Source: Atlanta Black Star

By Brianna Cox

In her essay, “Mourning for Whiteness,” which was published in The New Yorker, Morrison’s central thesis is simple: Trump won because privileged white people, white men especially, feel threatened by a “rapidly” diversifying United States of America.

Pulitzer prize-winning and prolific author Toni Morrison has penned an important essay in response to Donald Trump being elected president — as well as to the vile beliefs and violent actions of his supporters — in an effort to explain exactly why he won in the first place.

“Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color,” she begins.

She continues: “Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are ‘people of color’ everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.”

Morrison goes on to explain that white people, whether consciously or subconsciously, fear Black people and otherwise non-white people fighting for and obtaining equality, as this ultimately means losing their superiority. Equality for all is a loss for white people.

Because of this fear, white Americans, “[i]n order to limit the possibility of this untenable change and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing,” Morrison writes. “[T]hey are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice.”

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