JD Vance, Donald Trump, and MAGA Make Me Want to Apologize For Being White

If irony were deadly, JD Vance would have expired this weekend.The Vice President stood on a stage at Turning Point USA’s annual conference, and without an atom of sarcasm (and even less self-awareness), boldly declared to a crowd of white Christian nationalists, knuckle-dragging MAGA cultists, and career racists that "In the United States of America, you don't have to apologize for being white anymore.”Huh?Anymore?What kind of race-baiting, dog whistle, straw man nonsense is this?Have I not been paying attention?When, in the 250-year history of this nation, has whiteness ever been a liability?When has it ever done anything other than buffer people from adversity, form a barrier against struggles others experience as routine, open doors that would have otherwise remained locked, and afford a vast multitude of advantages that were neither earned nor deserved?Did I sleep through the sections in history class where white people weren’t allowed to vote? Where they weren’t able to marry the person they love? Where they weren’t able to own land? Where they weren’t allowed to serve in the Military?The Vice President needs to help me catch up on what I missed, because I’ve been alive for 56 years, and up until now, I didn’t even realize I was tyrannized or downtrodden. People who aren’t indoctrinated into a Conservative culture warrior fever dream are right to ask the question: In an America where 99 percent of our Supreme Court Justices and 98 percent of our Presidents have been white, in what reality is JD Vance living in?I’ll tell you: he’s living in the whitewashed Republican-curated, Fox News-perpetuated, bigot mythology of imagined persecution and nonexistent oppression that has convinced generations of mediocre white people that the world is somehow conspiring against them, despite them being beneficiaries of every advantage.He is living in a world that runs on prejudice, traffics in fear, that weans people from birth into a false narrative of grievance that leaves them susceptible to hate speech and immune to critical thinking, believing they are vulnerable despite being the most protected.Vance, who also (incorrectly) said that America "always will be a Christian nation," and that "Christianity is America's creed, the shared moral language from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond", is willfully regurgitating a grotesque white lie designed to stoke violence against people of color, Muslims, Jews, immigrants and queer people.He is intentionally adding corrosive fuel to the very bonfire of irrational hatred that elevated Donald Trump, himself perhaps the greatest example in our nation’s history of ignorant, unqualified, and incompetent people being rewarded for their pigmentation. As a white man raised in the Christian Church, I lament the genocide of indigenous Americans and the abomination of slavery of Black people that allowed my ancestors to colonize this nation through unthinkable violence and dehumanization. I fully grieve the legion of sins my forebears committed that have allowed me and those like me to step into this life ensconced in cloistered privilege, but I have never felt I need to apologize for any of it. I’ve simply done my best to be aware of the horrific legacy of institutionalized racism so that I can partner in dismantling it and help us avoid us repeating it. I’ve worked to continually become aware of the advantages my physicality and ethnicity have afforded me so that I do not take them for granted. I’ve committed myself to learning the stories of truly marginalized people so that I never succumb to the lie that I am among them.But I never once felt I needed to or was pressured to apologize.But watching JD Vance, a man who is the walking embodiment of unmerited white reward, standing on a stage with self-righteous indignation and pretending he and other white people are somehow victims, I want to apologize. Seeing a barely literate two-bit conman-rapist-felon sitting in the highest seat of power in our nation and avoiding any measure of legal or moral accountability because of the color of his skin, I want to apologize.Sitting through this Administration’s prolific bigotry, its calculated stereotypes, its sick perversion of Christianity, and its performative fight in a nonexistent war against them, I want to apologize.This entire MAGA movement is a disfigured monument to American racism, and every decent white person should apologize for it.But more than that, they should confront, oppose, and destroy it. Thanks for reading The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe