When you've slept with the devil
the tides are indeed picking up
Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of The Black Cat.
To read what you missed this week in Good Black News, click here. Otherwise, this week, we are talking about that online race war.
Feel free to send around, email me your reflections, and follow me on Instagram at dominicmadori.
This month I’m reading: Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay
This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: Ain’t No Sunshine by Bill Withers
💢From the Chatterbox💢
A split appeared over the past few weeks. I was away when it happened (hint the late response), but watched curiously from my screen — the newly powerful “Tech right” and the old standing “Right right” went at it over HB-1 Visas and whether Indian immigrants were taking jobs from “American” workers.
It was stunning. Usually, Latinos are the ones accused of “stealing jobs” while Asian Americans are stereotyped as the “model minorities.” But a few weeks ago that flipped. It turns out that the “Right Right” a group of people who said over and over again that they wanted to limit immigration to the country, was not making any exceptions, whereas the “Tech Right,” a small but powerful cohort who agreed that the immigration system is broken, thought there would be some form of exception for the immigrant labor they often use to help them run their companies.
Now, I don’t know the demographics of the Right Right. I got the impression it was mostly scared white people — perhaps working and middle-class. The accounts seemed real, although many spoke behind avatars on their accounts. Men and women took part. I’m going to say all were MAGA, because, well, that’s what this was all about right? Trump keeping his promise to deport millions of people. For some reason, Tech Right thought that meant only illegal immigrants. But it turns out the Right Right meant anyone who came, or whose parents came, and even whose parents parents came, from someplace far away.
It was quite fascinating to see immigrants fight, call each other out, and throw each other under the bus, deeming who is good and who is bad, all while angry white people lashed out at them all. For the first time in a long time, Black people were not the main subject evoking the ire of white people and, for the first time in a long time, I got to see what white lash looks like from an outside perspective.
The fight really started when Tech Right’s Vivek Ramaswamy, a new cozy confident to Trump, alongside Elon Musk, wrote a whole X about how lazy Americans are. And, as the online civil race war ensued, a few things became clear to me. One, tech companies are indeed probably abusing the HB-1 system, hiring immigrants on visas to exploit them and as a way to avoid hiring American workers. Two, the random, average American is perhaps really not as qualified as they used to be to take on these tech positions, or increasingly many of the more upward mobile positions, especially as they become older, as education increases in price, and as access to upskilling tools remains limited. Three, these big companies probably still wouldn’t hire them anyway because it would be harder to exploit them. Four, these Right Right people who came after Tech Right seem to be upset with the socioeconomic stagnation that many Americans have faced these past few decades and are taking those grievances out on the rest of the country. There is an underbelly of jealousy here. I saw an X that described it perfectly — the perfect American life is an entitled right to be given. They shouldn’t have to work this hard for it. And so Five, it became much clearer that no immigrant, no person of color, not first-generation anything will be safe from the wrath of the Right Right because these are people who would rather see everyone fail if not them succeed. The stereotype model minority could soon die. The Right Right will seek to kill it in rage, out of jealousy.
I thought much about how desperate the Right Right looked during that online civil war. Under the rules established by their cherished anti-woke movement, it makes sense that startups would hire qualified labor for jobs, and if in droves those troves are not white, then the answer is for the latter to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, even if you don’t have laces, and even if you can’t afford boots. That’s, at least, what African Americans were told when we begged for help. It simply is not fair that there should be any “DEI” or a program to help underqualified workers, regardless of race, get into desired highly skilled tech positions if they are not qualified. That was the agreement, right?
This online war is indicative of a much larger problem — something that at its core, doesn’t actually have anything to do with tech.
I always say that people should be taking their frustrations and questions about inequity to The System, not against another racial group that is more often than not also a victim of America’s wobbling socioeconomic fabric. HB-1 visas are not even a high enough percentage of workers that the Right Right needs to worry about. But I think they are looking for an outlet, a reprieve from the pain of not yet admitting that this society they thought would only befall one, has, in turn, befallen them too.
