This is partly why the conditions are indeed ripe for genuine and widespread racism to make a comeback in America, insofar as it ever really left. Whites are shrinking as a percentage of the population. The white working class is suffering, socially and economically. Far too many people on the right are isolated from communities of color, in some cases literally uncomprehending of minorities’ fears, concerns, and aspirations. Meanwhile, the left is increasingly defined by identity politics and fighting “white privilege,” at a time when millions of whites aren’t feeling so privileged.

“Frankly, if you’re a white family living in Clay Country, Kentucky, the poorest county in American, [in] which the poverty rate is about 40 percent and whose population is 94 percent white, wouldn’t this concept kind of tick you off?” asked former Democratic Sen. Jim Webb at a recent American Conservative magazine conference. “Wouldn’t you see it as reverse discrimination?”…

“White voters in this election behaved like a minority group,” observed Fox News’ Brit Hume. And their argument runs roughly thus: Other groups get to practice identity politics; there’s a Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a National Council of La Raza; why can’t whites play this game?

Politicians are forced to apologize for saying “all lives matter,” much less white lives matter. Samantha Bee can say white people “ruined America” without fear of the consequences she would receive for saying something similar about any other group, much as Susan Sontag was celebrated rather than reviled as a racist after saying white people were the cancer of human history.