This is Why Minorities and White People Can’t Get Along in America Day

24 min readDec 25, 2020

This is going to be a long, boring, enraging, and painful essay, and I highly recommend that you don’t read any of it.
Now, I’m going to use the term “white people” in this essay. And by that, of course, I don’t mean all white people, every single last person. I mean a certain kind of white person, a mentality that exists on both the liberal and conservative sides. It’s not for me to judge whether you are the kind of person I’m describing in this essay. That part is up to you.
A funny and strange thing happened to me yesterday, and though it was ultimately minor, it is a tiny, tiny example of something that we minorities live with daily. I read that Joe Biden was going to continue some of Trump’s “immigration policies,” meaning “privatized detention centers.” (Translation: concentration camps.) I laughed, in disappoinment. Big mistake. And I remarked, offhand, without thinking too much about it: “Lol. Joe Biden’s setting up his Presidency to fail.” Second mistake.
One thing you can’t do, especially if you’re a minority, these days, is criticise Joe Biden. It sets off white liberals. And so the fireworks began. I was told I was a murderer, a fascist, a Trumpist. Wait, what?
I’d crossed a major, major line. I’d critiqued someone that white liberals hold dear. And as a minority, I’m not allowed to do that. (I’ll leave the actual critique, by the way, aside. I didn’t just emptily mock Biden — I suggested his Presidency would fail for plenty of eminently logical set of reasons. I’ll write about those, too, but not here. This essay is about a different topic.) What does that say? Tell you? Reveal?
I wasn’t shocked. I rolled my eyes, in a kind of weary despair. It was happening all over again. I’d triggered the white people. It got me thinking about what minorities in America feel, day in, day out.
Fear.
Dear white people: we minorities live in fear of you. In a certain kind of terror, in fact. A fear that follows us everywhere, and watches our every word, action, and expression. A fear that our lives hinge on the tiniest things, and we could lose it all over nothing, just because you thought nothing was everything for a second, and you have the power to destroy us and everything we hold dear over nothing, just because you feel like it. We minorities live in fear of you. Of what you will do to us, just because you can.
We minorities live in fear of white rage. And that is why America cannot come together, ever.
No, not just of the Trumpists, sorry. We are even afraid of — especially of — the “good” white person, the liberal, because their moral superiority makes them all the more dangerous and self-unaware and unrestrained. White people of both kinds, you see, police us, and then they get mad, and they don’t seem to understand yet that their fury makes them obscene, indecent, destructive, that it’s a kind of killing rage. Who wouldn’t be afraid of that? And thats the simple truth of it.
The poor Black person is afraid of being shot by the cops. The lower middle class one, strangled in their own neighborhood. The middle class Asian, of being demeaned by his or her boss, made fun of by the leader of the pack, bullied, belittled. The one who you think doesn’t have to worry, like me, still live in fear, of offending the white majority. We are all living in fear. Of you. Of what you will do to us, how you will overreact today, what you will hold against us, what grudge you will nurse, what tiny, tiny mistake will set you off like a human had grenade, and destroy our incomes, livelihoods, relationships, reputations, lives.
The reason you don’t know this, if you’re white, is that we never tell you, because we’re already terrified enough of you. Who wants to provoke you more by telling you this strange and terrible secret? Who knows what you’ll do then? You’d get mad. And nobody wants to make you mad, because you could get angry, violent, hateful, enraged, you could lose your mind, your sh*t, your reason, call the cops, report us, turn us in, shun us, turn against us forever, call us all kinds of crazy things like murderers…your rage could make you crazy, and you could literally lose your bearings as a decent human being when you boil over and blow your top at us, over nothing, which happens all the time, and you don’t even know it, because nobody tells you, because we’re too scared of you in the first place to ever really tell you.
We minorities are terrified of triggering white rage. Because when it erupts, it is totally disproportionate, relentless, abusive, and hateful. All the boundaries that even the good white liberal imagines they never cross are suddenly OK to cross. White rage is a law unto itself, it knows it can get away with anything, and it will cross every last line to punish a minority it thinks has risen out of place.
