Anti-racist blogger Shay Stewart-Bouley of Black Girl in Maine shared news of white backlash against Black History Month in the U.S. generally and targeting her specifically. She posted the above photo to social media platforms with her commentary and the predictable backlash from terrified, angry white people ensued. 

Her analysis of the “It’s OK to be White” message is worth a read.

Coincidentally, my weekend kicked off with my 6 year old grandson sharing that he had watched Portland City Councilor Victoria Pelletier read a nasty letter she received and decided to publicize on social media.

(Note: I greatly appreciate my grandchildren’s parents for their active anti-racist educational efforts in our mostly white family.)

My grandson remembered Councilor Pelletier from the community television show we do together as he and his mom had been in the studio audience last year. As a young constituent of Portland’s 2nd District, he was concerned that people were “being mean” to Councilor Pelletier. 

Yup, me too, and kudos to Pelletier for lifting the rock and showing us the ugly racism that she and other people of color face constantly when elected to public office.

All this on the weekend of the Chinese weather balloon theatrics.

White people locally, nationally, and internationally are expressing their perception of being backed into a corner where their power over others and control of common resources is eroding rapidly. 

NATO, a white supremacist military alliance, has bombed, occupied, and pillaged populations around the globe. Now that Ukraine is being used in a proxy war to weaken China’s strongest ally, Russia, the violence is targeting whites — as it did in air strikes on Yugoslavia in the 1990’s.

But NATO and its U.S. masters are watching their economic power slip away. 

This is what working class white people are experiencing domestically as well.

Arguments about fairness and equity fall on deaf ears. The fact that Black households in the U.S. have a mere 11% of the household wealth of white households doesn’t matter to these terrified white folks. They can’t afford enough food or heat and are panicking. Their healthcare options are pathetic, and access to luxuries like regular dental care are almost non-existent.

Media owned by billionaires have people in the U.S. trained to blame each other rather than the root of their common problems: corporate government that allows, even facilitates, profit from misery. 

Example of a false dichotomy narrative common in the U.S.

Big Pharma and weapons manufacturers spring to mind but there are many more.

The U.S. doing business as NATO is panicking, too. The Ukraine war sanctions on Russia harmed Europe’s economy, not Russia’s, and hastened the abandonment of the U.S. dollar as a currency for international trade. Billions of dollars and weapons later, Ukraine’s military cannot prevail, and it has already lost in the humanitarian sense with neo-Nazis steering the ship of state.

Enter the weather balloon and cue the China-bashing hysteria in the press.

Most likely the PR aspect of hyping this appearance of a hot air balloon (there have been many in the past, but did you ever hear about them?) was to create a pretext for U.S. Secretary of State Blinken to cancel his announced visit to Beijing to meet with President Xi. This small step toward peaceful relations with China had to be stopped by those who want war and are very rapidly arming up in the Pacific region.

White supremacy has had its day. 

Delaying tactics are in some cases hastening its demise. Decisions made from fear are often not logical or ultimately beneficial to those making them.

It’s logical to be fearful of losing the major privilege accorded those who appear white. Although they play the victim, white privilege is very much something they benefit from all the time. Enslaving labor plus other plunder of colonized populations and their resources has created an artificial standard of living for white people that could never have endured on a level playing field.

So, as loss of status plus economic disaster overtakes this group, they lash out in myriad ways to stave off the inevitable. 

From the micro level where leaders of color are insulted and threatened to the macro level where NATO moves nuclear weapons into place all over the globe and ramps up anti-China rhetoric, white people are running scared.