[Header Photo by Walid Hamadeh on Unsplash]

Here are two texts that may not immediately appear to be saying something similar about the state of the US in 2025.

Let’s start with On Language, Race and the Black Writer by James Baldwin (Los Angeles Times, 1979):

Every white person in this country—and I do not care what he or she says—knows one thing. They may not know, as they put it, “what I want,” but they know they would not like to be black here. If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.

And then, just a few years later, there is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, specifically the closing “Historical Notes” where readers learn about the context behind how Gilead comes about.

At a satirical symposium in Gileadean studies dated June 25, 2195, the keynote, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, explains that context:

Men highly placed in the regime [of Gilead] were thus able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birthrates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time.

The reasons for the decline are not altogether clear to us. Some of the failure to reproduce can undoubtedly be traced to the widespread availability of birth control of various kinds, including abortion, in the immediate pre-Gilead period. Some infertility, then, was willed, which may account for the differing statistics among Caucasians and non-Caucasians.

…But whatever the causes, the effects were noticeable, and the Gilead regime was not the other one to react to them at the time. Rumania, for instance, had anticipated Gilead in the eighties by banning all forms of birth control, imposing compulsory pregnancy tests on the female population, and linking promotion and wage increases to fertility.

What are these texts from over four decades ago telling us about the current political and cultural state of the US during the era of Trump/MAGA?

White Americans, notably the white political and cultural leaders, are openly concerned about the low birthrate among white people. And thus, restricting and banning abortion have swept much of the country after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. [1]

Not that long ago, mainstream thinkers believed Roe v. Wade and abortion rights were safe in the US; people raising concerns were considered alarmists.

Now, as Republicans and conservatives seem to be coming after birth control next, we cannot hesitate as we did before the dismantling of women’s rights came as we should have known it would.

In the passage from the “Historical Notes,” we have a key point about the birthrates of white people falling against the rise of birthrates about other races.

And thus, the connection to Baldwin’s confronting “every white person in this country—and I do not care what he or she says—knows one thing. … [T]hey would not like to be [B]lack here.”

Not to speak for or over Baldwin, but to help us tease out this connection in 2025, white fear in the US is fear not singularly grounded in race but ultimately fueled by the fear of becoming a minority.

We must next consider fully Baldwin’s recognition that for white people, Black people and the consequences of their minority status in the US are a mirror for who white people are—more so than any commentary on Black people themselves.

For all the histrionics denying white privilege, white people know one thing—that white people as the majority, that white people with the balance of power, used that majority status and power to the detriment of any and all minorities.

If and when white people become the minority, they fear that they will then suffer the same consequences of minority status that white people have imposed on other races in the US.

White people cannot fathom a world in which majority and minority statuses do not result in some winning because others are losing.

The Great Whitewashing is upon us—one foreseen by Baldwin and Atwood.

One that is coming to fruition before our eyes.

What every white person knows may destroy everything for everyone.

What each white person does now will tell everyone everything we need to know.

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[1] See Things Fall Apart for Women (Again): Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks

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