Boom! Nobody knows when you’ll go nuclear, or why. We just know that you can, so you will, and we will be the ones standing in the way of the mushroom cloud, being turned to dust. You will watch happily from the plane dropping the bombs, and smile in a kind of stupid satisfaction. Yay! You won! Wait, were we at war? Nobody told me. I was just standing there…when you nuked me, dude. That’s white rage. And what we feel, us minorities, is the ever-present fear of it.
We’re not scared of you. We’re afraid of you. Those are two very different things. You are scared of us — your fears about us are bizarre, mythical, steeped in legend, overblown, fantastical. But our fears of you are very, very real. We know you can call the cops on us for something totally trivial, and yes, we might just get choked to death, deported, or put in jail. We know you can ruin our lives with the press of a button. We can’t do that to you. We are not scared of you — you are scared of us — but we are very, very afraid of you.
(At this point, I need to make the usual and important disclaimer. Of course I don’t mean you personally. I mean white Americans, as a whole, as a social group, tend to react this way. You may not behave this way. But enough white Americans do to the point that we live in fear of you.)
Imagine if, say, Chris Hayes or Ezra Klein had criticised Joe Biden. Do you think white liberals would erupt in rage? I don’t. I think they’d stroke their chins and nod along, as if they were hearing very wise words from sage figures. There is a glaring double standard. I can critique Trump, sure — but as a minority, I’m not allowed to criticise anyone that white liberals think is a good person. Have you ever wondered why? I have. And here is my answer. I want to use it to define white rage much more precisely.
White people are always policing us minorities. They are always looking for perceived infractions on our part. Of norms, codes, and often, laws. They are always playing cop. No matter what kind of minority you are, or how far you have risen, that remains true. In my case, it didn’t matter to white liberals, for example, that I’ve written against Trumpism and fascism for literally years at this point, that I was one of the very first people to warn of the dangers to come — the moment I barely began to criticise Biden, any good will that existed between us was gone. Had it ever really existed at all, then? They were still playing cop, looking at me with suspicious eyes, as a criminal-in-waiting, a person who was always no good all along. I’m going to discuss precisely how, but first let me continue.
We live in fear of hair triggers. When and where this kind of a white American senses a violation of norms or codes or rules, they will erupt. They will lash out, often violently — and I don’t just mean physically, though that’s also often the case — but emotionally, verbally, socially. They are like hand grenades with the pin half pulled. They are waiting for us to make what they perceive as a mistake, and when we do — kaboom, they explode.
White Americans are waiting to be set off by — no, on — us minorities. And we minorities know that the smallest wrong move on our part will set them off. The smallest one. So we live in a certain painful and strange and dehumanised way. We step gingerly. We watch our every word and action. We learn to smile just so, and never frown just so. We are always trying not to set white people’s hair triggers off, the ones we know lie waiting for us to slip up and make the tiniest mistake. Not a real mistake, mind you — just the tiniest thing that confirms their prejudices and biases. These people were no good all along. They were never to be trusted. You see — that is why we were suspicious of them from the beginning. And now they’ve proven it!
Always. Every single day. Over and over again we live this bitter and gruesome reality. Of having to walk on eggshells around human hair triggers.
But what is it that makes white people so suspicious of us? Ah, now we are coming to the nub of things, aren’t we? I suppose I have to say it, then. Racism. Unconsciously so, maybe. But, shrug — does that make such a difference?
We minorities are the ones who put Biden in power. White people backed Trump, again, as a majority. We overwhelmingly voted for Biden, and our votes are what put him in office. And yet we don’t have the right to criticise him — or else we set off white liberals. Think about that for a second. Not just the backwards morality of it, or the intellectual bankruptcy of it, but what it really is. Racism.
We minorities have to walk on eggshells every single day of our lives around white people, because they are human hand grenades, waiting to go off, policing our every word and expression and thought and action, interrogating us at every turn for evidence that we are the bad people they not so secretly obviously think we must be? Why else would you police someone all the time unless you think they are not to be trusted?
