The Re-Redemption of America

White people have one move—and they always return to it.

Remember economic anxiety?

No, not the one from the olden days of Black, madrassa-educated presidents, when unemployment, inflation and the consumer price index were all declining. Apparently, fiscal angst can be cured with a Mexican-proof wall, a Muslim ban and, of course, a white president. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t actually get a single item on the financially insecure Caucasian wish list (Obama’s successor wasn’t even white; his skin was more like the inside of an overripe cantaloupe). Still, by putting a corrupt, unrepentant, racist, white nationalist billionaire who hocks racism, hate and red hats in the Oval Office, stage 3 economic anxiety miraculously went into remission.

But, again, that’s not the one I’m talking about.

I’m also not talking about the economic anxiety of the 1980s. Ronald Reagan figured out what was causing high unemployment, skyrocketing gas prices and an out-of-control national debt. It was “welfare queens.” It was crack in the ghetto. It was the “monkeys” from Africa. It was the “gay plague.” But thanks to a combination of trickle-down economics, low-level drug arrests, mass incarceration, the federal contracts that birthed the private prison industry and tax breaks for wealthy Wall Street millionaires, America became a shining city on a hill.

But I’m not talking about that “economic anxiety,” either.

I mean the postbellum economic anxiety epidemic after Confederate traitors who had shot their own countrymen in the face to protect slavery suddenly lost their labor force. Remember when the people whose entire economy was built on violence and the threat of violence convinced themselves that the people who had survived 200 years of rape, pillage and exploitation were the source of all their problems? Remember how they went crazy? And for them, there was only one way to make their country great again:

Kill Black people.