What in the world do white people in America want? Oh, right – to be the only people in America whose opinion – or votes – matter. You know, like how it was when the country started. Back then, the only men (created) equal to rich, white, Christian men were other rich, white, Christian men. That may be how America set out, but it never was going to be how America ended up. To their credit, America’s founders did have a great idea. Alas, they failed to execute that idea successfully because they failed to apply it – equally – to everyone in America.

But, fortunately, great ideas transcend the fallible humans who create them. American democracy – still very much a work in progress – has survived multiple attempts to kill it dead. The people trying to kill our democracy have all been white. Racism has driven their hate for democracy. Racism, in fact, drove the Confederacy to secede. They preferred to destroy the country rather than give up slavery.

So long as white people dominated the population, they felt relatively secure about their grip on power. But, the population shift that slowly began in the 1980’s sped up as the decades wore on. According to Pew Research, “the share of people in the U.S. who identify as non-Hispanic White and no other race has also declined in recent years, falling from 64% in 2010 to 58% in 2020.” This trend, Pew says, “stretches back several decades: Non-Hispanic White people declined as a share of the U.S. population from 1980 to 1990 (80% to 76%) and in every decade since then.”

Thus white culture’s hair caught on fire. Seeing demographic doom staring at them, the conservative money machine ramped up into high gear. In the back rooms, the Kochs invested in hijacking the judiciary. Meanwhile, on the front lines, white culture doubled down on waging culture war against the rest of us. Too bad we didn’t realize we were fighting a culture war. We might have responded sooner.

It was Newt Gingrich who first announced that conservatives (meaning white people like him) no longer would engage in debate with progressives (meaning everyone else). From hence forth, it would be Newt’s way or the highway. Newt himself failed. But, his white tribe picked up the mantle and began running with it.

Then racing with it.

The white goal here is to impose monolithic white power upon the rest of us. That way, no one else would ever have a say in how we “self-govern”. White interests would reassert themselves over all other interests. White goals would soon be our culture’s only goals.

In this perverse image of America, white people get everything and the rest of us fade away. In essence, America itself would “fade to white”.

White people have it in their heads that whiteness and white money is American exceptionalism. They couldn’t be more wrong. White supremacists love to tout everything white culture contributed to America (in their minds, it’s literally everything). But, take every non-white out of America and America stops being America.

America is the first country in the history of the world made up of all the other countries. European pathogens wiped out most of the Native Americans (North and South) before Europeans arrived en masse. Thus, America has no long-lived cultures like they do in Europe, Africa and Asia. Though white people dominated America’s culture for the first two hundred years, that never meant they were going to continue dominating it.

They always thought they would apparently. Alas they won’t.

America needs its white people. But, also, it needs everyone else here, too. That’s what makes America tick. If America were to succumb to white rage and become a “white nation”, if we did “fade to white”, we would lose everything that makes us unique.

America would stop being as vibrant, essential and dynamic. It would, in fact, stop being America.

And, instead, we’d become just another rest stop along a dull, flat highway leading nowhere. The America of white America’s dreams.