“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” (Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960)

It was a very successful master plan put into place following the foiled attempt by Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. It was a collective uprising of the lower class against a small minority of wealthy land-owning elites.

Word was sent back to the English royals, and efforts were made to prevent such future endeavors by the masses. Consequently, racial divisions were put into place, and for the first time on American soil, a category of people deemed “white” entered the lexicon of the Virginia colony.

The term carried certain privileges reserved only for those who qualified under that description. They were given authority over non-whites; they were provided with more resources, greater respect, freedom from lifelong enslavement, and indentured servitude. They were fed a dream of entitlement reserved just for them. They would be exempt from discriminatory practices and being targeted because of the color of their skin. They were given access to what would become the American dream under the Declaration of Independence, nearly a hundred years later.

Pseudo-scientists would be appointed to provide so-called “scientific evidence” of their superiority. 

However, the category of whiteness was never set in stone and could vary from year to year in terms of which groups of people were included. In time, the definition would change from state to state. You could be defined as “white” in one state, and non-white once you crossed state lines.

But a non-white individual might “pass” if they merely looked the part and denied their actual “racial” lineage.  Seeking a better life, some chose to play the game of submersion and assimilation, leaving their family roots behind them.

It’s called “white privilege.” And yes, it is a thing, a documented part of American history that some unenlightened folks still deny, yet fight to protect.

It only reinforces the need to teach unadulterated history. To become all that America can be, we must learn to embrace knowledge and reject ignorance. When someone is allowed to control the dissemination of information, they can manipulate the masses.

Burning books, teaching revisionist history, denying historical events, covering up records, making documents inaccessible, and separating and demonizing people who can pass down knowledge are all methods of control.

The tiny minority of wealthy, “white,” male landowners hit a home run by introducing racism/white supremacy into American culture. It became the bedrock of America, part of its DNA, a malignant cancer poisoning the body of what could be a great nation.

But the “us” versus “them” has been incredibly effective. It took on a life of its own. It allowed one group of people to embrace acts of pure savagery and inhumanity perpetrated against their fellow human beings based solely on skin color and accompanying stereotypes.   

All the while, that tiny minority of wealthy, “white,” male landowners has only increased their wealth, their political control, their status, and their power. Laws were put into place to control those outside of their exclusive club. And fear of “the other” has never failed to produce dividends.  

In 1960, LBJ said the quiet part out loud. He exposed the essence of what was established in the Virginia colonies in 1681, when the category of “white” was first used in written documents.

So, when we see racialized pushback to Black progress, what we are actually seeing is the continued manifestations of a system that has become self-perpetuating and deeply established. It’s a system implanted in the minds of our children during their formative years. It’s a strategy of indoctrination with deeply rooted psychological seeds planted in the minds of the most vulnerable, our children. And more often than not, it takes place at a subliminal level.       

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”  (Proverbs 22:6)      

This can work in both the positive and the negative. Unless this mentality is directly challenged along the way, it will remain in place and produce the intended fruit, which promotes the system of racism/white supremacy.

A part of the mentality is a belief that if those “others” gain true equality, it means that “white privilege” must suffer and get “replaced” by privileges granted to those deemed “other.”

The election of the first Black President, while celebrated by many, led to many others feeling threatened. While some thought this signified a post-racial America, most POC realized something very different. America’s racism/white supremacy was too baked in for it to end so abruptly.   

We had been here before. We had been here with the caveat to the 13th Amendment, which allowed slavery under another name, “mass incarceration,” substantiated by Black Codes.

We were here 12 years following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Reconstruction era, and the rescinded promise of 40 acres and a mule.

We were here when the majority of over 2,000 Black politicians were removed from office when Jim Crow was ushered in.  

“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this; we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us, and there’ll be no way of stopping them; we’ll lose the filibuster, and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again. [Said by LBJ to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957]”

It should not be surprising, therefore, that America shifted to the other end of the spectrum and elected Donald Trump with the slogan of “Make America Great AGAIN.” It was the same slogan Reagan used.

Question: When was America ever GREAT for people of color and those categorized as “others?” The interpretation should be obvious. It was, and is, a matter of reinforcing that “white privilege” that many “white” people still insist does not exist.       

Whenever it seems to be slipping away, you merely introduce a new roster of boogie men to reinforce the weapon of fear. So, we get the CRT boogie man, we get the DEI boogie man, we get the “mass immigration” boogie man, we get the LGBTQ+ boogie man. We get banned books, revisionists, and erased history. We get banned countries, and increased incarceration of POC, and their ignored brutality and even murders.   

A lesser-known LBJ quote: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

It plays into the hands of evil and man’s fallen, default sin nature. And it is even covered by false religion, Christian Nationalism, and Evangelicalism posing as Biblical Christianity.

So often, white privilege is accompanied by white rage. The goal and objective of maintaining white privilege and white supremacy will even yield to the demolition of the previously coveted Constitution of the United States. It’s a matter of whatever works to protect whiteness and all that comes along with it.

Another lesser-known quote of LBJ: “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”

And that’s the truth.