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Thursday 2nd of October 2025

2008 financial crisis Compared with whites, minorities absorbed heavier losses in the housing collapse. From 2005 to 2009, “inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared  with just 16% among white households.” From 1984 to 2009, the wealth gap between whites and blacks nearly tripled, and in 2009, about a third of both black (35%) and Hispanic (31%) households had zero or negative worth, compared with 15% of white households. Ronald P. Formisano, Plutocracy in America, quoting from a Pew Research Center study  © 2017 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential election Only one meaningful correlation emerged [from the Chicago Project on Security & Threats' study of January 6 insurgents]. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one point drop in a county's percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state. Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 © 2021 Kwiple.com
2024 Presidential election What s truly strange is not just Trump's chronological age but the anachronistic vision in which only white men who plant their seed in fertile women are authentic citizens and legitimate rulers. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, September 19, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Affirmative action I have yet to meet the white male in whom special favoritism (getting a job, for example, through relatives or an old boys' network, or because of racial discrimination by a union or an employer) fostered doubt about his own abilities. Eric Foner, “Hiring Quotas for White Males Only” © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Estimated chance that a white woman in Washington, D.C., has a tanning salon addiction: 1 in 5 Harper's Index, January 2018 © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Percentage of U.S. Latinos who would support a law criminalizing offensive speech about white people: 47 Of US whites: 26 Harper's Index, January 2018 © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Percentage of U.S. whites who believe white Americans are discriminated against: 55 Who say they've experienced discrimination themselves: 21 Harper's Index, January 2018 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Civil rights movement Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, and then white folks saw the light and saved the day. Julian Bond, bitterly © 2020 Kwiple.com
Congress As such, white Protestants are overrepresented in government, and are disproportionately represented in Congress. Currently 77 percent of Congress is made up of whites, compared with 60 percent of the general population, and 55 percent of Congress identify as some kind of Protestant, compared with 43 percent nationally. Mary Trump, The Reckoning  [2021] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Conservatives No one had come along to suggest that power should be unlimited. But now someone has, and we have learned something very interesting about these “conservatives,” both the rank and file and holders of high of high office: their overwhelming commitment is not to democratic allocation of power, but to their ideological goals — the annihilation of liberalism, the restoration of a white ethno-nationalist hegemony. They know better than to speak of such things openly, but every once and a while they have allowed a piece of the cat's anatomy to slip out of the bag, a tail here, a hind leg there. Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books, August 16, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus The country, it turned out, was experiencing wildly different pandemics. For every ten thousand Americans, there were thirty-eight coronavirus cases. But, for whites, the number was twenty-three; for Blacks, it was sixty-two; for Hispanics, it was seventy-three. Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White. Rochelle Gutierrez, University of Illinois professor of education © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death Mortality rates in recent years have been increasing for all whites, in contrast to decreases in the rest of the world. At the same time, it is worth noting that mortality rates for African Americans remain higher than for whites. Adverse economics is bad for health, regardless of race. Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power and Profits © 2019 Kwiple.com
Democracy We are not a democracy. The question has always been whether enough white people even want one. Elie Mystal, The Nation, August 9/16, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Higher education Since the 1990s, the death rate for white men with a bachelor's degree aged between 45 and 54 in the US has fallen by 40 per cent, but it has risen by 25 per cent for white men in the same age group without a college degree. You can't be free if you are dead. Timothy Garten Ash, Prospect magazine, January/February 2021 © 2020 Kwiple.com
History In this paper, we show that the local prevalence of slavery — an institution that was abolished 150 years ago — has a detectable effect on present-day political attitudes in the American South. … That is, the larger the number of slaves  per capita in his or her county of residence in 1860, the greater the probability that a white Southerner today will identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express attitudes indicating some level of “racial resentment.” Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, Maya Sen, The Political Legacy of American Slavery [2016] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Housing During the boom years, IndyMac charged high interest rates (defined by the government as more than 3 percentage points above prime) to 24 percent of its white borrowers, but 36 percent of Hispanics and 43 percent of African Americans. Aaron Glantz, Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream © 2020 Kwiple.com
