I never asked to be white, and I didn’t expect to be embarrassed by it

I don't know how many more things can happen in this country that make me ashamed to be white...but I'm sure the Republican Party can gin up a few. Just give them a little time and the opportunity to make some kind of a profit.

Most recently, the right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court – that hallowed institution which just seated its second alleged sexual abuser out of nine justices – declined to overturn a controversial voter ID law in North Dakota which requires residents to show identification bearing a conventional street address. Those with post offices boxes need not apply.

Here’s the problem: Many Native American reservations do not use physical street addresses, relying instead on P.O. boxes for their mailing addresses or tribal identification that doesn't list an address. Sadly, Native Americans are also overrepresented among the nation’s homeless population, which exacerbates the problem.

Now, three weeks before the mid-term election, Native American groups in North Dakota are scrambling to help members acquire new addresses or new IDs that will enable them to vote. It’s no coincidence that Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, is trailing her Republican opponent in her race for re-election, and Native Americans tend to vote for Democrats.

Heitkamp is a critical component of the Democrats’ uphill battle to reclaim the Senate, so Republicans are using every dirty trick they can find to keep her from winning re-election. This is what Republicans do. They don’t know how to govern, but they know how to manipulate and consolidate power, so any time they think they might not win, they cheat.

Let me say this another way. Native Americans in the United States – those people who were here first – were shoved off their land (if they weren’t killed outright) by our westward expansion in the 1800s, and those who survived were eventually forced to live on government reservations while white people took over their property without compensation.

White people called that “manifest destiny.” That’s not what the natives called it.

Now, 175 or more years later, the white people who run our country have decided that these indigenous people shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they don’t live at 123 Maple Street or 2710 South Main. This comes just a few months after the Trump administration decided it was okay to rip through their protected lands to install a leaky oil pipeline and tell them to sit back quietly and watch while we endanger their tribal water supply.

I don’t know about you, but I'm humiliated by all of this and it isn't even my fault. I don't know how some people can sleep at night.

To top it off – before we move past the Native American issue – we now have a debate between President Trump and his army of White Walkers against U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren over the validity of a DNA test that purports to show she has Native American ancestors, to which I reply, “Who gives a rat’s ass?” I mean please, can’t we toss this shiny object into the bin where it belongs and get on with the serious issues of the day?

Serious issue like, say, what happened in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, where American citizens were virtually ignored by their federal government until eventually, 3,000 of them had died from lack of food, water, electricity and medical supplies. I’d be interested to know how many of the victims were Norwegians. President Trump likes Norwegians. Norway is 92% white.

I could also write extensively about the Trump Administration’s Muslim ban, but white people don’t want to talk about Muslims.  

Or how about the Republican Party’s voter suppression work against African Americans across the southern states? It’s not bad enough that Republican-controlled state governments have gerrymandered election maps to favor their own candidates, or passed discriminatory voter ID laws and changed voting times and dates to disenfranchise people of color, or dismantled key portions of the Voting Rights Act, but now a Republican secretary of state in Georgia (white guy) running for governor against an African American woman has reportedly shoved 53,000 voter registration applications into a drawer to keep mostly black people from voting against him.

Nothing to see here, right white people?  

And don’t even bring up those baby prisons for brown people on our southern border, where some young children who were taken from their families will probably never see their parents again. These are children, some as young as a few weeks old, and as near as I can tell, their most serious crime was not being born in Norway.

I’m also not going to mention the Japanese internment camps during World War II or the virtual enslavement of Chinese immigrants during the so-called "industrial" era?  (I guess I just did.) If you don't understand what I'm talking about, google "yellow peril" some time. And now white people have the audacity to declare themselves to be an endangered class and victims of religious and cultural discrimination. It simply boggles the mind.

As I reported here previously, several different surveys taken in 2017 showed that white evangelical Christians believe they are more discriminated against than African Americans, Muslims and other people of color. During the confirmation hearings for white Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Jennifer Rubin, conservative Republican opinion writer for The Washington Post, summed it up this way:

“The people who are least entitled to claim it are now claiming victimhood, (including) rich, entitled, privileged white guys” who get angry whenever they can’t have everything they want.

So back around to me. I was born white, of course. I didn’t request it or have any input in that outcome, and for much of my life I didn’t think much about it. I never felt entitled or privileged because of it – although I guess I was – and I certainly never felt discriminated against because of my color or my Irish-American ancestry. I wasn’t happy to be white or ashamed of it. I was just white.

Today, clearly, I can't stop being white, but the older and wiser I get, the greater my white burden becomes. Like Jacob Marley, it’s a ponderous burden that grows longer and heavier every year. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not a burden like Native Americans carry, or African Americans or Muslims or Asians or Jews. My burden is the colossal embarrassment of being white in Donald Trump’s America and watching what happens to all the other people who are not.

It saddens me to see what’s happening and know there’s very little I can do about it. I never thought I'd see the day….