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January 22 - January 26, 2020
the dilemma black voters perpetually face: how to effectively argue for their just reward for loyalty to a party that often takes them for granted while keeping its eye on the disaffected white voter who might potentially bail in resentment of the few benefits offered to black folk. Like
politics, and the state, exist to defend white interests and identities; that witness is an important means to express black grievance and resistance and to shape public policy; that dormant and resurgent white bigotry, even at the highest level of government, must be identified and opposed; and that a new politics must be formed to fulfill true democracy.
Politicians did not have to name white interests because they were considered American interests. The founders and the original citizens made whiteness the default position of American identity and humanity. American citizens were allowed to be white without having to say so.
President Kennedy gained a greater reputation for civil rights support in death than he had earned in life.
Obama offered the state legitimacy more than he offered black folk inclusion. One black face could not possibly overcome the historic legacy of black erasure.
For those who take solace in the belief that Trump is a marginal player in whiteness, they are sadly mistaken. He is, indeed, the extension of the logic of American ideas about blackness found at the nation’s roots and beginnings.
Donald Trump is far more representative of the nation than many whites would like to admit.
Trump’s total lack of knowledge, and the enshrinement of ignorance as the basis of power and authority, is the personification of white supremacy and white arrogance.
If there is a dirty secret in American life it is this: the real unifying force in our national cultural and political life, beyond skirmishes over ideology and party, is white identity masked as universal, neutral, and therefore quintessentially American. The greatest purveyors of identity politics today, and for the bulk of our country’s history, have been white citizens. This means that among the oldest forms of “fake news” in the nation’s long trek to democratic opportunity has been the belief that whiteness is identical to the idea of what it means to be American.
Senator Bernie Sanders, despite his dramatically different politics and ideology, is, in many ways, the mirror image of Donald Trump: a brash, older white male with professed sympathies for the white working class and little knowledge of black folk.
It seems more than a little reactionary to blame the loss of the election on a brand of identity politics that even liberals were slow to embrace, and that not all of them are completely sold on.
The interests of the white working class have often been used by white political elites to stave off challenges to inequality and discrimination by black folk and other minority groups.
Yet concern for their own interests leads whites to think of their well being at the expense of other groups, compromising the nation’s democratic health.
the most protected, cherished, and nurtured identity of all has been white identity. That whiteness is the nation’s preferred identity becomes painfully obvious when white bigots scamper out of their closets at the first sign of support from our government.
Together, Trump and white nationalists constitute the repulsive resurgence of a virulent bigotocracy, a loosely organized confederate of white racists who seek to institutionalize their ideology as national habit, social custom, cultural convention, and, when possible, legal bulwark.
In order to be true patriots, we must become disloyal to chronically prejudiced views of American society that persist in our rather ignoble Trumpian moment.
There is, too, in the white view of hip hop, vicarious access to the wildest forms of blackness, and a reverse minstrelsy of sorts: white folk wearing and performing blackness with all of its benefits and none of its burdens. This is what certain forms of the music and culture give rise to, what they authorize in the name of black authenticity.
This is why black directors hardly ever make horror films. They know the formula. The black character dies first, or certainly earlier than the white ones, is often alone with no partner, exists awkwardly in the white world, brings comic relief, and is only seen as authentic if she speaks in vernacular. Except that is no horror film; that is the real-life drama we have lived for the last 400 years.
In some ways, black life didn’t matter much then, and doesn’t matter much now. Police batons still flail black flesh; police bullets still unjustly riddle black bodies. Whiteness continues to metastasize across the body politic like a cancer that only goes into remission, sporadically, under the radiating prose and edifying action of a prophet.
The solutions proffered in the name of progressive racial faith—change in law, change in policy—have no answer for the hate that trumps law, the bigotry that adapts to whatever law is on the books and finds a way to twist it to its advantage. Whether any politician can truly address this conundrum is another matter.
Bearing witness to racial injustice is always perceived as a direct threat to white supremacy and is therefore an act of hostility that must be neutralized.
Ironically, Kaepernick has been accused of disrespecting an American flag that was long ago replaced by the Confederate flag for millions of white southerners. Those who hoist the Confederate flag indulge in romantic treason—since it is the emblem of secession from our country—often at, or on the way to, American football stadiums.
Many Americans wrongly think of the military as the exclusive, or primary, guardian of American pride and patriotism. However, only in a totalitarian society does the military define, instead of defend, what it means to be American.
It’s been said that racism is so American that when we protest racism, some assume we’re protesting America.