Think of the way that a white person will call the cops on a black person for just existing, or feel nothing is wrong about telling an Asian they “don’t fit culturally” in a rejection letter to a school or job. What the? Why do they think we need to be punished all the time, over and over again, for the tiniest perceived infraction or deviation?
There’s only possible reason, really. They think we are all guilty, inherently. Why else would you police someone all the time, and never forgive the tiniest mistake, but want to punish it as hard as you can? Because you presume they are guilty. But you cannot have a society of equals when the majority has already judged the minority guilty. That is called prejudice, and prejudice is the living definition of racism.
That doesn’t mean “all white people are racist,” but it does mean: a hell of a lot of white people who think they are good are badly racist in ways they have yet to comprehend or even perceive.
Let me interject here that what I say is, in my experience, true about American whites. I’ve lived all over the world as a minority — from Canada to Europe to Asia. And I’ve never remotely felt this feeling that I do with, around, from America white people.
White people, especially white liberals, often think that because the violence they do to us has gone from physical to emotional, verbal, cultural, and social, it is “less,” and so “progress” has been made. But it is not any less, really, except in the most gross and vulgar way. Harm is harm. Here we still are, living in fear of white people. Hounding us, pursuing us, hating us, and it shapes our every single interaction with them to the point that we are exhausted by the time the day is done, not from our work, but from the endless and gruelling emotional labour of dealing with suspicion. Don’t think for a moment that just because often it’s social and cultural it hurts any less. White rage is still the defining force, the prime mover, the invisible hand of American society.
How does it feel, to be a minority living in fear and terror, in a society which hates and terrorises you, in which even the good people in the majority don’t seem capable of admitting that they are doing great harm to you, too, obeying the same norms the bad people are, that you must be someone to be policed? Well, it’s just what you might imagine.
We minorities are traumatised by living in fear of white people’s entitlement to disproportionate, life-destroying, violent, abusive rage. Every single minority kid I know is hurting, and hurting badly. Every single one has an addiction of some kind. No, not always drugs. Maybe food, maybe sports, maybe art — often, they are very good ones. We need our coping mechanisms desperately, because we are so traumatized.
Will I be able to drive through this neighborhood — maybe it’s my own — without the cops stopping me? Will they shoot me if they do? Will they strangle me to death? Will we get the dreaded, expected, feared “we liked you but you didn’t culturally fit,” job rejection letter, after we get straight A’s in that degree? Will we be paired up with other minorities at work and play, just because white people think we’ll get along? Will white people go ballistic on us for a smile in the wrong way, a frown at the wrong time, a sigh in the wrong way — a LOL at the wrong time?
The emotion we feel most is fear. Fear haunts us like a terrible ghost we can’t exorcise. You have succeeded brilliantly in doing much more than terrorising us — in normalising it so much that even the good people amongst you can scarcely believe it when we tell you that yes, we really feel this way.
What does feeling that much fear do to a person? It messes them up. It gives them PTSD. They go into something like a semi-permanent state of shock, their parasympathetic nervous system in perpetual overload, their fight-flight-freeze response always on. They are depleted of dopamine, and low on serotonin.
Take a close look at the minorities around you. Do you see how hurt we are? Do you see how every minority you know is probably deeply traumatized, depressed, and alienated? Do you see how frightened we look, and how some of us try to front with bravado and machismo, which is a pretty obvious giveaway, that, well, we’re scared to death of you? But we have always been that way, because you have made us that way. This is just — maybe — the first time you see it.
I’m not saying white people can’t feel those things — wait, why did you think that? It’s not a contest. I am saying that we minorities often feel those things most — no, not “more than you,” “most,” as in, that is the largest amount of a kind of feeling we have. That is why so many of us, by the way, turn to artistic or scientific pursuits. No, Asian aren’t “nerds” or “naturally logical” and Black People aren’t “naturally musical.” We do it because these are the ways we cope with living in fear of you. Often, they are the only ways out for us, too.
