Category: Trump effect

November 10, 2024

   “A republic.  If you can keep it.”  Ever since Tuesday, I have been unable to get Benjamin Franklin’s quote out of my head.  Now that 70 million Americans have made clear that they would rather have a racist criminal lead this country than an intelligent and honest Black and Asian woman, I suppose we know the answer.

     I am shell shocked and grieving, as if a loved one has died.  In a manner of speaking it has.  To me, and to many Black women, what died on Tuesday was a dream of what America could be.

     We are not naive.  We know that we have always loved this country more than it has loved us.  We have always known the real America, not the whitewashed version peddled in Chevy truck ads and NFL games.  We love it anyway, because America is our home, one that we built.  A country whose blood soaked soil gave birth to our spirituals and our blues, which blossomed into our jazz, rock & roll, R&B, and hip hop.

    We believed in ourselves.  Against mountains of evidence to the contrary, we believed that we could forge a life in this country, our country, even as white people kept defining American to mean everyone but us. 

     After the Civil War, we built our own communities with the first public schools in the South open to Black and white children. White people, lost without us to look down on, burned our communities to the ground and passed laws to push us out of the schools we founded.

    Through it all, Black people remained undaunted.  We kept pushing, kept creating, kept trying to force this country to live up to the “better angels of [its] nature.”  Brilliant Black people used every available strategy-  marches, boycotts, lawsuits.  We put our literal bodies on the line for freedom and democracy.  If Americans are being honest,  they know that any measure of freedom afforded to all other marginalized groups rests on the foundation of Black freedom struggles.

     America responded to Black people’s efforts to perfect the union by assassinating our leaders and infiltrating and sabotaging our organizations. After a mere decade of hard won progress, backlash was swift. America elected Nixon who started the war on drugs to engineer the mass incarceration of Black people.  When Nixon resigned in disgrace, Black people enjoyed a brief respite from governmental persecution under President Carter, only to have the country elect a B movie actor who launched his campaign in the Mississippi town where voting rights activists, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered.

    The pendulum has swung back and forth ever since.  White Americans vote for Republicans for their promise to enact policies that maintain a strict racial hierarchy.  When those policies begin to hurt them too, white people elect Democrats.  Although people mistakenly believed that the 2008 election of Barack Obama meant that we had broken that cycle, Trump’s victory in 2016 proved just how wrong we were.

     His cruel and chaotic presidency created a permission structure for an avalanche of naked racism, misogyny and antisemitism.  We can excuse voters in 2016 for not knowing the full extent of Trump’s venality, but watching white commentators twist themselves in knots to avoid calling out the obvious misogynoir behind Kamala Harris’s defeat is enraging.

     Trump represents the absolute worst aspects of the American character.  In addition to being a hate-addled, narcissistic meat sack who spews an incomprehensible word salad of petty grievances and 70’s cultural references, Trump is a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assaulter.  The idea that people voted for him because the most pro-union administration in decades didn’t address the concerns of the working class is patently absurd.

     Let’s be real. People voted for Trump because he is a protection racket for anti-Black male mediocrity. The national abortion ban is designed to kneecap American women who have been outstripping men educationally and economically for years.  Trump’s unapologetically white nationalist agenda— outlawing DEI and the teaching of Black history is designed to eliminate competition from Black people and cement a belief in Black inferiority.

     The incoming Trump administration won’t merely be sexist and racist.  It will be hostile to labor, to regulations and to sane fiscal policy.  Other than the wealthy, Americans can expect to be sicker and poorer.  Black women have tried to save this country for the last time.  Too many of you clearly decided that what DuBois called the “psychological wages of whiteness” was more important than democracy.  Black women have two words— Good Luck.

September 25, 2024

     Marcellus Williams was lynched yesterday, (“Missouri executes Marcellus Williams, despite prosecutor’s objections,” by Kim Bellware, The Washington Post, 9/25/24).  Just because there are no grisly photos of a charred body hanging by a rope in the woods doesn’t mean that the murder of Marcellus Williams by the state of Missouri was not a lynching. Just because we don’t have photos of white families gathered around his corpse grinning and taking fingers as souvenirs doesn’t mean that those responsible for his death are any less gleeful.

     It is clear that Missouri Governor Mike Parson, state Attorney General, Andrew Bailey and U.S. Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Alito, Coney Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas are no less racist and indifferent to Constitutional guarantees of due process than Justice Roger Taney who wrote in the Dred Scott decision that Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Clearly, all that matters to these people is the power to indulge the bloodlust for Black lives.

