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Tuesday, December 31st, 2013

2013: The Year in Whiteness

Author:     JOAN WALSH
Source:     Salon
Publication Date:     Monday, Dec 30, 2013 12:30 PM PST
 Link: 2013: The Year in Whiteness
Stephan:   One of the major trends facing the U.S. is that it is on track to become a country with no racial majority, and to develop a culture where just being born white will no longer confer automatic privilege. For a significant minority of white people, particularly in the Southern states, this is causing massive angst and anger. I have been writing about this for over a decade, now others, as this report describes are beginning to see this trend as well.

Maybe it was the very fact of enjoying a wonderful Christmas with my family and friends, against the manufactured backlash to a nonexistent “War on Christmas,” that let me appreciate the perilous mental state of a small but noisy and paranoid swath of white America. Somehow over the holiday it became clear: 2013 was the year white grievance mongering became an uglier and even more lucrative racket.

Fox News has been peddling the phony “War on Christmas” for years, of course, but it took new Fox phenom Megyn Kelly to give it an explicitly racial cast. Not only did Kelly wage war against the menace of a black Santa – declaring nonsensically that the fictional character of Santa Claus “just is white” – but when she was called on it, she made herself out to be the victim of politically correct bullies, race-baiters and Fox haters. Suddenly it was clear: The imagined war on Christmas has become an equally farcical war on whiteness in the minds of those sad right-wing warriors.

The next week, “Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson also became a martyr for the white right, after A&E briefly suspended him for holding forth on the nastiness of gay sex while insisting […]

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