Chauncey DeVega: Dear Angry White Conservatives: Chill Out

Chauncey DeVega is editor and founder of the blog We Are Respectable Negroes, which has been featured by the NY Times, the Utne Reader, and The Atlantic Monthly. Writing under a pseudonym, Chauncey DeVega's essays on race, popular culture, and politics have appeared in various books, as well as on such sites as the Washington Post's The Root and PopMatters.

Dear angry white conservatives who are mourning Mitt Romney’s loss,

If Fox News is any indication, many of you are dismayed, upset, and befuddled by Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama. Some of these feelings are normal. Politics is tribal. When your team loses, a bit of sadness is expected.

However, some white folks are acting out in some very unhealthy ways. Young white conservatives participated in a near riot at the University of Mississippi, where they hurled rocks at bystanders, used racial slurs, and burned Obama and Biden campaign signs. Other angry white folks used the Internet to send out racist messages and pictures on Twitter as an act of protest and anger at the country’s re-election of its first Black president. I believe that these events are malicious outliers.

Many white people who voted for Mitt Romney are simply scared and angry that a “Black socialist Muslim atheist Communist usurper” was re-elected President of the United States.

Eighty-nine percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were white. Fifty-nine percent of the white vote went to Mitt Romney. He also won the majority of white voters in every age and gender group. We live in a country that is racially segregated. The United States is also very polarized politically. At present, Americans are not talking to each other across the dividing lines of race, class, and ideology....