Thread by @davidminpdx

I don’t know anything about critical race theory, but as I see some of the stuff floating through my timeline – and the incredibly stupid elite dialogue about it – I just find my mind returning to Baldwin again and again.

I mean THIS. In the end anti-CRT or anti-wokeness or whatever one wants to call this particular incoherent spasm of white supremacist authoritarian backlash, it is in the end about white people and the terror that they have of looking at themselves...

...looking at their forbearers, their history from the perspective of the people they have treated for ~400 years as less than full and equal humans. Their need to maintain the myth of white innocence is just so profound. To relinquish it is an existential threat.

I think I would go a step further than Baldwin here. Yes, the future of the nation depends upon white people looking at this gaping psychological need; at the same time, its utterly unimaginable that they would do so, precisely because they see doing so as an existential threat.

One of the deepest truths ever uttered about America boiled down to one sentence.

https://twitter.com/davidminpdx/status/1406045223453478912