Persons of Pallor

• In a post-civil rights movement society where equality and freedom for all is our publicly-avowed ethic, White identity is unmoored from its founding logic. Yet no coherent mass White identity has emerged to take its place. Perhaps more than ever before, we don't know how to understand a society where two things at once are true: Whiteness is advantaged, and millions of White people live in poverty and despair.
  
  There are nineteen million poor White Americans, the census bureau estimates. Yet our popular media and cultural narratives have no room for them. We can't even talk about them. Poor Whites are "working class" or "blue collar." They are not poor. Why? Because to be poor is to contradict the basic narrative of Whiteness.

  Jesse Curtis, walk on, addressing Trump's appeal.  It's pretty disturbing, so keep that in mind.
• Ben Carson claims President Obama "grew up in white America."  Dude, that one has been tried several times in the last, oh. eight years.  It didn't work then.  It won't work now.  By the way, has anyone mentioned to Dr. Carson that the President isn't running?
  
  Incidentally, and just for the information: Many black and mixed-race people brought up in "white America"  identify as black (and/or mixed-race) without having lived in a ghetto, gone to substandard schools, or gotten addicted to heroin.  Because, you know, really, there are a lot of behaviors, etc. that are totally extrinsic to blackness.  There are also stereotypes.  No one needs to be a stereotype.  If Dr. Carson needs President Obama to fit a stereotype, that says a lot (and nothing good) about Dr. Carson.

• What these dissenting voices are pointing out, in their own 21st century version of “parrhesia,” is that the relationship between guns, masculinity, whiteness, democracy and notions of “freedom” constitutes a very particular and specific form of privilege that is usually denied to other groups in the United States.

  Chauncey DeVega, Indomitable, concerning the media coverage of gun violence with respect to race.
  

Tiresome, I know.