SYMPATHY AND THE DEVIL.

I read that Washington Post "White, and In The Minority" story. Excerpt:

She went to him. They kissed and sat side by side, legs touching. Flipping through Facebook, she told him about the meeting, how uncomfortable it had been. 

“They don’t give a rat’s ass about people with white skin,” he said. 

She nodded, feeling better. This was exactly what she had needed. Someone who understood, and Venson always did. She first met him last July. For months, she had called over any mechanic — most of whom were white on her shift — repairing a nearby machine, just to have someone to talk to, and then one day it was Venson. He told her he’d gone to the same high school she had, and it felt so good to connect that they soon had a relationship going, one whose core was their shared experience at Bell & Evans.
“Half of them know English and they just don’t show it,” Venson continued, pulling on a cigarette. 

“They do,” she agreed, smoking her own. 

“You get pretty much overlooked,” he said. 

She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder, feeling tired, and then the two of them were quiet as the trucks carting away the chicken rumbled off and the final minutes of their break ticked down to nothing.

Like many of you I've had it up to here with mainstream papers obsessing over the feelings of racist white Trumpkins.  Maybe in this instance I was just more responsive to reporter Terrence McCoy's craft, or to the specific literary pedigree markings of his story, but I really think his empathy for the disgruntled white folks working at Bell & Evans Plant #2 in Fredericksburg, Pennsyltucky, is humane and appropriate, and that he's not championing Heaven's and Venson's sad white-minority resentment as a serious point of view we're supposed to nod sagely over and try to make accommodations with for the sake of national unity -- you know, that way that idiot Margaret Renki did at the Times -- but simply showing us what's going on with these people, the way real writers can.

Nonetheless, as I expected, white supremacists have seized on the story on message boards --

If you are white,then YEP! You aren't allowed to be among your own people because that's RACIST! The government will FORCE DIEversity down your throat or force it with the barrel of a gun but you WILL obey their dictates! Fight back or settle for this.

-- and at straight-up, not-even-kidding Nazi sites like Stormfront:

This is just sad, but read it carefully, for this is the future in a land where the Whites who built it are a small minority... 

That article is just propaganda designed to demoralize whites and boost the morale of any (((liberals))) reading it... 

It's nothing more than Jew/Marxist gloating, and I for one can't wait to see these "journalists" proven wrong. Whites will rise up against this perpetual onslaught of anti-White BS, and we're eventually going to WIN! Sink that into your demonic skulls, Washington Post...

The problem is not that the Post portrayed, apparently accurately,  the bitter lives of American racists; real journalism, like real art, is never the problem, in fact we're ever in need of more of it. The actual problem is, as I see it, twofold.

One problem is that America is as suffused with racism as it's ever been, but also more aware of it than it has been in a long time -- and the more some of us own up to it, the more others of us just own it, convinced that, if the liberals they've been trained to despise are against it, then they're by God for it.

The other problem is that our nation suffers from shitty education and shitty politics. If we were where we were at in the 1960s on both counts, we'd still have racists, but we'd be able to recognize them as such, and we'd be able to recognize a story like McCoy's as being an examination of racists, and maybe a glimpse into our own sick souls. As it is, our crap politics tells us that racism isn't racism, but Heritage, or the White Working Class, or This Is Why Trump Won, or some shit; and our miseducation tells us that anything that makes you better understand and even empathize with anyone -- including the racists in McCoy's story -- is a piece of propaganda for them and what they stand for; if you feel for them, you have to stan for them, and if you won't stan for them, then you can't feel for them.

This literally infantile way of relating to the world is killing us just as surely as the whole miasma of insane, ignorant policies is killing us. In fact I am convinced that it's where our troubles begin. Which is why, instead of just shaking my fist, I take the time to try and think these things through and explain them.