Another week of "devastating take downs" of Donald Trump has gone by and I'm starting to get sick of it.
There was a time when behaviour like Donald Trump's would see a child sent home with a letter asking for a meeting to discuss their behaviour. I would think that in Donald Trump's world, his petulant, self serving behaviour was rewarded. Bigly. And despite all the "devastating takedowns" of Donald Trump, this time around his comments on the Khan family...he knows, as well as I do, that nothing will change.
You see, in a White Supremacist society, White people's humanity Trump's the humanity of those who are not white...no matter how inhumane your behaviour.
Trump will continue being a vile human being, because no matter how repugnant his behaviour, millions of people will still see him as more human than those he's attacking, thus being granted the benefit of the doubt, every single time. That's what "White privilege" is.
We should stop criticizing and doing these "devastating takedowns" of Donald Trump, because ultimately, he isn't the problem. The social construct of Whiteness that coddles, privileges & protects him (and others who have no problem spewing racist diatribes), is.
The reality is, the Republican party figured this out a long time ago and conservatism became the bastion of White nationalism, to the detriment of both Black and White "non-elites" long ago. It fully embraced this with "the Southern Strategy" where rich elites, used the South's racism to hold onto power. It didn't do this by running out and out racist, but by using coded language and laws.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” - Lee Atwater
What the Republican party betted on, quite rightly, was White indifference to the plight of people of colour and their adherence to their (White) "national" identity. It worked masterfully. Now all of a sudden, they have a Frankenstein's monster on their hands called TRUMP, who far from playing the genteel game of "soft" racism, has gone back to "speaking plainly and telling the truth like an average American"...and they don't know what to do with it.
They rode the "tea party" to power to obstruct Obama in every way they could and now they have a Tea Party presidential candidate, a man who exemplifies the WORST of their countrymen (privileged, ignorant, sociopathic, incompetent, greedy, xenophobic, etc) and he's about to take over their country.
You see, even today, the Republican party is not above siding with people's basest behaviour to gain power. Republican Speaker of the house, Paul Ryan, the highest ranking Republican in the US is on the record as saying Donald Trump's words are racist...but he supports him anyways, because The Republicans value "power" over principal...and the pain of people of colour...even if they are related to them and dated them.
You see, "race" is a con. It was used to drive a wedge between "White" indentured servants and the Black slaves they shared many sufferings with.
White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.
It's a social construct used to dehumanize one set of people, whilst removing humanity from another. Given the latest cognitive research on implicit bias, I'll leave it up to you to figure out who is the former and who is the latter.
This is what you see happening, where the lust and almost lunatic zeal to get "that Kenyan Muslim" out of the White House has Donald Trump (the leader of the birther movement) a hairs breadth away from winning the Presidency of the United States.
He's doing it by blaming Obama for all the bad that's happened over the past 8 years and minimizing his accomplishments like taking on joblessness...can anyone name ONE jobs bill the Republicans have tried to pass that weren’t based around tax cuts aka “trickle down” or most astoundingly…further “deregulating” industries…ya know, because it worked so well for the financial industry? No? But they had time to try to repeal "Obamacare" over 50 times...something they signed off on mind you...what was the definition of insanity again?.
Obama has faced unprecedented levels of obstructionism by the Republicans.
After his historical Presidential victory, the Republicans stated their goal was to make Obama a one term President:
Mind you, this is on the heels of the greatest financial crisis that threatened the entire world's economy, millions of jobs and even their national security. Their priority wasn't to address / fix any of those immediate, pressing issue...their priority was to make Obama a one term President. Think of that myopic, petty, vindictive thinking...and think of the character of the man who is now their Presidential candidate.
Failing that, they are determined more than ever to press this meme of Obama being "the worst President EVER". Their inability to meet the President “halfway” (really, doing it “their way” alone) has been warped into HIS “inability to get anything done”.
As a Black person, this is all too familiar. Setting someone up to fail, then blaming them for being "unable to succeed". It's classic systemic White Supremacy: From denying Black people housing and jobs, forcing them into ghettoes, denying them the ability to move out of those ghettoes (Black families making $100,000.00 lived in same neighbourhoods as White families making $30,000.00), flooding those ghettoes with drugs, removing any sort of resource or investment in those neighbourhoods, then acting surprised when urbanized poverty produces violent street crime and calling it "Black on Black crime". Absolving themselves of any sort of culpability and most importantly, any sort of role to play in rectifying the situation.
This tactic has been played out publicly on a national scale on the President of the United States by the Republican party and the tactic is used by Donald Trump and people like Ann Coulter in regards to the Khans. Where some of us saw grieving parents, this is what Ann Coulter saw
Black people know what it's like to have your humanity stripped from you, your pain mocked and your "anger" at an injustice made to be the problem as opposed to the injustice itself.
Watching Obama the past 8 years, I saw in real time what happens to millions of Black folks every day. Watching the inhumane reaction, criticism and deflections to defend Trump and Coulter in regards to the Khans was way too familiar.
This isn't solely an indictment of the Republicans. This is an indictment of all of us. This is an indictment of the harms of “othering” people. How it separates us and removes our common human empathy from each other. It’s an indictment of the social construct of White Supremacy and how deeply and unfairly “White normalcy” attributes virtue to those who have shown no predilection for it and removes vice from those who embody it.
So here we are. Donald Trump, running as President of the United States. A man who has skated by on the heels of privilege, a man who’s father handed him wealth, which ironically would be even greater had he literally done nothing since 1974, is propped up by a system and people that see him as the pinnacle of “their” society. How right they are.
Donald Trump’s vanity, pride, greed, moral cowardice, arrogant single mindedness and sociopathic indifference to people’s pain, reflects that of his supporters. Think I’m being bombastic? Go read their Facebook comments, where their ignorance isn’t hidden by anime / egg avatars and weird screen names. Real people. Real names. Real photos. Real thoughts. Real feelings. Real actions.
Can we imagine if President Obama had 5 children by 3 different women?
Can we imagine if President Obama had ties to Black gangs, the way Donald Trump has ties to the mob?
Can we imagine if President Obama was as quick to anger as Donald Trump?
Can we imagine if Barack Obama was so obviously arrogant, vain, self centred, incompetent, greedy and downright mean?
Would he be looked at as "tough and a fighter, the right man for the job, who's gonna fix everything?" or would he be looked at as a "thug"?
I think we all know the answer to that.
Part of me is actually loving seeing this happen. "Real" America is riding with the worst Presidential candidate in history and a political party that exploits their prejudice to hide their culpability in their pain...JUST so they can make America "White" again..oops, sorry. I mean "great" again.
The fact of the matter is, Donald Trump wouldn't be a problem if there weren't millions of angry, ignorant, people who think just like him, who are so blinded and have been so coddled by their societal status, that a smaller world, with more people claiming their agency have them clinging to their guns, their "religion" and their Whiteness more than ever. Consequences be damned.
Donald Trump is patriarchal White Supremacy & White privilege finally eating itself for the world to see. If there wasn't so many disastrous repercussions for us all, I would probably be alot happier about it.
KB