Excellent post. The problem is that a lot of Americans who voted for Romney don't want to be Americans. They have unassimilated from American society and culture. The rest of us are Americans and we know how to interact with our fellow Americans and how to live in American culture and society. However, a lot of the white males who voted for Romney don't because they removed themselves from other Americans.
This is a serious problem. I don't think that carrying a sign like that fellow in the picture is going to be enough. This is a serious social issue, the de-assimilation of many white males in the US is the most serious social issue of our times.
While being able to function in a multicultural reality of today and get along with people of diverse backgrounds is certainly a positive and beneficial thing... please don't gloss over the fact that white males, more than any other group, built this country, both literally and figuratively. White males established what it meant to be American, along with white females of course. Other groups played a role too, mostly later on, but of course to a degree from the beginning.
White males are the single most important driving force behind the civilization that ALL people now enjoy. Consider the number of scientific achievements, technological developments... etc, which are attributable to white males.
Perhaps, just perhaps, it is worth considering that American society has been the thing to pull away from them, rather than the other way around. And that before pulling so dramatically and quickly away from the group that, more than any other, established what it meant to be America and an American, more thought should be given, more caution should be taken.
It has become VERY fashionable for the last half century or so to demonize white males, to portray them as the one group it's okay to throw stones at, but ALL groups have sins to atone for, barbaric violence, misogyny, war, tribal bloodshed, conquest, exploitation of the weak and vulnerable have been the order of the day since the dawn of our species. White males get more flak for slavery than any other group, but they were not the original practitioners of it, however they were the group who made the biggest, strongest and most productive push to eliminate it from the world. And made this push at a time when they were benefiting from it.
White males have shared the fruits of their technological achievements and cultural advancements with the rest of the world, and have opened their borders wide in every one of their traditional countries, USA and otherwise. Perhaps to a suicidal degree, that remains to be seen.
Of course, it's not so clear cut and simple... as I said, women played an important role throughout history, now more than ever (that's a positive thing), other groups were important to the development of western civilization and America in particular. But to deny that the group people now turn their nose up at, the white males, was the primary driving force behind these things... is to deny reality.
I'm not advocating for any mindset of white male superiority, I'm just advocating some humility in the face of history, and some restraint in turning our backs on it.
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