For Your Consideration...
"The recent talk of secession on the political right has not been racially based per se, but it would be naive not to suspect a racial component. Just as Unz warned, there does seem to be a growing number of whites who feel -- and act -- like an aggrieved minority. And the signs aren't just coming from the far-right extreme.
Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a workplace discrimination case filed by a firefighter in New Haven, Conn., who claims he was passed over for promotion because he is white. Last August, the New York Times-owned Ocala Star-Banner in Florida published an opinion article by an immigration-restriction activist who claimed that "whites in America are going to be disempowered, assuming we remain a democracy, through a radical and rapid transformation of the nation's demography on a scale unprecedented in world history."
We're likely to hear more such sentiments as the nation goes through the same demographic transition that California has experienced.
Fox News' Glenn Beck has even posited a creepy "Bubba effect." In February, his guest was a retired Army sergeant major who talked about the expanding ranks of survivalists, who "lose that faith and confidence within the various politicians" and "end up developing their own infrastructure, their own means to survive, to basically fend for themselves."
I don't want to make the same mistake Schlesinger did and overestimate the influence of such sentiments, but it's disturbing to see mainstream politicians such as Perry and Palin and talk-show hosts give these ideas any credibility whatsoever.
In some ways, the election of Barack Obama is a culmination of the mainstreaming of nonwhite minorities. Despite the worst excesses of multicultural separatist rhetoric and activism, these groups are more politically integrated than ever before. Now we shouldn't be surprised to hear louder calls for separation, secession or national disintegration from whites than from nonwhites."
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