Mayor Pete, desperate to get himself back in the good graces of black voters after a controversial police shooting in South Bend marred his presidential campaign, said Saturday that white supremacy – of all things – could spell doom for the future of the United States. In an interview with ABC News, Buttigieg called on nothing less than the example of the Civil War to argue that the Trump vs. The Squad feud could usher in a new age of racial darkness in America.
“That is the only issue that almost ended this country,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of challenges in this country, but the one that actually almost ended this country in the Civil War was white supremacy. It could be the lurking issue that ends this country in the future, if we don’t wrangle it down in our time.”
Uh-huh. So first of all, southerners often get accused of revisionist history when they try to make it sound as if slavery were an ancillary topic in the Civil War. But if that doesn’t quite tell the whole story about the war, then surely saying it was about “white supremacy” is just as ignorant, if not more so. Even if we concede that without the subject of slavery at the heart of the conflict, there wouldn’t have been a conflict, putting it in the terms Buttigieg does here makes it sound as though the North was full of woke racial crusaders who donned uniforms in an all-out effort to “save the slaves.” That is a child’s understanding of the Civil War. A rather dull child, at that.
Second, correct us if we’re wrong, but didn’t we have a black president just a few short years ago? Don’t we have more black people in public office and running for president in 2020 than we’ve ever had? Aren’t we, as a culture, constantly examining racial bias and making efforts to eliminate it? For God’s sake, didn’t we just make the Little Mermaid a black girl? It seems to us that “white supremacy” has never been weaker, as an ideology, than it is in 2019. And a raucous chant at a Trump rally certainly doesn’t change that fact.
But if there is a hint of a racial backlash in this country, whose fault is that? Are millions of Americans really that upset that a black man dared sit in the Oval Office? Is that what it’s all about? Or is it possible that everyday white people are sick and tired of being told that supporting Trump is racist, that wanting to stop illegal immigration is racist, that eating a taco is racist, that putting dreads in your hair is racist, and that merely being white is racist?
White supremacy isn’t going to “end” this country, but this nonstop assault on people whose only sin is being white very well could.
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