Part of this is that many on the Right Right voted for Trump because they want him to pull them up from their bootstraps. However, there were never any exceptions to the rules this society has had since the founding of the country. Race for so long was able to shield the underbelly of class, often intertwining with it creating ceilings where progress struggled to premiate. But things have started to change, and the coloring of race has started to chip away, leaving the issue of class that white families simply cannot run away from. There are immigrants in this country doing better than the Right Right and they can’t stand that. They can’t stand the celebrity class, the rising oligarchy, the tech barons, begging a billionaire to share his gold. Without the leg up that many white families received last century as race held so many back, they must now actually compete against what all this nation has to offer. Many of them admitted during that online civil war that they didn’t stand a chance and didn’t know what to do.
The Wall Street Journal had a story about something on this topic that I found fascinating. The article, called “America’s Role Reversal: Working-Class Blacks Make Gains While Whites Fall Back,” was written by Arian Campo-Flores and cited data from a recent Harvard University study. Campo-Flores used Madison County, Illinois as an example. During the U.S.’s mass industrialization during the 20th century, Madison County became a hotbed for industries like oil, glass, and steel. But when industrialization slowed, the area and its workers suffered and development shifted to other industries like healthcare, retail, and wholesale. Campo-Flores wrote about how Blacks and whites responded differently to this shift:
“Many white workers with union positions at plants saw their jobs as core to their identities, a deep source of pride passed across generations. That made it harder to adjust when factories disappeared,” he wrote. “Black workers, who historically had lower-paying factory and service jobs, had comparatively little attachment to the tradition of heavy industry and more room to gain.”
Campo-Flores wrote how these manufacturing jobs were the almost-guaranteed bootstraps for many white working-class people to gain entry into the middle class. That certainty is now gone and what is left are workers without the proper skills to help them maintain or achieve upward mobility in this once again rapidly progressing society. The American Dream is seen as a right for them, not a privilege, and that subconscious sense of failure is unleashed as a feeling of betrayal. Campo-Flores's article highlighted how deep the frustration for a lot of these white working-class families might be.
For decades, white workers with well-paying factory jobs often paved the way for relatives and friends to join. Black workers didn’t have such favorable access and connections, and those who managed to get in weren’t as eager to bring in family.
“Those parents who worked there didn’t want their kids to work there,” said Rouzell Porter, who is 57 and Black. “They wanted their kids to go to college.”
But even those who went to college were not spared the socioeconomic disparities that have touched every part of this nation. For Black workers, we’ve always had to quickly adapt and adjust to unpleasant, cruel, oppressive realities to stay ahead. But it seems the Right Right is gasping for air. And I am not convinced that these angry, white voters can peacefully adjust to the idea that they are not automatically part of this new ruling class. That their position, well, headed toward the bottom. And that the socioeconomic ladder is so slippery to climb, thinking only minorities would actually need to grasp it, they’ve realized they can’t get a grip.
It’s clear the Right Right has fear. But they aren’t scared of us. They are scared for themselves. I read a book called Slave to Fashion by Monica Miller and in it, she wrote that after slavery ended in the U.S., minstrel shows became very popular, not because white audiences wanted to simply make fun of Black people, but because the stories told during those shows were helping them process what was going to happen to them as a ruling class now that their subjugated had been freed.
This online civil race war will be the first of many and I don’t think the fraction it caused on the Right will ever be fully repaired. Trump came out in support of HB-1 visas, as a businessman he of course uses the program often. I don’t think his core MAGA fanbase will like that. They will not like much of anything as the motives of the Tech Right collide with theirs in Washington. With his presidential ascent in just a few weeks, only time will tell what the result of their dissatisfaction will be.
💫Kitty Talk💫
Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met:
New York Times Magazine, “America’s Hidden Racial Divide: A Mysterious Gap in Psychosis Rates”
The Economist, “Tech is coming to Washington. Prepare for a clash of cultures.”
TechCrunch, “Hollywood angels: Here are the celebrities who are also star VCs”
If “the perfect American life is an entitled right to be given” doesn’t hit the nail on the head, WHEW.