Immigration When natives have lots of children of their own, immigrants look like reinforcements. When natives have few children, immigrants look like replacements. No wonder that, according to a 2016 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, nearly half of white working-class Americans agree with this statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” David Frum, The Atlantic, April 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality In 2018, the median household income for a black family was $41,361, having grown 3.4 per cent over the previous decade, according to the latest US Census Bureau data. This compared with a median income $70,642 for non-Hispanic whites which had grown 8.8 per cent since the 2008 crisis. Financial Times, June 4, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary yanezthetize (yə nez thə tīz), v. To authorize a white dressed in blue to kill a black. Memorializes Jeronimo Yanez, the St. Anthony, Minnesota, cop who panicked during a traffic stop, was live-streamed on Facebook from inside Philando Castile's car and caught on a police dashcam video as he shot Castile seven times, claimed he felt threatened when Castile followed his orders, lied about what he saw in court, and was acquitted of all charges. © 2017 Kwiple.com
 
Lotteries  Many white voters, [Jonathan] Cohen writes [in For a Dollar and a Dream ], supported legalization because they thought state-run gambling would primarily attract Black numbers players, who would then foot the bill for services that those white voters didn't  want to pay for anyway, such as better schools in the urban areas they had lately fled.  (In reality, the oft-repeated claim that legalizing the lottery would merely decriminalize current gamblers rather than create new ones of all races proved dramatically wrong.) Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, October 17, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Opportunity Despite our rhetoric, equal opportunity has never been the American way. For nearly all our history, affirmative action has been the prerogative of white men. Eric Foner, “Hiring Quotas for White Males Only” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Snapshot Trump truly is something new – the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific – America's first white president. Donald Trump portrayed by Ta-Nehisi Coates © 2020 Kwiple.com
Social mobility When white Americans tell the Negro to lift himself by his own bootstraps, they don't look at the legacy of slavery and segregation. I believe we ought to do all we can, and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, but it's a cruel gesture to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And many Negroes, by the thousands and millions, have been left bootless as a result of all these years of oppression and as a result of a society that deliberately made his color a stigma and something worthless and degrading. Martin Luther King, Jr. © 2023 Kwiple.com
Socio-economic mobility To be clear, white Americans don't resent growing poorer. They resent losing their comparative superiority to non-white Americans. Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War  © 2022 Kwiple.com
The South Any southern white man worth a pinch of salt would give his all to maintain white supremacy. Richard Russell © 2021 Kwiple.com
State of the union The poor state of so many Americans is in part a product of plutocratic politics: a relentless and systematic devotion to the interests of the very rich. … a politics of low taxes, low social spending and high inequality is sustainable in a universal suffrage democracy only with a mixture of propaganda in favour of “trickle down” economics, splitting the less well off on cultural and racial lines, ruthless gerry- mandering and outright voter suppression. All this has indeed happened. These are the politics of “pluto-populism” or of “greed and grievance”. They have been stunningly successful in making Republicans attractive to many in the white working class. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 2018/07/17 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Supreme Court The current court's concept of equal protection has essentially boiled down to supporting white plaintiffs who claim to have been disadvantaged by affirmative action. Eric Foner, “Partisanship Rules” (2001) © 2017 Kwiple.com
Polarization Many voters dislike their own party, but detest the other one. For Republicans, there's something else driving their radicalisation: they are a white tribe that fears demographic extinction. “A majority of infants born [in the US] today, are non-white,” notes [Ezra] Klein [author of Why We're Polarized ]. The most common age for white Americans is 58; for Hispanics, it's 11, says economist Jed Kolko. Many Republican regions are depopulating. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, February 27, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Political power Whites have feared the political power of people of color more so than voters of color have recognized their power. Gilda R. Daniels, Uncounted  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Poor Whites They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them. Barack Obama © 2015 Kwiple.com
Poverty Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences – deep, corrosive, obstinate differences – radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual. The differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced and they must be dealt with and they must be overcome. Lyndon Johnson, 1963, Howard University Commencement Address © 2017 Kwiple.com
Race A man become as rich as he wants to, he is still a Negro. Or a man may sink as low as it is possible to sink in terms of the mores of society, but he will still be white. Peter L. Berger, An Invitation to Sociology © 2020 Kwiple.com
Race The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Racists say The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. … In New York state, if you're white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health. Donald Trump, January 15, 2022, at a rally in Florence, Arizona, a town which was 82.2% white in 2015 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Republican Party It's the white thing to do © 2018 Kwiple.com
Republican Party We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term. Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator from South Carolina © 2015 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Real Americans are native-born, English-speaking, rural white Christians © 2018 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Thank God for white guys © 2015 Kwiple.com
Republicans say We're white. They're not. © 2015 Kwiple.com
Resisters say If this march is about accountability 57% of white women voted 4 misogny Placard, New York City Women's March, January 20, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Revolution The revoltionary prophets of the nineteenth century, like Karl Marx, believed that the oppressed would rise up against their oppressors. In the twenty-first century, the oppressors revolt. By no means is this violent reaction against lost privilege unique to white Americans. Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Selfie They're people just like me, only they're poor. Donald Trump, when asked to define “white trash” © 2018 Kwiple.com
