As we all prepare (if only nominally) to recall the gratitude we ought to feel for the establishment of the beacon of freedom into which we were born, with a specific nod to a moment of shared humanity on Thanksgiving, take a moment to play with a fancy interactive infographic Bloomberg published in September. The sub-headlined point sets the stage:

The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color.

For context — although it’s getting more difficult to find data that isn’t slathered in diversity triumphalism and narrative promotion — “White alone non-Hispanic” Americans still make up 58% of the United States population.  To put a nice clear box around it:  Only 6% of all new jobs in America’s top companies were parceled out to nearly 60% of the population.  I’m certainly not a fan of “equity” talk, but is there a non-racist, non-vindictive way to justify that imbalance?

Scroll through Bloomberg’s infographic, and the problem only becomes more worrying.  The disproportion gets worse as one moves down the career ladder.  The “less-senior roles” in these companies saw a decrease of 18,800 white people, while white professionals, managers, and executives did better.  Looking at total workforces, and not just new hires, if you dip below “managers,” white people are not proportionately represented in the total existing workforce at these companies.

As indicated above, I don’t put much stock in racial quota tracking, but a likely outcome is easy to see, here.  To “make gains” in “equity,” companies are actively blocking white Americans from accessing the lower rungs of the ladder.  This will (oh, yes, it will) create a bitter underclass, for which the mainstream solution appears to be mockery, scorn, and vilification, even by the U.S. military, to which people in those circumstances used to turn for a straight-and-narrow path to self-respect and self-improvement.  These trends will not turn out well.  The more desperate white folks in the lower economic ranks become, the more America’s elites will use their reaction to despair as evidence of the need for restricted rights and the unfit nature of the white lower class.

These trends expose the entire racialist line as the lie that it is.  There is no conspiracy of whiteness.  Our economic system does not favor white people as white people.  White elites are happy to suppress working and poor whites, who (lest we forget) are actually the majority in their classes, too.  Racial solidarity of people with light skin is a malevolent myth… at least for the time being.  As the reality of the “equity” program becomes increasingly obvious, the rationality of an actual “white identity” will become irresistible.

Whether it is fanciful or not, the idea of a unifying shared meal in America’s colonial past represents a valuable ideal.  Those of our neighbors who insist that it never existed tend to go much farther, sowing division at every opportunity and proving by their actions that, whether such unity is possible, they do not find it desirable.

Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.