White People Are the Default Americans
The success of racial minorities is seen as an exception
From the editor:
The Preamble is entering an exciting new era, and you’re at the center of it. We’ll soon be publishing one deep, reader-guided digital magazine each week. Become a paid subscriber now to help decide what we cover and sustain independent content that meets the moment. Powered by our readers, not backed by billionaires.
Click here to take 20% off your annual membership.
Read more about our new magazine here.
—Sharon McMahon, Founder
In a speech last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the armed forces had “promoted too many uniformed leaders for the wrong reasons, based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.” He called for countering past diversity efforts as a way of “clearing out the debris.”
Hegseth seemed to be making a common assumption: that white people are the default race, the ones naturally deserving of success and recognition, and that nothing but “debris” is lost when people of color are absent from positions of power.
Previously, Hegseth speculated that top military officials were DEI hires, specifically naming Air Force General Charles Q. Brown in his 2024 book. Brown was the first Black person to head a branch of the military and became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Biden. Trump then fired Brown and appointed Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Caine in his place. Caine, who had already retired and lacked Brown’s experience and honors, did not meet the requirements set by law for the position, but the law also allowed Trump to waive them, which he did.
General Brown was accused of not being held to equal standards because of his race and of not earning his position — despite the objective fact that he met every standard and, ironically, his white successor did not. Hegsesth’s desire to have Brown fired seems to have been based on his own tacit racial judgment of Brown’s achievement. This false dichotomy of “We don’t want diversity, we want merit” traps racial minorities in perpetual suspicion.
That is the paradox of prejudice, and of seeing white as the norm. When you believe that people of color must be underqualified, they are forced to become overqualified and go above and beyond to prove themselves. In the end, racial minorities aren’t just held to equal standards, but to higher ones.
In a 2024 podcast episode, Charlie Kirk said, “I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” Following criticism, he went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast to defend his remarks. “Of course I believe anybody of any skin color can become a qualified pilot,” he said. He explained that his point wasn’t to endorse prejudice, but to blame DEI for leaving us with no choice but to “look at everything through a hyper-racialized diversity-quota lens.” In the wake of DEI, he argued, it’s reasonable to conclude that a white person is truly qualified and a person of color may not be. That is, he described racial stereotyping not as an evil but as a rational judgement.
On another occasion, he named four accomplished Black women in politics and journalism and said they “do not have the brain processing power” to be taken seriously. “You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”
Kirk’s basic premise was that because of DEI, some Black people have been taking what isn’t rightfully theirs — even though, in the history of this country, or even just in the last century, that can’t possibly have been done by Black people nearly as much as it’s been done to Black people. From piloting to politics, Kirk believed that when it comes to achievement, white is to be expected and diverse outcomes are an exception.
This is the difference between seeing a Black pilot and wondering, “How did he make it through? What strings were pulled to achieve that outcome?” and seeing only white pilots and wondering, “Where are all the people of other races who could be pilots but aren’t? What’s standing in their way?” Kirk said that race should not be an advantage or a disadvantage, but he didn’t voice concern with the ways that white people are more likely to have gotten a leg up — such as intergenerational wealth, legacy admissions, nepotism, or simple “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” connections. By his own logic, these factors should cast doubt on all white pilots. But the race-based prejudice goes in only one direction. Kirk is not alone in this view. He was seen as a mouthpiece for millions — like Trump, often considered a leader brave enough to say what many are thinking.
Even if we don’t speak them out loud, we all have both covert and overt beliefs about who meets the standard. Race affects who gets the benefit of the doubt and shapes where we place the burden of responsibility. For example, Trump says he plans to provide a big bailout for farmers. Investment in rural populations is mostly bipartisan, and the decline in rural standards of living is viewed as a failing of the government. In stark contrast, investment and reparations in minority urban areas are extremely partisan, and the decline in urban standards of living is seen as a failing of the citizens. The situations admittedly differ in many regards, but one of them is race.
In recent years, more scholars have sought to bring recognition to the fact that white people are not just the race-less norm. They have a racial identity and social location, just the same as everyone else, though it may be invisible to them. Peggy McIntosh, the scholar who coined the term “white privilege,” explains: “As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.” White people tend to see themselves as outside the system of race, even if they are race-conscious when it comes to other groups. As in, they may think that other people have a racial identity, but they themselves are just people. A white pilot is a pilot; a Black pilot is a Black pilot. A white politician is a politician; a Black politician is a Black politician.
Generally speaking, white people have the privilege of being seen as individuals rather than as representatives of their race. This is why some say we should strive to be more conscious of whiteness even as we decrease the salience of race for people of color, bringing these disparate racial experiences into balance. Others say that, instead, we should strive to be less conscious of all races.
