"Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people..."

"... they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause. The comfort of being 'naturally better than,' of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished. So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble."

Wrote Toni Morrison in "Making America White Again/The choices made by white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status," originally published in the the November 21, 2016, issue if The New Yorker, in a collection of pieces titled "Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America" and featured today on the front page of the magazine's website. Morrison died on August 5th.