This sectarian divide, as it was called, had existed for a long time. Among other things, it had led in the years preceding Bloody Sunday to many violent clashes between the two communities and with the police, then the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). The police had become regarded by many in the nationalist community not as impartial keepers of the peace and upholders of the law, but rather as agents of the unionist Northern Ireland Government, employed in their view to keep the nationalist community subjugated, often by the use of unjustifiable and brutal force.
—The Report of The Bloody Sunday Inquiry, 1998.
Yesterday, I was planning to write about a poll result that I found completely amazing and yet completely predictable.
First, there are some real and large differences in the way that different groups of Americans answered those two questions up above. Half of white Americans — including 60 percent of the white working class — told researchers that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. Meanwhile, 29 percent of Latinos and 25 percent of black Americans agreed. White Americans feel put-upon and mistreated — and large shares of non-white Americans do not seem to have any knowledge of the challenges that white Americans say they face. Of course, there are always aspects of other people's lives that we do not or cannot understand. But the sheer size of the racial/ethnic gap concerning perceived discrimination against white Americans is particularly interesting because there is very little in the way of objective evidence of this discrimination and the disadvantage that typically follows. On just about every measure of social or economic well-being, white Americans fare better than any other group. That's true of housing and neighborhood quality and homeownership. That's true of overall health, health insurance coverage rates, quality of health care received, life expectancy and infant mortality. That's true when it comes to median household earnings, wealth (assets minus debt), retirement savings and even who has a bank account.
You will note that the reporter above presents a welter of empirical evidence that what half of white Americans believe—that they are the primary victims of racial discrimination—is utter bollocks. You also will note that this does not matter a damn to the half of white Americans who believe it. Why should they? For the past 60 years, as a result of the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement, they have been fed this line by people and by politicians who have profited handsomely from the dark energy of racial reaction. They all have discovered uncles who lost jobs with the county road crew because of affirmative action, or nephews who didn't get into law school because of a "quota." Anyway, I was going to write about this in the context of the ongoing activism of #BlackLivesMatter, and the reaction to it, and its influence on the presidential campaign. And then that protester got beat up—to the roaring cheers of hundreds—at the Donald Trump rally, and Trump himself defended what happened. Then some white guys in a truck pulled up at a rally in Minneapolis.
Protesters said they had formed a group to walk people away from the 4th Precinct who were causing problems. About a block away from the demonstrations, the shots were fired. One of the lead protest groups, Black Lives Matter Minneapolis, posted on its Facebook page that "5 unarmed protesters shot by white supremacists who were asked to leave & followed out. One block up they shot one in leg & 1 in stomach." Jie Wronski-Riley was among the protesters following the people leaving the scene. "Then it was like they just turned around and they just started shooting. At first I wasn't sure. I was like, are they shooting firecrackers? Because it was so loud, and there was all this, like, sulfur, or whatever," Wronski-Riley said. "Then it was like the person right next to me on my left went down and the person on my right went down, and I was like, they're actually shooting at us. They're shooting bullets at us."
The country is sitting on a powder keg right now.
Shortly before his death, Thomas Jefferson described the issue of chattel slavery as the equivalent of holding a wolf by the ear—you can't hold him and you can't let him go. Jefferson, being fundamentally a white supremacist, misread the problem. It wasn't slavery that was the wolf. That was only the most outward manifestation of the wolf. The wolf was racism, and we're still just barely hanging on. It has become vivid in the past seven years, since the country had the audacity of electing a black man to be its president. The election of Barack Obama changed the context of the events that occurred during his presidency. All of those events—from the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in his own home, to the rise of #BLM in the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin and all the rest, to the mass shooting in Charleston—took place in the context of racial opposition to the idea of Barack Obama's election. It sharpened the racial edge of the political dialogue on virtually every issue. (Ever stopped to count how many synonyms for "uppity" have been used in connection with this president? You wouldn't think there was a thesaurus that comprehensive.) The grip we have on the wolf is weakening.
There is a wildness in our politics that goes back beyond this administration. But the election of this president—and his stubborn insistence that he be allowed to act like a president—has brought a focused volatility to that wildness that is unprecedented in the years since the turmoil of the 1960s. The lost illusions of American exceptionalism, and the loss of the dominant postwar American economy, make the results of that poll sadly unsurprising. But that basic disillusionment has been percolating around American politics for decades. There is something different about it now that is the result of years of exchanging history for desperate propaganda, a yearning for a past that never was, at least not for all Americans. In the 1960s, protests like those going on at various universities, and like the one that's ongoing in Minneapolis, would have been completely unremarkable.
Now, though, thanks to 50 years of steady drum-beating about how it was in the 1960s in which the country began to slide into decline, and how it was in the 1960s that the power drained away from You in the direction of Them, a culture of victimization has arisen despite all the data proving that the victims in question have not been victimized at all, at least not in comparison to their fellow citizens, anyway. What has victimized them are economic and trade policies that have drained the country of decent paying jobs, the decline of organized labor, and a lot of sleight-of-hand political jibber-jabber that continues to this day. It's just easier to get people to blame each other. And that's what's coming to a head in the country now.
That poll is chilling in its detachment from actual empirical reality. The people polled in it are chilling in their certainty. That certainty makes them believe that the police are their Myrmidons holding back the power of their fellow citizens who happen to be black, and who wield so much power that any means of resisting that power is wholly justified. That certainty makes them believe that protesters on a campus in Missouri are some kind of threat against the dwindling promise of a real American middle class. That certainty makes them jump at shadows, predictably. That certainty eventually curdles into a rage that lashes out blindly at all the wrong targets. For too long, too many people have been willing to believe that which is not true. At some level, people rebel against the nonsense they've come to believe. They feel stupid. They feel like suckers. They look for easy targets. Rage is general, like Joyce's snow, all over this country. It is not a good time.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
