I definitely think this is a backlash against white people being called out for everything they’ve gotten wrong for centuries. They’ve e been calling everyone who isn’t white, straight, or a man, nasty slurs, since the invention of American English. They still do that on the regular today, and these same people are the ones who like to argue about saying the N*word, but let some anonymous black girl make a dubious statement, and they lose the entirety of their shit! I’d be angrier, except it’s amazing to behold.

But then: Never, in the history of this country, have white people been spoken back to, and challenged, by marginalized people, as much as they have, since the invention of the internet.

And this isn’t like before, where your garden variety white person was largely unaware of all this “talking back”, and could simply quash any talking back, they encountered, with the use of extreme violence. Now its all but impossible to not know how marginalized people feel, and our pushback against oppression, and injustice, is often immediate, and intense. They are working desperately to reestablish their equilibrium, by upholding the status quo. But someone once said to me, that’s what Conservative means: to conserve. To keep things as they were.

They’re so used to simply ignoring any form of oppression, but now it’s constantly being thrown in their face. They can’t ignore it anymore. This is mass white fragility (rather than individual).