The Aggrieved White Guy

 This is a really interesting story from WaPo about an ongoing controversy about DEI initiatives at the Virginia Military Institute. VMI was historically VERY White and intensely Southern. It shares a town with Washington and Lee, which itself lived deeply in it's Southern past. Robert E. Lee is buried there on the W&L campus and Stonewall Jackson used to have a statue on the VMI campus that cadets would salute.

Recently, VMI hired its first Black Superintendent. One of General Cedric Wins' charges was making VMI more inclusive. One of his classmates and former friends basically freaked right the hell out about it.

I would urge you to read the story, but Wins' former friend, Matt Daniel, basically started spiraling during the Ferguson unrest. On Facebook (natch) he called the protestors "animals." Here's a sampling:

 “Let’s hope all of these destructive animals go home and build a plan to become law-abiding contributors instead of the arsonists, looters, muggers, rapists, drug addicts, pimps, whores, gangster a-----e cowards that they obviously are.”

Daniel said "I've never seen anybody at VMI do anything racist at all....I don't even remember talking about race - ever." This is the perfect example of a term I don't really like to use too frequently: White Privilege. Daniel never talked about race at VMI because issues of race were invisible to him. I would wager that Wins had conversations about race with other Black students. Daniel never had to grapple with the long history of race and the shadow it casts over America, because he's White. 

His inability to see race is because he didn't need to see race. Now that the world is taking a hard look at the history of race, people like Daniel are freaking out. Here's another sample:

“(T)he reason why our education system is broken i[s] because Liberals have imbued in it the toxic waste and fabricated storyline of systemic racial bias, engineered history and perverted disgusting sexual hogwash.”

There's a lot to unpack there, starting with "fabricated storyline." How, exactly, is the storyline of racism in America fabricated? 

I am a few years younger than the Wins and Daniel, but I grew up in the South. Even in New England, though, I can't say my high school history course really leaned into the central role of slavery and white supremacy in American history. The past three decades have been a legacy of the civil rights movement in terms of centering the focus of historians in all sorts of marginalized groups. The idea that this somehow comes at the expense of White people is really...interesting.

Why do efforts at making more opportunities present such a psychic challenge to people like Daniel? The article doesn't offer a theory, but it does a good job of laying out the narrative.