The Senate Because of the way the modern Senate has has evolved, combined with the trends of of polarization and negative partisanship that have shaped America, this faction [of  wealthy white anti-choice conservatives] is able to wield power far out of proportion to its numbers. The modern Senate gives it the power to exercise a veto over policies backed by a majority of the population and makes likely that it will have the power do so in perpetuity. This is not just a minority. This is a superminority. Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch © 2021 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say “Great” in “Make America Great Again” doesn't mean “White” © 2018 Kwiple.com
Snapshot By 2044 whites will be a minority in the US. They sense this, they feel fearful, and that is why Donald Trump is their symbol, the man who will keep the “others” out. But that's not the future. Trump will be the last person to seek the presidency with only the white vote. Donald Trump portrayed by Jorge Ramos © 2016 Kwiple.com
State of the union Death rate of middle-aged whites surging atop drug and alcohol abuse, liver disease, suicide © 2015 Kwiple.com
State of the union The nation is moving toward two societies, one white, one black – separate and unequal. The Kerner Report: The 1968 Report of the NationalAdvisory Commisson on Civil Disorders © 2019 Kwiple.com
State of the union People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.  Richard Spencer © 2022 Kwiple.com
 
Trumpists say I would say,  based on the current way things are going,  the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. … It makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen to try to help black citizens anymore. It doesn't make sense. Scott Adams © 2023 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say  The number of white recruits has plummeted,  [It’s] a casualty of this cultural skirmish that  has left our Army beleaguered and besieged by “woke” ideologies. Paul Gosar © 2024 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday. Mary Miller, Trump-endorsed candidate for election to the House of Representatives from Illinois's 15th Congressional District, celebrating overturning of Roe v. Wade at a June 25, 2022, Mendon, Illinois rally attended by Trump © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say Replacement theory is real. Scott Perry © 2024 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say  They should give it a more fitting name like: Cucks for Kamala Donald Trump, Jr., 2:56 PM – Jul 29, 2024, reacting to news that more than 75,000 white men had registered for a “White Dudes for Kamala” Zoom call © 2024 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer, and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward, and we recognize the central lie of American race relations. We don't exploit other groups.  We don't gain anything from their presence.  They need us and not the other way around. Richard Spencer © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say The U. S. is a white nation. Peter Brimelow, February 25, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Unions White-collar professionals tend to appreciate what unions did for their parents. But they don't view today's janitors or nurse's aides in the same way. Andy Stern, former president, Service Employees International Union © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality According to Pew [Research Center], the gap in wealth between upper- income households and lower- and middle-income households in 2016 was the highest since the Federal Reserve began collecting such data in 1983. There are also signs of greater strain on lower-income white households, many of which voted for Mr Trump last year, with 17 per cent of them having a net worth of zero or below. Financial Times, November 13, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Economic disparities are also growing by race. In 1963, median family wealth was $43,000 higher for whites than for African Americans. By 2013, it was $123,000 higher (and $120,000 higher than for Hispanics, for whom there isn't data from 1963). Even in the few years since the financial crash, wealth inequality has grown along racial lines. Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution © 2021 Kwiple.com
White privilege Fish don't know they swim in water saying © 2017 Kwiple.com
Whites  As late as the 1996 presidential election, counties that were at least 85 percent white and earned less than the national  median income split about evenly between  Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican Bob Dole. In the 2016 election, such counties went 658 for Donald Trump and two for Hillary Clinton.  Robert Kuttner. New York Review of Books, July 21, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Whites The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time   © 2017 Kwiple.com
Whites White Republicans have become more intolerant about the country's growing diversity. White Democrats haven't. That's the big change. Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Whites Whites, it must be frankly said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to re-educate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so littile to learn. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here:  Chaos or Community?  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Whites With Obama, there was this narrative: “Woo, we have crossed the racial Rubicon! We have overcome! We put a Black man in the White House!” Without looking at the data that shows that a majority of white people did not vote for Barack Obama and that they have not voted for a Democratic candidate for president since 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Carol Anderson, New York Times Magazine, March 20, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Whites The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again. James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Working-class whites Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful. J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy © 2016 Kwiple.com
 
Working-class whites The [white working class] fantasy is to become an order-giver rather than an order-taker. Trump is an order-giver. That's the brilliance of “You're fired!” Joan C. Williams, Financial Times, May 13-14, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com