Photo by Evan Nesterak | CC BY 2.0
In the wake of the August 2017 neo-Nazi rally and counter-protest in Charlottesville, VA, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics (with Reuters/Ipsos) conducted a survey that warned, “some Americans express troubling racial attitudes even as majority oppose white supremacists.”
Asking whether white people and/or racial minorities in the United States were “under attack,” it found the following:
+ 14 percent agreed that white people were under attack but disagreed with the statement that nonwhites were under attack.
+ 31 percent strongly or somewhat agreed that the country needed to “protect and preserve its White European heritage.”
+ 16 percent agreed that “marriage should only be allowed between two people of the same race” and 17 percent agreed that marriage should be restricted to the same race.
Americans are fearful, the nation is changing and most people’s place in it is uncertain — and racism is one of the ways this fear plays out. Racial identify is America’s version of apartheid.
Since the nation’s founding four centuries ago, racial identity has played a key role in the country’s social, moral and political orders — especially what it means to be “white.” The first Africans land in the British colony of James Town (now Virginia) in 1619 and their status, either slave or indentured servant, remains somewhat a mystery. Along with other early colonialists, whether…