There’s a common saying that Black people have to work twice as hard to get half as far. This relates to Claude Steele’s research on stereotype threat, which he presents in Whistling Vivaldi. Stereotype threat is triggered by the fear that you might be stereotyped, causing you to feel “at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group.” It leads to over-efforting, performance anxiety, and underperformance. In other words, it leads to working twice as hard and getting half as far — all prompted by the sense that you must set out to defy others’ low expectations of you. Instead, those expectations become a sad, self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the burden W. E. B. Du Bois called double-consciousness: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
It creates issues when we normalize the assumption that people of color are likely to be less qualified or capable, or that they are infringing on what should default to a white person. It is critical that every single person of color be seen just as they are, so they can show you what they are capable of.
 | A guest post by
|
Trump, especially Trump, and his entire cabinet are a master class in race over merit. The whole group is a breathtaking assemblage of ignorance, incompetence, sycophancy, hypocrisy and cruelty.
Thank you for the full picture here, Marie! Your piece reminded me of what I wrote back in January about the Trump administration exploiting the Potomac crash while bodies were still being recovered. Before any investigation could begin, they made sweeping claims about DEI being to blame. So I decided to check in with the investigation 9 months later to see where we are at. It turns out there was a systemic cause, but it’s a cause the administration needs to take responsibility for, not the DEI boogeyman they use to evade accountability.
To remind everyone: on January 29, an American Airlines jet collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan Airport, killing all 67 people aboard. Less than 24 hours later, Trump stood at a press conference with his newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and declared that diversity initiatives at the FAA were partly to blame. When asked how he could possibly know this, he said: “Because I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.” Hegseth announced “the era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department.” Vice President Vance claimed “many hundreds of people” had been turned away from air traffic controller jobs “because of the color of their skin.”
This was Hegseth, the man you described, forced out of veterans’ organizations amid allegations of financial misconduct and sexual abuse, whose own mother wrote that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.” He was confirmed only through a tie-breaking vote after what senators privately called “a feral intimidation campaign.” Yet there he stood, lecturing America about “merit” while families waited for bodies to be recovered.
Months later, the National Transportation Safety Board shared some findings in its investigation, and they tell a completely different story. Most critically, a single air traffic controller was handling both helicopter and commercial traffic, jobs normally done by two people, due to staffing issues.
Between 2011 and 2024, there was at least one close call per month between commercial planes and helicopters at Reagan Airport. The NTSB called it “not an isolated incident, but a symptom of broader failures in our aviation safety system.” One finding was conspicuously absent: any connection whatsoever to diversity hiring. The helicopter crew were highly experienced pilots who had flown this exact route before at night. The problem was the fact that one person was doing two jobs.
But in MAGA logic, there probably was someone with dark skin somewhere near the controls of some part of the system, so their thesis about DEI being to blame can’t really be refuted in their eyes.
So what has Trump done to address the understaffing problem that the investigation identified as a key factor? While touting that he hit his goal of hiring 2,000 air traffic controllers in 2025, he simultaneously gutted the support infrastructure those controllers depend on. In February, just weeks after the crash, his administration fired 200-400 FAA probationary employees including maintenance mechanics, aeronautical information specialists, environmental protection specialists, and aviation safety assistants. Over 2,700 additional FAA employees have taken buyout offers to leave the agency, with the acting FAA administrator warning employees “we will be leaner in a year, in two years” and that layoffs are coming. Between 20-30% of non-exempt FAA staff are expected to leave. Senators from both parties raised alarms that hiring controllers means nothing without the support staff who maintain radar systems and assist with aviation safety. As Senator Patty Murray said, “You can have all air traffic controllers there, but if they don’t have the support staff, we can’t know that they’re doing the job.” The FAA remains 3,500 controllers short of target levels, and over 90% of U.S. air traffic control facilities operate below recommended staffing. Trump created a public relations win by hiring controllers while making the actual systemic problem worse by gutting support staff, the exact kind of understaffing that contributed to one controller doing two jobs the night of the crash.
If the investigation had found that an inexperienced person of color had been present in any role associated with this tragedy, Trump and Hegseth would have made it headline news. They would have overhauled policy immediately, held congressional hearings, and used it as proof that DEI kills. But the investigation found the real culprit was inadequate staffing, budget cuts, and systemic failures that accumulated across multiple administrations including Trump’s first term. So now they’re doing the opposite of solving the problem and quietly letting us forget why 67 innocent people died.
This is exactly the pattern you identified. When General Charles Q. Brown met every qualification, Hegseth questioned his merit. When Brown’s white replacement didn’t meet legal requirements, Trump waived them. When 67 people died in a crash, Trump’s first instinct was to blame diversity before any facts emerged.
White people’s failures are individual mistakes within broken systems. People of color’s mere presence triggers suspicion, and the president literally says that suspicion is common sense.