December 17, 2017
There has always been a stark contradiction between the soaring rhetoric and universal applicability of our country’s founding documents and the messy reality of our willingness to massacre one group of people and enslave another to achieve our country’s global dominance. We know, all too well, the staying power of the pernicious mythology of Black inferiority required to justify our continued subjugation. At every stage of our country’s history, far too many Americans have been comfortable ignoring the contradiction, treating the status of Black Americans like a footnote that can be overlooked without distorting the meaning of the text.
Every effort to gain equality for Black Americans has been met with a violent and determined backlash. From the Civil War, to the sustained reign of terror launched at the end of Reconstruction, to the vicious and insistent violence meted out against the Civil Rights activists of the 50’s and 60’s, to the resurgent white supremacist hate groups emboldened by Trump’s election, it is clear that a significant percentage of white Americans prefer anything to full equality for Black people.
There are myriad reasons for this, but a key one is what W.E.B. DuBois famously termed the “psychological wage” that white people earned from white supremacy. DuBois’ point was that, regardless of class status, white people could rely on receiving, “public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white…. They were admitted freely …to the best schools. …The police were drawn from their ranks….” (Source: Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois (1935)). Although DuBois wrote this eighty years ago to describe an even earlier period of American history, he could just as easily be describing the perceived intangible benefit of white supremacy that persists in the 21st Century and causes working class white people to vote against their own economic interest. These voters are content as long as the politicians that they elect punish those that they deem unworthy of full membership in the American community.
There is no escaping the brutal fact that Trump’s voters supported him because of racism. Study after study conducted by political scientists since the election demonstrates this conclusively (Source: “The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment,” by German Lopez, Vox.com, 12/15/17). So journalists need to stop interviewing Trump supporters in Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania and expecting their minds to change. They are getting what they voted for—the reassurance that century-old racial hierarchies will be reasserted and that there is a place for them near the top of that hierarchy – even if only as 21st Century Gestapo. As we watch this administration ban words like “transgender”, “science based,” and “diversity”, while Congressional Republicans and their right wing media echo chamber set the stage for Mueller’s firing, we need to understand that 35% of our fellow citizens are fine with fascism, as long as it has a straight, Christian white face. Democracy and white supremacy are on a collision course. It is up to us to determine who survives the crash.