Why Didn't We Riot?: A Black Man in Trumpland

by Issac J. Bailey

White people have been rioting against black people since before the founding of the country, calling it “proper” and “natural” and “God-ordained” even as they insisted black people should not riot, too.

Throughout our history, when white people rioted, they killed scores of black people, burned black businesses, overturned elections in which black people had emerged as the victors, and purposefully targeted black people who had found a way to become wealthy and educated despite the long tentacles of Jim Crow.

White supremacy can’t survive in this country without Christianity.

It’s the only reason Trump could repeatedly do and say so many openly racist and bigoted things, because he’s had the undying support of a historic percentage of white Evangelical Christians, even as Pew noted that nearly 90 percent of black Christians disapprove of him.

In the Trump era, white Evangelical Christians now oppose the presence of refugees more than any other group.

When Trump called African countries and Haiti “shitholes,” many of the white Evangelical Christians I know began calling them shitholes, too. They felt freed from societal restraints that have never restrained Trump. Four years earlier, the youth pastor who unexpectedly invited me to dinner had hoped Herman Cain would serve that purpose. Trump did not lead white Evangelical Christians to this place. They were waiting to follow anyone who would take the first step.

My white brothers and sisters in Christ chose Trump and his bigotry over us — not because they had to, but because they wanted to. All those years spent earnestly engaging them on their own terms in their own homes in their own church did not dissuade them from making that choice.