If you're a supporter of Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein, you've definitely heard it before. If you go Green this year, it's because you're privileged enough not to support Hillary Clinton, who is the only candidate that can realistically defeat her opponent and longtime friend Donald Trump. Blah, blah, entitled blah.
This obnoxious and deeply fallacious trend really took off a few months ago when Clinton supporter Dan Savage (who is incidentally both white and a multimillionaire, according to Celebrity Net Worth), brought the term "pasty white Jill Stein supporters" into popularity in a couple of viral expletive-laden attack columns, wherein he made the presumptuous and baseless assertion that third parties have no right to run a presidential candidate until they've established a strong presence in local and legislative government branches. Savage conveniently ignored the fact that if the Green party didn't run a presidential candidate, nobody would even know that it exists; running presidential candidates has always been an essential part of the way parties gain legitimacy and viability in this country. And as Green party national co-chair Andrea Mérida Cuéllar correctly pointed out in a response on the party's website, the party does, in fact, have a presence in local government.
Cuéllar, by the way, is not white. Neither is Jill Stein's running mate, civil rights leader Ajamu Baraka, nor are many of the amazing human beings I've encountered on this wild journey of green political subversion I've been on lately.