Not true, Enrique. White males were the first group to see slower job growth and lower labor force participation in the early 1980s, right at the beginning of the shift away from an egalitarian society. This is because affirmative action started to be implemented in a meaningful way right at that time.

Pushing women into the workplace was also a result of affirmative action, and that had a negative effect on marital stability for non-elite whites. Affirmative action has been a net negative for whites, and liberals often gloat over our reduced status, saying things like “white men are enraged because they are no longer ‘privileged’” (as though the white working class ever was).

Affirmative action has had real, negative effects on non-elite white males, and that was by design. You may deny this, but it is universally unpopular with these non-elite whites. Is this because they are all stupid, ignorant, inbred rednecks as the anti-racist left would have us believe? Are they suffering from mass delusion? Were they fooled by aliens? Or the Republicans (who simply exploited white resentment of Democrats who sold them out)? No, they aren’t really that stupid. They know that affirmative action is against their interests.

Sure, elite whites supported it from the beginning. Republicans wanted women in the workforce during the Eisenhower administration. Democrats fought that hard for a while, and women mainly voted Republican until the 1970s (today’s gender gap is a reversal from those times). Saturating the labor market has always been capitalists’ goal, and women and minorities were seen as convenient tools for that.

Sure, it sucks for minorities that white men opposed immigration and didn’t want their jobs opened to others circa 1960, but they were looking after their and their families’ interests, and they comprised about 90% of the population. Maybe you think that’s evil. I think it’s pragmatic, just as Cesar Chavez thought it was pragmatic to keep immigrants from taking farm workers’ jobs in California back in the day.

And frankly speaking, blacks as a group are incapable of creating the kind of society that can support the industry and lifestyle whites built in the US, and that was and continues to be a widely known (although seldom admitted) fact. Contemporary Detroit is a sad testament to this inadequacy. So white workers felt that they deserved to share in the wealth created by a white society without the threat of replacement by cheaper labor, and rightly so. Is it fair that blacks should benefit from the society that made white industry possible while the whites who formed its bedrock are cast aside and forced to pay the bills for the problems created by black failure to conform to it? Maybe you think so, but for the white working class it was an enormous betrayal, yet a triumph for thieving elites. Remember: white industry was stifled in the slave society of the American South, and that’s what motivated most people to vote for Abe Lincoln — not Harriet Beecher Stowe and her quaint little fantasy.

As long as the white majority was steadily accumulating wealth this situation could be tolerated, but all that has changed, so white priorities will change as well. It’s as sure as the sun setting in the west. Maybe there’s nothing we can do about it, and we’re destined to live a lifestyle approximating that in Jalisco or – heaven forbid – Port au Prince, but that isn’t what we want, and we have every right to try to prevent it.