the GOP are not very bright people. They actually think they can preserve white privilege in our society. They are wrong.
The following is from The Washington Post:
For the first time in the history of the country’s census taking, the number of White people in the United States is widely expected to show a decline when the first racial breakdowns from the 2020 Census are reported this week.
For five years now, the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual updates of the 2010 Census have estimated that the nation’s White population is shrinking, and all population growth has been from people of color.
The new census data, planned for release on Aug. 12, will show definitively how the ethnic, racial and voting-age makeup of neighborhoods shifted over the past decade, based on the national house-to-house canvass last year. It is the data most state legislatures and local governments use to redraw political districts for the next 10 years.
If the White decline is confirmed by the new data, that benchmark will have come about eight years earlier than previously projected, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
“Twenty years ago if you told people this was going to be the case, they wouldn’t have believed you,” he said, adding that the opioid epidemic and lower-than-anticipated birthrates among millennials after the Great Recession accelerated the White population’s decline. “The country is changing dramatically.”
The United States is also expected to have passed two other milestones on its way to becoming a majority-minority society in a few decades: For the first time ever, the portion of White people could dip below 60 percent and the under-18 population is likely to be majority non-White.
This attempt to cover up for White terrorists has not stopped. The denial by Republicans to create a bipartisan committee to investigate the January 6th attack on our Capitol was just another in a long line of cover-ups for White extremist terrorism.
The following is much of an article by Dean Obeidallah at MSNBC.com on this subject:
If you’re wondering why you may have only recently heard of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, it's because this horrific incident in Oklahoma was intentionally covered up for decades by white people in power and their allies.
Historian Scott Ellsworth explained to NBC News that the mayor and other city officials “realized that the massacre was this horrible public relations problem,” so they actively sought to erase records of the attack. This cover-up worked, which is why so few people outside of Black communities have heard much, if anything, about it until very recently.
One hundred years later, we’re seeing a disturbing similarity in the way many Republicans are downplaying a different terrorist attack carried out by white extremists: the Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol. . . .
While the Tulsa Race Massacre and Jan. 6 are not comparable in terms of loss of life or destruction, as Biden shared in his Tulsa address, one 107-year-old Tulsa survivor, Viola "Mother" Fletcher, pointed out some telling resemblances. The Jan. 6 attack by “a mob of violent white extremists, thugs” had “reminded her of what happened in Greenwood 100 years ago,” Biden shared.
There’s another glaring similarity between the two events: Today’s GOP is desperate to cover up the Jan. 6 attack because — like the whites who ran Tulsa in 1921 — it grasps how bad this looks for it politically, since its supporters carried out the attack. . . .
Senate Republicans just last week blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the details of the Jan. 6 riot. Like the politicians in Tulsa in the 1920s, they appear to want to cover up the details surrounding the attack because it’s bad PR for the GOP. It’s also possible that some Republicans in Congress — likely similar to some white politicians in 1920s Tulsa — feared a thorough investigation might implicate them in the attack.
When Biden stated in his Tuesday address that “what happened in Greenwood was an act of hate and domestic terrorism with a through line that exists today still,” he was 100 percent correct. So was FBI Director Christopher Wray when he stated in his March testimony at a Senate hearing that Jan. 6 was an act of “domestic terrorism.”
And like in 1921, the threat posed by white extremist violence today is very real. In his testimony, Wray said that since he became FBI director in 2017, “the number of arrests of white supremacists and other racially motivated extremists has almost tripled,” The Associated Press reported. He also said, “Jan. 6 was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon.”. . .
"Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they can't be buried, no matter how hard people try," Biden said Tuesday. This principle must also guide us when it comes to the Jan. 6 attack. For the sake of our democracy, we cannot allow today’s Republicans to cover up the attack like white politicians covered up the Tulsa Race Massacre.
The White House also listed what they want to accomplish to narrow the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in this country, and you can access that here.
Much has been made in the media of Donald Trump's supposed appeal to White working class voters. The general opinion expressed is that there was a massive shift of White working class voters from Democrats to Trump in the last election. But that may not be true.
These charts tell a different story. The top chart shows the percentage of Republican voters in the White working class. Note that it rose to 31% in 2012 (when Romney was the GOP candidate), but remained at that level in 2016 and 2020. Trump did not increase the percentage of Republicans who were in the White working class.
The second chart shows the percentage of White working class voters who voted Republican. Note that while it increased slightly from 2012 to 2016 (from 57% to 62%0, it fell in 2020 to 59% (as these workers were actually starting to abandon Trump.
NOTE - For the survey, White working class voters were identified as those without a college degree who were in the bottom half of the household income distribution.
Dorothy A. Brown explains those complications in an excellent article in The Washington Post. I urge you to read the whole article, but here is a part of it:
Higher education is supposedly the ticket to a better future, and it usually translates to a larger salary regardless of race, according to a 2011 study from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. But college does not pay off for Black students the way it does for White students. At virtually every step — from taking out loans to facing a racist job market to dealing with repayment plans — Black students and their families have disadvantages. As a result, the Black-White wealth gap widens.
