Racism, Protest, And Trump

The thread of racism runs through the fabric of America. Anyone who pretends otherwise, who believes our justice system is free from it, who fails to understand it’s at the heart of these demonstrations, is deluded. 

Contrary to claims, the election of President Barack Obama didn’t mark its end. Like jogging or birdwatching, presidenting while black provoked racist fury, eventually helping to “elect” Trump, whose racism was obvious long before he back-doored politics by way of Kenya. Before he urged participants to “knock the crap” out of protestors at his rallies, before he told police to be rough when arresting people.  

White Americans can grieve, but we can never feel what it’s like to be African-American when yet another is killed by cops in circumstances unlikely to have extinguished a white person. None of us has had to teach our sons how to avoid being murdered, nor feared for their lives whenever they went out. Who can say they wouldn’t be protesting, rioting even, if skins were exchanged? 

Policing mass protests is tough. This isn’t about cops. It’s about bad ones and unequal justice. And bad people and their bad president, who didn’t start it but has made it worse, before, during, and, no doubt, after the current turmoil. He thinks it plays well for him.  

It’s an unending cycle: brutal police action results in the death of an African-American; angry protests arise, initially peaceful. Then someone throws a brick, a firebomb, looting starts, police respond, people are arrested, violence becomes the story, peaceful protestors are ignored, the underlying issues are suffocated. Again.  

The words of no president could entirely quell violence. Before Trump, though, they’ve tried. Only he, seeing personal advantage, has intentionally poured accelerants into the flames. Incapable of rising to the occasion, he could no more appeal to our best than he could put down a cheeseburger. To him, this violence is an opportunity to distract from his incapable coronavirus leadership, to get his base even angrier, to assure their turnout in November.  

No doubt some of the violence is an expression of anger and frustration, even as it buries the message. But the overwhelming majority of protestors have been non-violent; those who aren’t make it easy to dismiss them all as, in Trump’s inspirational words, “lowlifes and losers.” Which is the point: many instigators – white supremacists, neo-fascists -- are there to do just that; and, unlike anti-fascists, the only group Trump would designate as terrorists, their presence has been documented.  

Violence is to be condemned, but a real president would acknowledge the country’s cross-cultural pain and seek ways to heal it. Instead, eager to look tough, Trump chooses to make it worse, threatens to unleash “vicious dogs and ominous weapons,” calls governors “weak” while sequestered in a bunker in a darkened White House. (He was only “inspecting it,” he told Fox “news.”) Lacking the moral authority of presidents past, he calls for cruelty, not calm.  

In his most disgusting act, ever, which is like picking the hottest tree in a forest fire, Trump, aping third-world dictators, facilitated by his (no longer our) Attorney General, had peaceful citizens dispersed with gas, rubber bullets and low-flying helicopters, before imperiously strutting across the street, followed dutifully by the Secretary of Defense and, decked out in combat fatigues, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. To posture with a Bible, with whose content he’s unfamiliar. 

Never have Trump’s phony religiosity and authoritarian phantasies been so evident, nor his certainty that his supporters are fools. Which they were quick to confirm. That Book should have melted his face like the Lost Ark.  

It’s heartening to see police and elected officials kneeling with protesters, and black demonstrators stopping white agitators from further carnage, pleading for calm, protecting a white cop. But Trump and his enablers will never address racial inequality. It’s up to all of us, liberal and conservative, finally to do so; and, because it’s now or never, to recognize the mounting danger we thought impossible: a democracy-destroying “president,” exploiting justified demonstrations to drag us ever closer to the military-backed dictatorship he craves; whose latest actions have been so disturbing, so sinister, they leave one bereft of words.  

So hear Joe Biden’s instead. Consider what we might regain, if there’s time; if military leaders find the integrity to refuse Trump’s despotic demands; if Republicans reclaim the American values for which they once stood; and if white people finally listen. Really listen.

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The Racists Among Us

My next newspaper column:

Racists, anti-Semites, xenophobes, homophobes: they’ve always been with us. When I lived in Salem, forty years ago, anti-Semitic leaflets were placed in my mailbox. Back then, though, such people would sneak around at night. Now they feel empowered – encouraged! -- to express their hatred in the open, confident that leaders who ought to condemn them in the strongest possible terms, and with the strongest possible actions, will look the other way, even suggesting that among them are “some very fine people.” No longer must they seethe, full of resentment, in the dark.  

Last week eight such America-loving patriots were arrested right here in Snohomish County, after assaulting a black DJ in a bar, shouting the expected racial slurs. Recently discovered, a Monroe white-supremacist had killing Jews in mind, and the weapons to carry it out. Local schools are reporting a significant upsurge in racist incidents. Across our state, hate crimes increased by 42% in 2017, much faster than the already-shocking national average.  

As with the force of a particular hurricane and climate change, it’s not possible to point to a specific hate-crime and blame it on the climate of white nationalism Trump has brought to his “presidency.” But the trend is obvious, one more thing on the list of outrages about which Trump’s thirty-nine-percenters are either happy, or against which they’re unwilling to speak out. Trump’s empathetic first response to the recent murders in a synagogue was to blame the victims for not having armed guards.  

Even white women are getting in on it. Nearly daily we see video of one shouting down a black or brown person for existing, or wearing a hijab, or not speaking English. One expects such behavior from a certain stratum of white men, like those pictured in the story about the beating. The sort who’d rather not get to know people who don’t look or think like them, except eight to one in a bar fight.  

But those women enjoy their white privilege as much as their menfolk do, and must feel equally threatened as they see American demographics running away from them. It’s an answer to why any woman would vote for a grossly misogynistic “president” or anyone in his party, as it seeks to relegate women to mere vessels for the seed and service of men, as God intended. 

Not all of the minority of Americans who continue to support Trump, even as his crimes and those of his “only the best people” become clear, are openly racist. Many are merely suffering from self-inflicted blindness; or, one supposes, have enough remaining humanity to keep themselves from acting out. If they’re appalled, they need to say so.  

Those others, though. They’re consumed by the rage born of self-scorn; the kind that can be mitigated only by hating those in whom they don’t see themselves reflected. The liberal in me should be sympathetic, I guess, think of ways to help them with their self-esteem issues. Establish workshops to undo the damage their parents did. Show them Mister Rogers re-runs, offer ice cream. Public schools teaching tolerance is, after all, somebody’s duplicitous “agenda.” Probably George Soros’.  

Ages two and four, my grandchildren play with any kid of any color willing to play with them, laugh and do silly things, at the park, at preschool, seeking only fun with people their size. It’s both heartwarming and, knowing what’s coming, heartbreaking. Those children, also growing up in our Pacific Northwest, have nurturing parents teaching them that race, religion, attire don’t matter: only being kind to each other does. 

To embrace the hate of which we’re seeing more and more, one has to be taught, with intention. Because the last thing haters want to see, given their own insecurities, is their spawn rejecting their family values. So teach them they will, birthing an endless source of damaged, dangerous people.   

There’s little reason to expect change. Even if future presidents have a moral compass, absent in our current one, if they love America for what it is instead of what so many embittered Trump supporters wish it were, people longing for the not-great old days will remain, finding ever more targets for their self-pitying anger. And, as they love to remind us, they’ll be armed. 

So, sadly, it falls upon local law enforcement and brave activists to protect decency, for we can expect no help from the self-described “… nationalist” in the White House.  

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