By Terry Manning
I wish conservatives lived in the world the rest of us inhabit.
They have gone all out protecting a worldview that never was, is not now, and likely never will be — unless they bring it about by their own doing.
See, their worldview is based on white grievance. They hold the notion that white people, conservative white people specifically, are under attack from all sides. Beyond ideological differences, these perceived threats are considered existential and validate doing anything and everything to save themselves, their beliefs, their America.
They do not seem to care what they are destroying in the process.
Take abortion, for example. I would love to get into a discussion of the mislabeling of the pro-life movement, which seems to dissipate at the moment of birth, given conservatives’ tireless assaults on social safety nets that protect the health of children and the public education system. But let’s look at some of the unintended consequences of at least 40 years of their anti-abortion fervor.
Replacement theory is a strong motivator here. If white women have access to abortion, then to the minds of some conservatives, that will only speed up the inevitable transition of America from being a white-dominant country to one where whites will be the largest minority population. Whites will still have numbers, mind you, they just won’t have more than a 50 percent majority.
These folks are trying to install white rule at a time when many of their own families are becoming more diverse. Would they reconsider if it occurred to them they were dooming their mixed-race offspring to a second-class existence below “pure” whites? Who gets to determine what “pure” means? How many people are “pure” anything?
Not me, for sure. Every time I get an update from Ancestry, my DNA story shows more overlap with Eurocentric populations. Does that give me more rights? I wonder how many white people would find DNA connections to people in Western African nations?
Speaking of race, the Supreme Court last week struck down affirmative action, saying race can no longer be used as a criterion for college admissions. A nonprofit called Students for Fair Admissions filed lawsuits against Harvard, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Texas alleging their admissions practices were racially biased.
The ruling is seen as a huge loss for efforts to provide minority communities access to the most elite universities and for efforts to diversify higher education generally. Most of the comments I have seen focus on the impact on Black communities, but what about white students?
If admission is based solely on academic performance, won’t some of them lose spots to applicants from cultures where education is more highly valued? What about white students who enroll at historically Black colleges because there they qualify for scholarships based on their minority status?
And, as always, there is the “slippery slope” of throwing out preferential treatment aimed at achieving equity. With race gone, who’s to say gender won’t be next? I don’t necessarily believe one necessarily leads to the next, but the question has to be asked.
Look at the high court’s similar ruling a website designer had the right because of her religious beliefs to deny making a website for a gay wedding. Never mind that the man whose name was the basis for the lawsuit said 1) he never asked the plaintiff to make a website and 2) he is not gay.
And the web designer? She wasn’t even making wedding sites when she filed the suit. She just wanted to protect herself from the mere possibility a gay couple might ask. Her Christian convictions led her to essentially fabricate a case that made it in front of a Supreme Court cherry-picked to rule in her favor.
See what I mean about the real world versus this dystopian nightmare these folks envision?
They spent decades accusing others of being “snowflakes,” playing “the blame game” and wielding “the race card.” They warned against judicial activism and the threat of Sharia law. Now they have appropriated all of these for their own agenda.
They will not stop until they bully the rest of us into making them the outcast minority they already think they are.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. His email is teemanning@gmail.com.