      They are no different than Trump and J.D. Vance, whose relentless assaults on the innocent, lawful Haitian residents of  Springfield, Ohio, have destabilized the entire city and left Haitian residents fearing for their lives. These people want Black people dead and they will abandon facts and spread vile, dehumanizing lies to accomplish that goal.

     Sadly, these sentiments are hardly contained to Republican officials, as evidenced by the case of the white student at Gettysburg College who carved the word, “n—ger” into the chest of his lone Black teammate on the school’s swim team, (“A student has left Gettysburg College after a racial slur was etched onto a student’s chest, officials say,” by Lauren Mascarenhas and Paradise Afshar, CNN.com).  Or consider that, in a race for the presidency between an obviously impaired, racist criminal who lacks intellect or impulse control, or the Black and South Asian Vice President who has dedicated her life to public service, 52% of white voters choose the racist (Source:  Poll:  Newly popular Harris builds momentum, challenging Trump for the mantle of change,” NBCNews.com).

     Even though the theme of Kamala Harris’s campaign is “freedom,” for Trump, Vance, and the 52% of white Americans who support them, the definition of freedom is not the ability to control your own body, choose who you love, or pursue life, liberty and happiness.  For them, freedom means the ability to murder, maim, and humiliate Black people with impunity. They will welcome fascism with open arms to keep it.  41 days.

March 25, 2024

     A week ago, courtesy of the activist group Until Freedom, I attended a screening of Origin, Ava DuVernay’s brilliant adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s groundbreaking book, Caste.  The film could not have arrived at a better time than now, as we confront regimes around the world determined to uphold or install rigid caste systems that arbitrarily cement a marginalized group to permanent lower class status. 

      Both the film and the book powerfully make the point that societies that ruthlessly dehumanize one segment of their society in order to mark them for subjugation or extermination have more similarities than differences.  They draw parallels between the United States and Nazi Germany, who modeled their Nuremberg Laws after the Jim Crow laws of the American South. Origin and Caste also do a deep dive into the original caste system in India, exploring the harsh persecution of the Dalit people.

     Origin does not argue that the caste systems of the United States, Nazi Germany and India are identical, but that they share common structural features, giving us a framework for understanding how such systems persist or re-emerge, so that we can recognize the danger signs.

      We are at such a moment in the United States right now, and the lights are blinking red. The outcome of this presidential election will determine whether we hurtle backwards 100 years, or continue our fitful journey towards embracing multiracial democracy. The signs are not good.  Although many Black people, LGBTQ people and women of all races have been shouting from the rooftops that Trump and this version of the Republican Party pose an existential threat to democracy, a disturbingly large number of people seem oddly complacent.

     Even though several of Trump’s former staffers say he is unfit for office and his own Vice President refuses to endorse him, one of our major broadcast networks, NBC, responded by hiring former RNC chair and election denier, Ronna McDaniel, as a political analyst.  When Trump promised a bloodbath if he loses and called migrants “animals” at a rally, the initial defense by Republican apologists  was to ask us to put Trump’s remarks “in context.”  As Mehdi Hassan said, the context is that these were statements made by a man who fomented an insurrection in which people were killed, (Source:  “Trump, a ‘Bloodbath’ and ‘The Banality of Crazy,’” by Mehdi Hassan, Zeteo.com, 3/18/24).

     Trump’s full-throated embrace of the most vile stereotypes and his efforts during his first presidency to enact policies to persecute everyone from Black people, to Muslims, to asylum seekers to Trans people created a permission structure for everybody else.  Americans are no longer shy about saying the quiet part out loud and an entire movement funded by billionaires has been supercharged to ban Black history and queer lives and to reduce every woman to a breeding vessel with no control over her own body.  This movement seeks nothing less than to torch every program or initiative that tries to level the playing field for Black people and other marginalized groups of Americans and remedy past discrimination.  They want to return to the jurisprudence of the Dred Scott decision, where Black people had “no rights the white man was bound to respect.”

      As Nikole Hannah Jones detailed in her essay in The New York Times, just as the right had a 50 year game plan for overturning Roe v. Wade, from the moment that Barry Goldwater lost in 1964, the right made a plan to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement, (Source:  “The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap. How A Civil Rights Idea Got Hijacked,” by Nikole Hannah Jones, The New York Times, 3/13/24).  Conservative Justices redefined  affirmative action to mean the pursuit of “diversity” for its own sake, rather than the redress of the continuing harm suffered by Black Americans as a result of slavery and the ensuing 100 year Jim Crow regime of segregation and terror. Recasting the goal of affirmative action as “cosmetic,” rather than rooted in justice, made it much easier to attack and dismantle.

