White People Are Easily Triggered Snowflakes

Rebecca Solnit gets it, with a vengeance:

"In the aftermath of the 2016 election, we were told that we needed to be nicer to the white working class, which reaffirmed the message that whiteness and the working class were the same thing and made the vast non-white working class invisible or inconsequential. We were told that Trump voters were the salt of the earth and the authentic sufferers, even though poorer people tended to vote for the other candidate. We were told that we had to be understanding of their choice to vote for a man who threatened to harm almost everyone who was not a white Christian man, because their feelings preempt everyone else’s survival. 'Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks,' Bernie Sanders reprimanded us, though studies showed that many were indeed often racists, sexists, and homophobes.

Part of how we know whose party it is was demonstrated by who gets excused for hatred and attacks, literal or verbal. A couple of weeks ago, the Atlantic tried out hiring a writer, Kevin Williamson, who said women who have abortions should be hanged, and then un-hired him under public pressure from people who don’t like the idea that a quarter of American women should be executed. The New York Times has hired a few conservatives akin to Williamson, including climate waffler Bret Stephens. Stephens devoted a column to sympathy on Williamson’s behalf and indignation that anyone might oppose him. Sympathy in pro-bubble America often goes reflexively to the white man in the story. The assumption is that the story is about him; he’s the protagonist, the person who matters, and when you, say, read Stephens defending Woody Allen and attacking Dylan Farrow for saying Allen molested her, you see how much work he’s done imagining being Woody Allen, how little being Dylan Farrow or anyone like her. It reminds me of how young women pressing rape charges are often told they’re harming the bright future of the rapist in question, rather than that maybe he did it to himself, and that their bright future should matter too. The Onion nailed it years ago: 'College Basketball Star Heroically Overcomes Tragic Rape He Committed.'”

This is nothing new.  I remember back in 2008 when the great Republican philosopher, Sarah Palin, referenced "real America."

Obviously, she meant white America.  From a certain conservative perspective, "American-ness" is only valid when performed by whites, and mostly white males at that.