I find, of late, that reading the news is like glimpsing some hulking form through the fog. I grow tense as my eyes trace the contours, what little of them I can make out. I cannot tell what the shape may be, nor if it is boulder or beast. Each time I begin to grasp its form, the fog rolls and settles, or a breeze remakes the outline. Perhaps it is not even one thing, but many. Is it a forest? I am not sure.

The fog, though readily seen, extends beyond any reckoning. Who can tell if the soup of opinion, condemnation, fear, pain, doubt, and anger in this place, obscuring my view, is the same as it is in any other place? Of necessity, the state of the fog elsewhere is unknown.

I, and we, strive for objectivity, for some kind of map of the view obscured, and thus for some better intuition about the shapes hiding behind the greyness. I see, and feel certain, that a kind of hate is growing in my country. Not a new kind, but an old kind that, for a time, we had denounced (with the tacit understanding that denunciation would not equate to elimination, and that we would not pursue the latter too closely). What is the shape of this hatred? I can’t say fully. It seems, on one hand, to be a bitter resentment of immigrants, and on another to be an unjustifiable claim of whiteness as superiority, and on another to be a comfortable disdain for black Americans, and on another to be an old package of prejudice whose yellowing edges and dusty patina have somehow rendered it more palatable to a few.

What I can tell, with some certainty, is that we have run two ideals against one another: we have said that you may believe what you wish, but you must act as society deems appropriate. And we have said also that as a society, we will accept a diversity of belief and be hesitant to judge. In so doing, in claiming both ideals and refusing to look at their opposition, we have outlawed the performance of racism, and let the actual practice settle comfortably into the fog. The practice confers privileges, and we are loathe to give that up.

Is it any surprise when the performance returns to mirror the practice? As a society, we claim economic and social justifications for the same vicious prejudice white supremacists embrace openly and, if I may say, more honestly. Is it any surprise when the whitest of our political parties and leaders embrace their whiteness as empowering, and insist their privilege is defensible? As a society, we have not taught our members otherwise. Instead, we have taught them that believing these things is acceptable, even if avowing them is not. We have taught them to practice racism without becoming, overtly, racists.

So the belief, which we have carefully tolerated, now spills back into performance. It spills into votes. It spills into self-justification, and violence, and hatred, and a shape reemerges in the fog.

The whitest of us wear their privilege itself as if it were defensible. They are used to being immune to the consequences of their actions and having those consequences fall on others. Is it any surprise when their condemnations of violence come in the same breath with blame for others? Our president says, when an avowed Nazi attacks and kills people whose only sin is to claim supposed American ideals, that the victims are the guilty. He invents a boogeyman, an “alt-left,” that is somehow more worthy of condemnation than white supremacists. Our parents and grandparents fought and died to stop Hitler’s Nazis. But Trump’s Nazis are white Americans, and white Americans do not see themselves. They have the privilege not to.

So, Trump’s white Americans look down at immigrants working for a pittance, and resent their work. White Americans are losing their jobs, but they lose them to their own policies and their own unwillingness to share—so a few of them take more and more, and ship jobs overseas, and automate, and the rest of them blame immigrants. The consequences of their actions cannot be their own. After all, they cannot see themselves.

And Trump’s white Americans see that the country is divided, and hate that it is so. But they claim a black man divided the country, when it was, truly, their refusal to be led by a black man. The division is not what they despise—it is that they now have half when they want the whole. They yell, “take our country back!” But the consequence of that greed cannot be their own, so they blame a black man. They cannot see themselves, only him.

And Trump’s white Americans say that costs are too high, and the government is too big, and that the faltering steps of America, tiring and divided that she is, are due to the inclusion of anyone different. They have had, until now, the privilege to harm others and be immune from the consequences. But the world is moving beyond them, and so they are feeling the discomfort of losing their immunity. And the whitest party of our government argues about who to blame and how to hurt them, never seeing the consequences of their own choices.

We have reached, I fear, a point of critical decision. There are people who have decided, without consulting the rest of us, that they deserve preference in policy, unequal representation in government, and the biggest share of American prosperity. They will not be content unless they get it, and because they had it before, they will not accept that they can have it no longer. What will the rest of us decide about how to deal with them? We are complicit, too, in ignoring them for so long. Is there any right decision left?

As the American system has lurched step by step towards greater justice, it has reached a strange place. For many—for women, black Americans, LGBTQ Americans, Muslims, immigrants, and so many more—the injustice is palpable, but changeable; there is a glimmer of hope and change. Yet for the privileged white Americans, even the slightest rebalancing of those scales feels like a massive loss. So white Americans declare that greater justice is fine, in abstract, but only if it comes at no cost to them.

So here we are, one half of our country seizing change and demanding it continue, and the other half refusing categorically to give up any more of their wealth, condemning anyone who asks for it, and pining for the time when injustice was overwhelmingly, rather than just mostly, in their favor.

And there are Nazis in the streets, and we have a white coward of a president who cannot even say no to them. Who slightly agrees with them. Whose supporters, in thoughts deeper than they can grasp, think the pain of losing some power is greater than the pain of racism and fascism, because those same supporters know the burden of the latter will fall on people who are different. Those same supporters know they are not the ones who pay.

This is the shape in the fog—it is not a forest of trees, but of white hoods. And just as it was before, the people hiding behind those hoods cannot see one another, and do not admit to their shameful greed. And just as it was before, the people cowering behind those hoods believe they are justified in their actions, or do not care. And just as it was before, prominent people in power say the words of condemnation, but deny that these events are the consequences they themselves inspire.

The shape in the fog is still with us, closer than we knew, and shifting, slowly, as the mist moves. It looks like hoods today. But it may look like the American flag tomorrow.

After all, it looked like the flag yesterday.

Image Credit: Kevan