And that tells us all something deeply and painfully true. You will not treat us as equals. No matter what we do, we can’t make white people trust us. There is simply no way they will let it be done. Yes, really. The Black person can live in a nice neighborhood — but white people will still move. The minority can achieve or accomplish — but she is always treated differently. “Cultural fit” is still an excuse to not get a job.
Take my case, if you really want to. No matter what I’ve ever accomplished or achieved — despite the books, columns, articles, essays, interviews, all of it — white people still don’t trust me. There is literally, at this point, nothing more I can do. In fact, white people of the kind I’m discussing here don’t even think I’m real. A real American, a real economist, a real intellectual, use whatever scale you like — the moment I step beyond the little place they’ve assigned me, which is a place of subjugation and inferiority to them — bang! It’s over. I was never to be trusted to begin with. And if I can’t earn white people’s trust, in my relative position of privilege and power, what the hell chance do the rest of us minorities have?
White people live out a self-fulfilling prophecy. They distrust us, so they police us intently, and policing us intently, they find evidence, sooner or later, that we were never to be trusted to begin with. There is no winning this absurd battle. The game is rigged from the beginning.
Why don’t white Americans and minorities seem capable of getting along? For all the reasons above. We minorities keep our distance, emotionally, socially, culturally, from white people. We have learned to perform for them, in a new way, a different way. To pander to their prejudices and biases by pretending, we aren’t walking on eggshells around you. We’re buddies now! Hey, we’re best friends, living in a post-racial utopia! You’re not constantly judging me — and I’m not in perpetual fear that you’ll destroy my life over the tiniest thing. Nope — that’s not happening at all.
Meanwhile, white people are performing just the opposite step in this kabuki dance. Hey, how are you doing, Mr/Ms Minority? Did you know what a good person I am? Why, I’m treating you just like an equal. Isn’t it great! I even talk about sports and the weather with you. No, I’m not secretly watching you out of the corner of my eye, for any deviation from whiteness’s rules, norms, or codes. Nope, I’m not trying to hide the fact that I’m intently policing your every word, expression, and action, so I can report back to White People, Inc, meaning the water cooler gang, and gossip behind your back — or maybe just call the cops. No way! We’re buddies! BFFs, even. Hey, I even listen to rap.
This dance is as exhausting for both sides as it is pointless. It’s better, in my estimation, to admit the truth. We live in fear of you. Even the good ones among you feel entitled to dehumanise us and distrust us and lash out at us, over the tiniest things, over and over again. There seems to be no way to change your behaviour, which cannot form a democracy, because a democracy is made of equals, not superiors and inferiors. All that we can do is distance ourselves from you. That is why American society is coming apart at the seams now, because you will not let it be a true democracy. You never have.
Let me finish on one final thought. There’s this TV show I like. Chicago Fire. Have you seen it? It’s set, like so many of Dick Wolf’s shows, in a kind of post-racial utopia. The Black firehouse chief is treated with respect and grace. I wish we lived in that society, but we don’t. Shows like that are escapist myths, as pleasant as they are. And one of their sins is that while they model for white people a better way to behave, they also give the impression we live in such a society already. We don’t.
The America we live in, the one I know, is this. It’s the one where minorities live in fear of white people. Fear of losing their jobs, incomes, homes, reputations, lives. Over the smallest things.

If you wonder why white people and minoritiees in America don’t seem to get along, a better question is: how could they? White people still hate us. They just don’t know it. They don’t even know what it is to hate, really, yet.
That is how far there is yet to go.
And that is the problem, because maybe if enough of them did, things could finally begin to change a little bit. Ready for my final test?
LOL, Joe Biden’s Presidency is going to fail. Ah — did you just want to kill me? Erase me? Wound me? Check yourself, my friend. I am not here to judge you. So why don’t you trust me, yet, after all these long, long centuries of pain and violence and stupidity? Will you ever change? Can you?
Umair
December 2020

This is Why Minorities and White People Can’t Get Along in America Day

Written by Shannon F. Genovese