Black college graduates have higher debt loads, on average, than White college graduates. Black debt rises over time, White debt diminishes. Upon graduation, the average Black graduate owes $23,400 vs. the White graduate’s $16,000, according to the Brookings Institution. Four years later, the gap triples. Even at the top end of the income spectrum, Black students have higher student loans ($4,643, on average) than White students ($3,835), and Black parents take out larger loans to help pay for college ($3,303 vs. $1,903).
What accounts for that difference? First, it’s the schools students attend. Wealthier colleges, which can afford to award financial aid and scholarships, disproportionately admit White students: White students are almost five timesas likely to go to a selective university than Black students, even when controlling for income. Meanwhile, a higher share (12 percent) of Black students attend for-profit colleges than very selective universities (9 percent), because online and part-time features allow them to work while getting their degrees. These schools usually do not award any financial aid and are in effect extremely expensive, given their low graduation rates.
Another factor is the wealth disparity between Black and White families. Black college students are less likely than their White peers to receive tax-free gifts from their parents and grandparents. A study examining financial transfers of at least $10,000 in Black and White families between 1989 and 2013 found that only 9 percent of Black households received such a gift, compared with 32 percent of White ones. And the scale of the gifts was remarkably modest: “White college-educated families received $55,419 at the median and $235,353 at the mean, while their Black counterparts received $36,260 and $65,755, respectively.”
But even parental wealth cannot fully protect Black students from higher debt loads. Black parents hold their assets differently than White parents: They are tied more heavily to homeownership than to the stock market, which makes them illiquid. Research that compared Black and White parents in the highest wealth quintile showed that White parents had $81,827 in financial assets such as stock, but Black parents had just $46,579. White parents had $154,627 in home equity, but Black ones had just $92,555. As a result, even Black students whose families are well-off on paper usually do not have resources readily available to support them. . . .
When a Black student, through herculean efforts, actually obtains a college degree, he or she faces a racist labor market that makes it harder to pay down debt and build wealth. A 2014 study showed that a Black Harvard graduate had to send out eight résumés before getting an interview offer, while a White one had to send out only six. As the selectivity decreased, the disparity increased: For example, with a University of Massachusetts at Amherst degree, White graduates submitted nine résumés before getting an interview offer, while Black graduates had to send out 15. This suggests that, while the credential makes a huge difference for a Black applicant, White students can afford to go to less-prestigious (and generally less-expensive) institutions and receive roughly similar rewards from the labor market. Worse, that same study showed that Black applicants — but not the White ones — were asked to interview for lower-paying jobs than those they applied to. . . .
Layered on top of all of these inequities is our tax code. Within four years of graduation, average Black debt is $53,000 and White debt is $28,000. The tax implications help White graduates and harm Black ones. The deduction for student loan interest, capped at only $2,500 a year, does little to help the average Black borrower, who has higher debt and more interest; the average White borrower, meanwhile, can deduct all of their student loan interest in their first year. (God forbid two Black college graduates get married, since their maximum deduction, combined, remains $2,500.) Meanwhile, when (mostly White) families help pay for children and grandchildren’s educations, those gifts are tax-free.
All of this student debt widens the overall Black-White wealth gap. In 1989, college-educated White households had roughly five times greater wealth than their Black peers. By 2013, that gap had tripled. Student debt represents roughly 10 percent of the racial wealth gap when a college graduate is 25 years old, according to professors Fenaba R. Addo and Jason Houle. By age 30-35, it explains about 25 percent of the gap.
The chart above reflects the results of a survey by the Pew Research Center -- done between March 1st and 7th of a national sample of 4,796 Republicans, with a 2.3 point margin of error.
It just shows how out-of-touch with reality most Republicans really are. About 63% say whites are discriminated as much as Blacks in the U.S. -- and more than either Hispanics or Asians.
That's a ludicrous view to have, but if they believe they are victims then that can justify their failure to attack real discrimination in this country.
Sadly though, in the recent election, about 60% of white voters voted for Donald Trump -- a person that has a history of being a racist throughout his life. Those voters cannot say they didn't know he is a racist. He has made that very clear in his words and actions.
That means a majority of whites in the United States are racists. Frankly, I am ashamed of my fellow whites, and they should be ashamed of themselves.
This should be a wake-up call to those who were thinking that racism is not a big problem in this country. It is, and as long as 3 out of 5 whites support and vote for racists, it will remain a racist country.
The following is just a tiny part of an excellent op-ed by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times:
After all that Donald Trump has done, all the misery he has caused, all the racism he has aroused, all the immigrant families he has destroyed, all the people who have left this life because of his mismanagement of a pandemic, still roughly half of the country voted to extend this horror show.
Let me be specific and explicit here: White people — both men and women — were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump, according to exit polls. To be exact, nearly three out of every five white voters in America are Trump voters.
It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists.