     This is how we find ourselves in the present moment, where tech bros embrace debunked and discredited “scientific racism” and bankroll the quacks who peddle it, (Source:  “Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires,” by Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times, 8/12/23).  Dope-addled Klan Wizard Elon Musk platforms the most vile antisemitism and racism, retweeting “great replacement theory” posts and blaming Boeing’s faulty door plugs on Black pilots.    The continuing decision by major media outlets to platform these people and sanitize their truly hateful and anti-democratic ideas is evidence either that our media is so warped by greed they don’t care about the content, as long as it gets views or that they’re silently hoping to re-establish a rigid white, patriarchal, supremacist caste system, with Black people permanently at the bottom, queer people back in the closet and women the virtual property of men.  As Sinclair Lewis warned us nearly a century ago, don’t think it can’t happen here.

 August 14, 2023

    On August 1st, after the initial feint of a superseding indictment in the Mar-a-lago classified documents case, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith dropped a second federal indictment on Donald Trump, charging him in Washington, D.C. on four felony counts:  1) Conspiracy to Defraud the United States 18 U.S.C.§371; 2) Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding, 18 U.S.C. 1512(k); 3) Obstruction of and Attempt to Obstruct an Official Proceeding, 18 U.S.C. 1512 (c ) (2) and 2; and 4)  the Reconstruction era statute designed to protect Black citizens, Conspiracy Against Rights, 18 U.S.C. 241. (Source:  United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, (Case No. 1:23-cr-00257-TSC, D.D.C.).

     The 45 page indictment meticulously lays out the myriad ways in which Trump and six unindicted (for now) co-conspirators worked feverishly to overturn the results of a free and fair election, spread lies to sow distrust among the American people and hold on to power.  Although countless journalists have summarized the indictment, it is well worth reading for yourself.  Again and again, the indictment provides evidence that Trump was repeatedly told by Republicans that he had lost the election.  It presents evidence that Trump knew that the wackadoodle theories advanced by his loon squad of “attorneys” like Giuliani and Sydney Powell were completely false.

     Trump and his confederates repeatedly pushed everyone from V.P. Pence to Governors and Secretaries of State to throw out election results where Trump was defeated. The conspirators “organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin),” (U.S.v Trump Indictment at par. 10(b)).

      Although Trump’s fake electors scheme covered seven states, he and his co-conspirators singled out the majority Black cities of Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia for the bulk of their opprobrium.  Co-Conspirator #1, Rudy Giuliani accused mother/daughter election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss of passing a thumb drive of fraudulent votes “like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.”  In reality Ruby was simply handing her daughter a mint.  As a result of Giuliani’s vile slander, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss were doxxed and threatened and had to leave their homes, (Source:  “Rudy Giuliani concedes he made false statements against Georgia election workers,” by Jaclyn Diaz, npr.org,7/26/23).  In Philadelphia, after Trump maligned a City Commissioner for stating that there was no evidence of voter fraud, the Commissioner and his family received death threats, (U.S. v. Trump Indictment at par. 42).  In Detroit, Trump supporters stormed the facility where votes were being counted after Trump made the baseless allegation that 149,772 fraudulent votes had been dumped in the overwhelmingly Black city, (U.S. v. Trump Indictment at par.41).

     Trump is many things, but subtle is not one of them.  Invalidating the votes of Black and Brown voters was the centerpiece of his scheme.  Trump has stoked white grievance and resentment by demonizing Black elected officials, Black prosecutors and rank and file Black election workers.  His central thesis is that any claim to, or exercise of, power by Black people is per se illegitimate.  For all of the hand wringing about the unique threat that Trump poses to American democracy, his position is not novel and he is far from alone in his belief.

     Trump has inspired or unleashed an army of copycats who believe that their path to power lies in the ostentatious persecution of people of color.  From Texas Governor Greg Abbott installing torture traps in the Rio Grande that maim and kill asylum seekers, to charisma-free fascist Ron DeSantis’ wholesale book bans and removal of democratically elected prosecutors for the crime of refusing to enforce draconian abortion bans or throw kids in jail, there is no shortage of elected officials eager to abandon democracy.

     The ugly truth is that for most of our country’s history, “democracy” has been a privilege reserved for white, straight, Christian men.  Any effort to expand the definition to include Black people has met with fierce backlash, from 1877 to today.  As Henry Louis Gates said in 2016, Trump’s election signaled the end of the second Reconstruction.  While Trump should certainly be held accountable for his attempted coup if convicted, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that jailing Trump will extinguish the threat to democracy.  The people who empower Trump and his pale imitations show no sign of relenting.  We need to take a page out of the book of the people of Ohio and the people of Montgomery, Alabama and face them armed with our vote… and a folding chair.

