She gets a long letter, sends back a postcard

Times are hard:

“They look at Donald Trump and the millions of people who went to battle fighting alongside him and they’re terrified. They want him to go away. Let me tell you this right now: Donald J. Trump ain’t going anywhere,” said Cruz.

“The Republican Party is not the party of the country clubs, it’s the party of steel workers and construction workers and taxi drivers and cops and firefighters and waitresses,” he added. “That is our party, these deplorables are here to stay!”

One of the quirkier kinks of political discourse in this country — and not just on the right — is the extent to which the phrase “blue collar” remains a synonym for “white,” in direct contradiction to the facts in the world. (Such as for example the fact that the majority of blue collar workers aren’t white, while the Leader of Your Party literally lives at a country club, and at least putatively owns a bunch of them).

For another example, until the Woke Police began to influence the language of even our sports broadcasters, it was an iron law of sports commentary that a player who was described as having a “blue collar” or “lunch bucket” attitude was ALWAYS white, even in sports like big time football and basketball (college and pro), in which the large majority of players were Black.

Other synonyms for white players: “heady,” “gritty,” “hard-nosed,” and “coach on the floor/field.” Meanwhile a “talented but erratic” player was always Black. It was also part of the mos maiorum that white players could only be compared to other white players, and Black players to other Black players, no matter how inapt this made the analogies.

Example: back in the day Iowa had a blindingly fast receiver named Tim Dwight, who became quite a star, and for several years afterwards it was a rule that all smallish white receivers in the Big 10 who ever did anything had to be compared to Tim Dwight, even if the latter individuals were clearly what is known in the trade as a “possession receivers,” that is they weren’t fast, but ran precise routes in a hard nosed, gritty way, like a coach on the field.

I think this kind of thing has gotten better in the sports world, though I confess I haven’t paid terribly close attention or tried to quantify it or anything.

One thing that definitely got better over the course of the Trump years is that it became a lot harder to treat whiteness as a completely unmarked category — even a lot of dum dum centrist pundits finally realized that you just couldn’t use “average” or “normal” or “typical” as a synonym for “white” any more. Because the Woke Mob would come after you, which is just like the Cultural Revolution, except it happens on Twitter.

For example I doubt something like this could get published in the Grey Lady these days, in which a Distinguished Professor of the Political Science fails to notice that the identity politics of white people [mind blown] also had something to do with the election of Donald Trump. But I’m an optimist like that.