White People Are Snowflakes

David Roberts, a writer at Vox, came across a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute that contained a telling question and answer. The question was whether the increasing demographic diversity was good or bad for the country. As Roberts notes,

[T]he question is not about illegal immigrants, or even immigrants at all; it’s not about crime, or welfare, or jobs. It’s just about racial diversity as such. And more Republicans are against it than for it! (So much for “economic anxiety.”)

Yessiree, Republicans think more people of color is a bad thing in itself. So Roberts decided to put these findings to the test. “It occurred to me that white people rarely if ever experience questions like this, about their very legitimacy. Do they belong? Is having more of them around good for America?”

So he put up a Twitter poll asking, “Do white people have a positive or negative effect on America?” More than 22,000 people responded, with 82% saying “positive.” But that’s not the story. The story was the comments.

By Wednesday morning, I was the outrage of the day on the entertainment site TheWrap and on a couple of right-wing news sites….For reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me, the MAGA brigade seems to view their victory in my poll as a grand self-own on my part. Presumably because I cared about this poll, wanted white people to lose, and assumed my followers would send them down to defeat.

Those erroneous assumptions and many more are reflected in the Twitter thread beneath the poll, which I recommend to anyone with a masochistic streak. The words “cuck” and “soy boy” come up a lot, as well as a wide variety of colorful anatomical suggestions. The funny thing is, I never said a disparaging word about white people. I only said that while other groups are accustomed to being discussed and polled and judged, white people aren’t, and they would freak out if they saw a question like the one in the PRRI poll about themselves.

Then they saw one, completely missed the context, and freaked out, right on cue, thus proving my point in real time.

Roberts goes on from there to talk about studies which found that simply mentioning this demographic trend makes them give more conservative answers to even unrelated questions. It’s a thought-provoking read, highly recommended.