White Republicans see themselves as oppressed.
Even Rafael Ted Cruz agrees and he's as brown as a dog's stool

Led by Trump, GOP increasingly casts White people as racism�s victims

Early barbs for President Joe Biden�s Supreme Court selection process have
helped crystallize a rising Republican line of attack against Democrats.

�He�s saying, �If you�re a White guy, tough luck,� � complained Sen. Ted
Cruz of Texas.

Cruz was referring to Biden�s vow to name a Black woman to the Supreme
Court for the first time in American history. But that same sense of
grievance propels the drive by Republican state and local officials to
shield the psyches of White students through constraints on what schools
teach about slavery and modern-day discrimination against non-White people

It finds its starkest expression, characteristically, from the top
Republican of all. In recent days former President Donald Trump has
falsely accused Democrats of putting White people at �the back of the
line� for coronavirus medical care and has blasted prosecutorial �racists�
� a jibe at Black women in New York and Atlanta who are probing his
conduct.

Appeals to bigotry are nothing new for Trump. The modern Republican Party
itself has been shaped in crucial ways by racial division long before he
entered politics.

But what�s striking now, nine months before midterm elections, is how
explicitly Trump and his GOP followers have embraced a theme that inverts
the onus of racism in America. Whatever history shows, they insist, White
people today represent its victims at least as much as Blacks and other
minorities.

The theme�s effectiveness is uncertain. Unlike Barack Obama, the first
African American President, who preceded him in the White House, Trump
lost his reelection bid. But it has become second nature to the twice-
impeached former President and a large swath of the GOP.

�The message,� as Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher puts it, �is to
pour as much gasoline on the fire of White grievance and victimhood as
possible to energize and mobilize their vote.�

Trump�s rise has been both cause and effect of that swelling grievance.
The so-called �Southern strategy,� from which Republicans harvested
support from racial conservatives after Democrats nationally embraced the
civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, proved a formative event in the
party�s evolution.

Race-driven wedge issues, from school busing to welfare to criminal
justice, subsequently gained increasing prominence in Republican politics.
In deference to the sensibilities of more socially liberal voters, as the
late strategist Lee Atwater once explained, GOP candidates over time
stripped overt racial references from discussion of those issues.