Pat Buchanan, in a recent column on white anger, argues that it’s nothing to do with Obama being black: “the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived … In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates … America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

In the first place, America was “their” country only in the sense that everyone else — white women, blacks, hispanics — was kept from sharing in power. I know it’s painful for some people to see the whole equality of races/genders/faiths thing taken seriously—to know that no matter how poor they were, they were automatically held superior to people who weren’t straight white males—but I don’t have much sympathy for them.
In the second place, it’s creepy—though having been reading Buchanan for years, not surprising—that he conceives this entirely in terms of white people. No suggestion that the black working class is hit as hard or worse by the economic downturn, by downsizing and outsourcing or that they feel alienated and frustrated, or that it matters if they do. Apparently America doesn’t quite qualify as “their” country.
And in that light a quote in response from Adam Serwer: “Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today’s legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing”

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