- Joined
- Apr 20, 2018
- Messages
- 10,257
- Reaction score
- 4,161
- Location
- Washington, D.C.
- Gender
- Undisclosed
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed
Number 1:
Number 2:
Number3:
SNL portrayed this divided ability to hear in Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle's skit, "Election Night." Delusional white liberals glued to the television anticipate a "historic night" bringing a new female president to the White House. As the election results roll in, however, they inch toward an epiphany, if only barely: "America is racist." At the end of the skit, one of the white viewers says, "This is the worst thing America has ever done," setting Chappelle and Rock into a guffaw.
The form of racism in Trump’s America poignantly reminds us of racism's past. If anyone ever doubted the content of Donald Trump’s message, we now have its materialization in the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, confirmed by the Republican Senate on February 8, 2017, in a straight-party vote. Sessions' multitude of unprosecuted episodes of racist violence during his tenure as AL Atty Gen. in the 1970s and 1980s brings indubitable clarity to Trump’s manufactured ambiguity. Trump chose a man deeply implicated in Jim Crow sins of omission, a man who in the 1990s resurrected prisoner chain gangs in AL and stood against efforts to reform the criminal justice system. We do not need an analysis of style to know why this man was chosen. Trump’s choice of Jeff Sessions as America’s top law and order administrator, eagerly supported by Republicans, resurrected the racism of the Civil Rights era and commences a new chapter in our country’s battle with racial inequality, one that requires our vigilance and active resistance.
So is Trump a racist? He presidentially surrounds himself with, succors and surfeits racists; thus whether he is doesn't matter.
Racists know he's racist. Why the hell anyone else doesn't just shows one to be less astute even than racists.
Number 2:
Trump has yet to (1) execrate any racist's expressed bigotry and/or (2) spurn racists' approbation.
Number3:
Given the above, it's irrelevant whether Trump is or isn't a racist. What does and will forever will matter is that he avails racist tropes and rhetorical symbology to abet his political ends, and that matters because some share of his supporters are racist and therefore construe him as "one of them."
The dreams embraced by many of Trump’s followers extend most directly and exclusively to white people. Indeed, one can temporalize Trump’s nostalgia can be temporalized to the "mid-twentieth century, and to the industrial economy and welfare statism of that era," and a normatively nostalgic bid to return existentially to that era. Trump, unlike the left, grasped the intensity of this smoldering white racism; moreover and potently, Trump’s speech and gestures spoke clearly to heretofore latent yen for "white male resurrection."
With the benefit of hindsight, many more folks see that now, but Trump’s political style from its outset signaled all along to racists a derogated representation of depraved inner cities filled with black and brown people -- locations reviled as places abnegated of law and order, living hells whites forswore inhabiting, forgotten sites needing government intervention. So Trump stoked a revived white nationalism while tacitly condoning its racist content. The threat offered was market marginalization of whites by cheap minority black/brown labor and globalization's multicultural face. Rank and file of Trump followers "turned out to be more concerned about race and immigration than it was about debt and fiscal constraint."
Blacks, however, experienced Trump’s speech and semiotics as a collective Gehenna. Black women, for example, did not dismiss "***** grabbing" as a minor transgression: the black electorate understood the lawlessness that Trump claimed for himself as part of a long history of white privilege and hypocrisy, exacerbated by Clinton’s record which demonstrated its own sort of lawlessness regarding Black incarceration. The litany of Black lives lost reflects a current racism seen most clearly in the instigating offenses' bagatelle:
-- a broken taillight leads to a jail room death;
-- selling loose cigarettes on the street elicits a fatal chokehold;
-- wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a suburban neighborhood provokes an excessive and ultimately lethal response.
These events are "biopower and the violent state" in "color and high definition." Trump’s calls to "Make America Great Again" by returning to an intensified law and order timeframe of Jim Crow racism is passed off as nostalgia, but Trump’s dog-whistle politics beguiled few Blacks; they heard him loud and clear.
The dreams embraced by many of Trump’s followers extend most directly and exclusively to white people. Indeed, one can temporalize Trump’s nostalgia can be temporalized to the "mid-twentieth century, and to the industrial economy and welfare statism of that era," and a normatively nostalgic bid to return existentially to that era. Trump, unlike the left, grasped the intensity of this smoldering white racism; moreover and potently, Trump’s speech and gestures spoke clearly to heretofore latent yen for "white male resurrection."
With the benefit of hindsight, many more folks see that now, but Trump’s political style from its outset signaled all along to racists a derogated representation of depraved inner cities filled with black and brown people -- locations reviled as places abnegated of law and order, living hells whites forswore inhabiting, forgotten sites needing government intervention. So Trump stoked a revived white nationalism while tacitly condoning its racist content. The threat offered was market marginalization of whites by cheap minority black/brown labor and globalization's multicultural face. Rank and file of Trump followers "turned out to be more concerned about race and immigration than it was about debt and fiscal constraint."
Blacks, however, experienced Trump’s speech and semiotics as a collective Gehenna. Black women, for example, did not dismiss "***** grabbing" as a minor transgression: the black electorate understood the lawlessness that Trump claimed for himself as part of a long history of white privilege and hypocrisy, exacerbated by Clinton’s record which demonstrated its own sort of lawlessness regarding Black incarceration. The litany of Black lives lost reflects a current racism seen most clearly in the instigating offenses' bagatelle:
-- a broken taillight leads to a jail room death;
-- selling loose cigarettes on the street elicits a fatal chokehold;
-- wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a suburban neighborhood provokes an excessive and ultimately lethal response.
These events are "biopower and the violent state" in "color and high definition." Trump’s calls to "Make America Great Again" by returning to an intensified law and order timeframe of Jim Crow racism is passed off as nostalgia, but Trump’s dog-whistle politics beguiled few Blacks; they heard him loud and clear.
SNL portrayed this divided ability to hear in Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle's skit, "Election Night." Delusional white liberals glued to the television anticipate a "historic night" bringing a new female president to the White House. As the election results roll in, however, they inch toward an epiphany, if only barely: "America is racist." At the end of the skit, one of the white viewers says, "This is the worst thing America has ever done," setting Chappelle and Rock into a guffaw.
The form of racism in Trump’s America poignantly reminds us of racism's past. If anyone ever doubted the content of Donald Trump’s message, we now have its materialization in the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, confirmed by the Republican Senate on February 8, 2017, in a straight-party vote. Sessions' multitude of unprosecuted episodes of racist violence during his tenure as AL Atty Gen. in the 1970s and 1980s brings indubitable clarity to Trump’s manufactured ambiguity. Trump chose a man deeply implicated in Jim Crow sins of omission, a man who in the 1990s resurrected prisoner chain gangs in AL and stood against efforts to reform the criminal justice system. We do not need an analysis of style to know why this man was chosen. Trump’s choice of Jeff Sessions as America’s top law and order administrator, eagerly supported by Republicans, resurrected the racism of the Civil Rights era and commences a new chapter in our country’s battle with racial inequality, one that requires our vigilance and active resistance.
So is Trump a racist? He presidentially surrounds himself with, succors and surfeits racists; thus whether he is doesn't matter.
