As a white person who actually cares about everyone in this country and not just other white people, I've just been forced to accept that I'm a kind of aberration.
I'm not going to do any of this, "Please don't blame us!" stuff. We're to blame, as a group. I was raised in this hateful shit just like most white folk I know. I grew up in California and Washington, super liberal places. But not in cities. My father's bookshelf was full of books by Reagan, Rand, Limbaugh, Coulter. He is a intelligent man, works for a tech company, very dedicated to his family, but also certain of the correctness of white male superiority.
Clinton was a name people spat when I was a kid, not something they said. In 2000, when Bush won, teenage kids my age literally linked hands and danced around the flagpole at school, celebrating "their" victory, looking for all the world to me like some kind of jingoistic cult. In 2008, when Obama won, my dad cried and turned to my mom and said, "My children are going to be slaves." The delusion is so real. Been on top so long, a large number of us have justified it by convincing themselves that personal freedoms and opportunities are a zero sum game. And this was an educated, middle class neighborhood in a liberal state. None of this stuff was particularly out in the open for everyone to see, but it wasn't especially well hidden either. I can only imagine what households more rural than that are like.
Other white people who haven't closed themselves off to empathy need to face the fact that our culture is like this head-on. We can't just let it keep going like this. If you grew up in a completely liberal household as a white person, please recognize that ethically, politically you won the fucking lottery. But just "being on the right side of history" isn't enough. We have to change this shit. We have to at least try, goddamnit. Simply divorcing ourselves from this insanity just seems to me anymore like good men, doing nothing. It not ok, it was never ok and it's gone on far, far too long.
