A new invisible empire strikes back
The backlash to the “created equal” decisions and policies of the last century percolated along for decades. First, resistance to 1954’s Brown v. Board decision with the growth of segregation academies. Then the blue to red flip of former Confederate states in the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 under LBJ. Then the promotion of the religious right by the conservative movement.
By the end of the last century, the internet and right-wing media facilitated isolated cranks and bigots bonding with others of their kind, including flat earthers and other conspiracy theorists.
The election of a Black man to the White House threw accelerant onto white grievances building for half a century. What has grown into a white grievance industrial complex pairs racial and ideological goals with commercial ones supported by YouTube, Fox, and other social media.
Charles Blow examines the next generation of efforts by unsettled whites to turn back the clock and return nonwhite minorities to their proper places at the bottom of the social order. Chris Rufo, the man who turned critical race theory (CRT) into a popular, right-wing bugaboo, is moving on from CRT to DEI:
D.E.I. stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, a concept that goes far beyond just the racial prism of critical race theory, and moves into the worlds of ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age and class.
What Rufo is proposing is the distorting and demonizing of legitimate practices and areas of academic inquiry. He admitted as much in a 2021 tweet, back when he was still focused primarily on critical race theory: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’ ” he wrote. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Certain Americans, anyway.
Republican pols like Representative Chip Roy of Texas and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida are among the happiest of Rufo’s culture-war comrades, along with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law limiting D.E.I. in the workplace last April, Rufo likened him to Teddy Roosevelt and praised his “muscular” strategy for combating “corporate malfeasance.” “Conservatives,” he wrote, “need to build on these efforts by developing a comprehensive agenda for pushing back against left-wing ideology in corporate America.”
In fact, Rufo sees Florida as the seeding ground for his censorship, where it can take root and spread, and Texas has already followed suit. Earlier this month, just a few days after DeSantis announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on D.E.I., the office of the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, issued a memo warning state agency and public university leaders that the use of D.E.I. in hiring was illegal.
The backlash has moved from public schools to private boardrooms. The South may not rise again, but if the right gets its way, patriarchal white supremacy will.
This is the New Right’s strategic plan: a relentless push to re-establish and strengthen the straight, cis, patriarchal, white supremacist power structure. And as [Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of CRT’s developers] put it: “This thing will not be satisfied by one victory. This is just one skirmish, in a wider, broader battle to make racism unspeakable, and basically to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women, and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”
In fact, every perceived win will only embolden the extremists. The objective is to win the war against progress and to freeze America in a yesteryear image of itself. This is a swing-for-the-fences play. They are seeking to widen the conservative aperture in their quest to suppress and reverse, to promote a universal vision on oppression, to apply uniform pressure.
The demographic handwriting is on the wall. The U.S. Constitution’s slave-era, structural biases notwithstanding, White America has not had full control of the polity or culture for decades. The 50-50 outcomes of many national elections should have been a clue. Conservatives may have hated Bill Clinton, but he was still a white hound dog from Arkansas, if an overeducated one. It was not until Barack Obama’s election that the alarms right-wing pundits had been sounding about whites’ falling political and social potency set conservatives’ hair on fire.
For the last decade and a half, white conservative “patriots” have been mounting their last stand against “created equal.” Not just against racial minorities, but against all marginalized Americans asserting their rights to be and to be free. Crenshaw tells Blow, “I believe that this is the battle for the next century.” White conservatives mean to defend their treasured place atop the social pyramid by putting everyone else back in theirs.