Hi Marley —

It’s fear. They’ve been taught since birth that their whiteness gave them carte blanche (which I just now realized is probably translated as “white card”) to be the dominant people in the world…and they were taught to fear those with darker skin, and the darker, the scarier. They really lost their minds when a Black man with an African name moved into the White House, and so they really think this is their last stand, that if they don’t stop the browning of America, they’ll lose “their” nation, that it somehow won’t be America anymore.

The demographic change is happening and it can’t be stopped. Whites are still dominant, but are slowly, slowly diminishing in influence and power. They realize this, and every time they see a POC — or especially a Black man or woman — become successful, the more they feel threatened, the more they feel resentment and anger at the perceived loss of what they thought was theirs by birthright.

I could be wrong, but I think the racism by the Right is only going to get worse, especially if they’re somehow able to win (or nullify or cancel) the upcoming election. They’re going to be all the more hateful and malicious, never allowing themselves to realize the futility of their hate and malice compared to the inevitability of demographic change. Even if we win the next election, they’ll still try to use every dirty trick in the book to win the race war.

And it’s all due to the fear instilled in them every single day by right-wing media, pundits, and right-wing evangelical preachers. The solution is so easy — to learn to accept change and to stop judging others for skin color or accent or culture or gender identification — but that is precisely the solution they cannot allow to happen to themselves or their like-minded family and friends.

The change is coming — they can’t stop it. I just hope it doesn’t get so bad that we devolve into Balkanization, social disintegration of the sort that occurred to what used to be Yugoslavia. I don’t think it will…but it might.