No More Old White Men For President

I think we’ve seen the last of old white men as political leaders for this century. 

Not saying there won’t be old political leaders.

Not saying there won’t be white political leaders.

Not saying there won’t be male political leaders.

Just saying we’re not going to see any combinations of all three (maybe two of three provided the politician is really good at their job).

Good.

As a distinct subset, old white men have never been the majority in this country.  They wielded their unearned status over women and minorities and younger people to leverage power and control for hundreds of years.

But that was then, this is now.  A hundred  years ago the country was almost ninety percent white; in less than twenty-five years current demographic projections will reduce that to just under fifty percent, making whites the largest minority in a country made up of minorities, but a minority nonetheless.

Good.

Right now, whites are no longer effectively a majority in the U.S.  Including people of mixed ancestry who identify as white, only seventy-one percent of the country is white.

When persons of mixed ancestry are taken out of the mix, that number today drops to less than sixty-two percent.

The cause of this precipitous drop in the white population? 

The whites’ own pernicious “one drop rule” that goes all the way back to the earliest colonial era.

As demonstrated by the fabled “lost colony” of Roanoke, white English colonists in the new world felt no particular attachment to their home culture across the Atlantic and when treated shabbily by their absentee masters back in merrie olde England were perfectly capable of defecting to one of the local Native American tribes.

Realizing they couldn’t force indentured servants to work like slaves, the landed gentry began importing actual slaves from Africa.  Unlike the indentured servants who colonized America, the enslaved Africans faced perpetual chattel slavery with their children born into slavery as well.

Small wonder many of them sought escape to the west where they could be adopted and accepted by local tribes.

Add to this various frontiersmen willing to intermarry with Native Americans -- not to mention the countless number of half-white children born into slavery after white slaveowners raped their mothers -- and whites in American -- particularly that entitled white gentry class -- sought to exclude as many people as possible from the body politic by claiming one drop of non-white blood meant that person by legal definition was non-white.

Don’t listen to the malignant MAGA nonsense; identity politics were created by white men for the protection and preservation of white men.

In the beginning, “white” applied only to those of English or Northern / Western European descent. 

Jewish people, no matter where they came from, weren’t accepted as “really” white.  The Irish and Italians were viewed as subhuman thugs.  A select few French, German, Scandinavian, and some upper crust Spaniards and Slavs were allowed in the white man’s world, but most Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, and all Asians were excluded.

…that is, until the number of white people in America began declining, then suddenly previous barriers held against the Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans dropped in order to reinforce white ranks.

But to this day Latin Americans, African-Americans, Middle Easterners, and Asians are kept outside the old white men’s circle of power.

Oh, a few token representatives are allowed in:  Fetching females who parrot what the old men want to hear, sociopathic opportunists of all kinds willing to make a buck by selling out others like them, etc.

But by excluding all those tainted by so much as “one drop” of Native American, African-American, Middle Eastern or Asian heritage, selfish old power hungry white men hoped to concentrate all the benefits of citizenship on themselves alone.

Well, that didn’t last long.  First African-Americans were freed, then women got to vote, then laws forbidding Asians from being American citizens were struck down, and finally laws against miscegenation were abolished.

The latter meant a lot of people now claimed membership in two subsets of American, the traditional pure white stain [sic!] and something else.

This results in bizarrely arcane rules and regulations, as well as increasingly paradoxical cultural standing.  A single “full blooded” Native American great-great-grandparent enables one to claim membership in that tribe, a tall kid without a noticeable epicanthic fold can be accepted as white even if one parent is fully Asian.

On the one hand, the true American ideal is liberty and justice for all with every person having a chance to participate in society to the best of their abilities. 

On the other, there’s definitely a cultural subset that wants to make sure old white men (and the various subsets of that subset, viz. white women, young white men, etc.) are more equal than others.

But their day is drawing to a close.

Already there are enough old white men who do believe in liberty and justice for all and who vote for young and female and minority candidates to ensure this country’s coalition of minorities get a say in how things are done.

Donald Trump and MAGA represent that last feverish attempt to hold onto power before old white men no longer find the country deferring to them simply because they’re old white men.

Oh, there will be old white men involved in politics in years to come.

They will start as young white men who know how to deal and make alliances with all the other subsets in the country.  A few will be successful enough at their careers to survive long enough to become old white men…

…but they’ll never wield the same dominant clout old white men used to have.

I trust we will not have another old white male president for the rest of this century.  That particular combo is a toxic turd that needs to learn to play will with others.  We will have old people male and female, of all sorts of different backgrounds serve as president, and we’ll probably have a few younger-to-middle aged white men as well, candidates who grew up in the new realpolitik and understand their age and skin tone and assigned genitalia give them no more special consideration than anyone else.

© Buzz Dixon