     On this 247th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, nothing comes to mind so much as Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech, “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?”  After this last dispiriting week of decisions from the Supreme Court, in 2023, Black people find ourselves asking the same question— what does the Fourth of July mean to us?

     From the time we were first dragged here against our will in 1619, Black people have been fighting a two-front war—famously shedding the first blood in the American Revolution and fighting our white countrymen for the right to be recognized and treated as human beings “endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

     Of course, the Declaration was a lie from the start.  Inalienable literally means unable to be bought and sold, yet the venerable Founders who wrote and co-signed those words blithely owned, bought and sold Black human beings.  

     Despite the glaring contradiction, we have collectively bought into this blinkered myth, in a country that refuses to compensate Black people for the unpaid physical labor that built this country or the unpaid intellectual labor that forced this country to live up, grudgingly and in fits and starts, to the flowery sentiments in its founding documents.

    If we are being honest, Black freedom movements are the foundation on which the rights of other marginalized Americans are built— often by Black people with intersectional identities—like Marsha P. Johnson and Pauli Murray.    The misguided individual Asian American plaintiffs who allowed themselves to be used by the forces of white supremacy in the case of Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard didn’t just betray Black people. They betrayed the decades of coalitions between Asian American and Black activists who understood that we rise and fall together.  They betrayed the 70% of Asian Americans who support affirmative action and they dishonored freedom fighters like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama.  Like the protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” they have “sold their soul for a mess of pottage.  “Happy” Independence Day to us all.

* Originally posted on Facebook on July 4, 2023

     Today marks the federal holiday of Juneteenth, which commemorates the date in 1865 that General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. Although Lincoln issued the Proclamation with an effective date of January 1, 1863, the Southern whites who took up arms to defend their “right” to own and exploit other human beings certainly did not honor the Proclamation during the Civil War.  Even after Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 19, 1865, white planters thought that they could simply continue slavery if they were beyond the reach of federal troops.

    The conventional wisdom is that enslaved Black Texans first learned of their freedom with General Granger’s arrival, but the truth is that Black people knew that they had been freed, but needed the power of the Union Army to compel white Texans to respect it.  Throughout the Civil War, Southern plantation owners moved westward to Texas in order to continue profiting from violently extracted free labor. “Within weeks,” Granger’s proclamation was followed  by “fifty thousand troops who flooded the state in a late arriving occupation,” (Source:  “The Hidden History of Juneteenth,” by Gregory P. Downs, TalkingPointsMemo.com, 6/18/15).

      Even after Juneteenth, white enslavers continued their violent recalcitrance. As late as October 1865, there were reports of white planters who continued to “claim and control slaves as property…and systematically murdered rebellious African-Americans to try to frighten the rest into submission,” (ibid).  Enslaved Black Texans were not passively waiting to be told they were free, but were actively engaged in the fight for their own emancipation.  The truth is that they needed not only the letter of the law, but the power of the Union army to enforce that law. 

   The same pattern has recurred throughout the last 158 years — violent white resistance to Black freedom which can only be overcome by a combination of Black organizing and federal legislation that is actually enforced, with federal troops if necessary.  After all, the continued recalcitrance of white Southerners gave birth to the 14th and 15th Amendments, which became hollow guarantees after the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877.

      Although it was Reconstruction era integrated state legislatures that established universal free public education and enshrined the right to a basic education in Southern state constitutions, Jim Crow legislatures segregated public schools and starved Black schools of resources.  They then used the lack of education that they had engineered to disenfranchise Black people by imposing literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting rights (Source:  “The Constitutional Moment:  Reconstruction and Black Education in the South,”  by David Tyack and Robert Lowe, American Journal of Education, Vol. 94, No.2, pp. 236-256, (February 1986).

It took, not only one hundred years of Black people’s unceasing activism and strategic litigation, but our steely resolve to remain undeterred despite the ceaseless campaign of terror and murder waged by white supremacists, in order to regain the freedom supposedly guaranteed to us by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Just as in the 1960s and the 1860s, there are an alarming number of people in this country today who would stop at nothing to keep Black people from being free. The lesson of the true history of Juneteenth is that freedom is never given, it is fought for and won.

May 3, 2023

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2023/05/efforts-to-erase-african-american-history-is-a-frontal-assault-on-democracy-opinion.html