WHITE RESENTMENT.

Publius writes:

I’m a child of the rural South. But you know what? Actual racism is a lot less common there — we have a ways to go, but there has been real progress on that front. The more serious problem is white resentment. A lot of white people honestly think they have been significantly deprived of various things because of minorities. And it’s hard to overstate how deeply these feelings run.It’s not so much animosity toward people who are different — it’s the animosity of the aggrieved. They feel like they are the victims.

Andrew Sullivan replies, "This is the poisoned fruit of that poisonous, if well-intentioned, policy of affirmative action." That's a very odd response. When trying to understand the roots of white resentment, you have to decide when you start the clock. One place is in the mid-60s, with the civil rights movement, desegregation, affirmative action, and the Great Society. Under this timeframe, whites grew resentful as the government, under the control of earnest liberal do-gooders, showered African-Americans with federal largess. Or you can start the clock at slavery. Under this timeframe, whites enslaved blacks, built an economy atop their unpaid labor, fought viciously to keep them as slaves, then to keep them as second class citizens, then to disrupt even minor attempts to redress the centuries of economic and moral injury they'd endured. African-Americans had been materially harmed by centuries of enslavement and discrimination, while whites had materially benefited from being the slave-owners and the ones with the power to discriminate, and something had to be done to help African-Americans make up the ground that they'd formerly not even been allowed to walk on. This did entail redistribution, and this did enrage whites. But let's be clear: White resentment didn't begin in 1965, when affirmative action was introduced. The end of privilege -- though of course, white privilege didn't end, it was only somewhat reduced -- hurts. Ending slavery meant destroying a lot of privilege, and it created a war. Reconstruction disrupted a lot of privilege and it produced countless lynchings and murders. Ending segregation destroyed a hefty amount of privilege, and it spurred societal tumult and vicious violence. By contrast, affirmative action was a relatively modest policy with fairly minimal effects on privilege, and it merely resulted in a potent political issue for conservatives. But to call white resentment the "poisoned fruit" of affirmative action is extremely strange. White resentment has been around a lot longer, and stems from people's desire to protect the fruits of a gross and grave injustice.