Perhaps the most stunning act of legerdemain in recent history was the bold capture of civil rights laws as a tool to ignore its original beneficiaries–people of color and women–and to turn those laws into a protective shield for men and white Christians. No longer will white Christians be demonized and oppressed!
Jessica Washington writes in The intercept about how the Trump administration has twisted the civil rights rhetoric so that the beneficiaries are white Christians.
She wrote:
With an assist from Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Trump has made the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion a centerpiece of his new administration. For all the crowing about his early success — much of it greatly overinflated— Trump has simply flipped the script: Instead of creating a level playing field, he launched DEI for white Christians.
“They’ve stumbled on a winning strategy, which is to portray white people as victims.”
Trump’s bid to dismantle the legacy of the civil rights movement while using its own language is part and parcel of the Christian right’s playbook, according to Christine Reyna, a psychology professor at DePaul University who studies extremism.
“They’ve stumbled on a winning strategy, which is to portray white people as victims and portray their movement as a civil rights movement,” Reyna said. “And they’ve completely co-opted the strategies of the Black civil rights movement.”
At the prayer event that morning, Trump announced the latest gift to his right-wing evangelical supporters: a task force on “anti-Christian bias,” helmed by his new Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“[T]he task force will work to fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society and to move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide,” he said.
So, in Trump’s new world order, any effort to raise up Blacks, women, Hispanics, and other minorities is immediately derided as “woke” or DEI and banned.
Such efforts, by implication, are anti-white. The Trump administration rides to the rescue of white Christians, to end their persecution.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wonder what black Christians think of all this?
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There is a lot of faulty logic in the “persecution of white Christians” belief. Maybe if opportunity were a zero sum game, their belief would have some basis in fact. If a pizza represented opportunity, and minorities ate 75% of the pizza, there would be only 25% left for the white Christians. Opportunity does not follow that logic. If we help one group of people because the facts show they tend to get ignored, it does not imply there is little opportunity left over for white Christians. Currently, life in the US is not a zero sum game. There are lots of different options for different people in different places and different types of careers. In reality in study after study on job opportunities, it is the white males that tend to be selected in greater numbers than any other subgroup, and those with an “ethnic sounding names” tend to be hired in lower numbers. White people are more likely to receive better treatment from law enforcement as well. White Christians should drop their pity party and stop playing the victim. This is another distraction from Trump who deliberately tries to divide and pit one group of people against another.
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White (males especially) have been receivers of privilege for so long, it’s become a part of their psychic DNA–so that when someone with dark skin asks for justice, the unreflective white guy feels like a victim, when what he is most probably feeling is really his UNWARRANTED privilege being threatened – – – at the existential level.
And I am convinced (sorry guys) that many (not all) who are oh-so-nice to women are involved less in having fundamentally changed their misogynist comportments and more in engaging in condescension and lip service.
Trump just popped the lid off of the National stew of unrepentant biases, racism, sexism, etc., living just below the surface ever since Johnson was in office. CBK
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Addendum: BTW, my above note is more about social commentary than about any contempt I might feel for white males–not a part of my soul any more–though it took a long time to root it out (along with my own racism, btw) and to become mellow about such things personally . I still have to repeat myself sometimes because men “go blank” or go for a drink when I talk or, worse, turn to the person next to them and start a different conversation with them. Then someone in my family complained to me that I repeat myself.
Though I do have contempt for women who don’t “get it” yet–and I think some really are “shrill,” but no more than men are conversational bullies–I guess I’m like a reformed smoker in that respect. But (ahem) “some of my best friends are white males.” I even love some of them. CBK
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