Given my recent experience with using articles from The Atlantic Web site as a jumping-off point for these blog posts, I'm half-tempted to just tell all of you to just ignore my blog and buy a subscription to The Atlantic instead. Or, at least, get a subscription of my own. Granted, I have something of a family connection to the publication, as I have previously explained, so my self-interest is already tied up in the publication to a small degree. But that doesn't matter. Frankly, given the current state of our country and its government (or what passes for it), I really don't care where you get your wisdom from, so long as you, and others get it.
But I digress.
Here is a link to an Atlantic article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, making the case for Donald Trump as the nation's first white president. This is a case Coates makes successfully, and as carefully and thoroughly as possible. He starts with a discussion of Trump's own personal history, documented the racism that has been the single common thread throughout all of his public life, from keeping people of color out of his father's apartment buildings to his personal assaults on Obama's personal history and character during Obama's Presidency. Coates goes on from there to review the data from the 2016 Presidential election, and shows that whiteness, not economic distress, was the single demographic factor against all others that identified Trump support (yes, even including gender). Finally, Coates goes back into our history, and shows how race has been manipulated from the very beginning as a tool of both economic and social oppression. In the process, he also shows why progressive white Democrats who want to "unify" with Reagan-Trump Democrats are doomed to fail in their efforts. It is not possible to transcend the issue of race without directly confronting the racism that exists everywhere in our society.
And I truly do mean everywhere, based on my own personal experience. Consider, for a few moments the fact that Trump's various raced-based political appeals, now largely but not exclusively focused on the issue of immigration, make him a slightly-more-silk-suited version of George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who carried five states running on a third-party ticket in the 1968 Presidential election. But Trump's a native New Yorker, you say. How could such a blue state like New York, and especially such a blue city like New York City, produce a political clone of Wallace.
Well, fairly easily, when you consider the fact that Trump, who built his real-estate career in Manhattan, was born and raised in Queens, the home bureau of Archie Bunker from "All in the Family." And, although the Queens of today is very much of a multi-ethic, multi-national melting pot, that was certainly not the case in the Queens where Trump came of age.
As I suggested a moment ago, a little personal experience here.
Flashback: It is 1979, the first of my four-year sojourn in New York, largely as a civil servant and later as a would-be commercial artist. Summer has come and, with them, summer blockbusters at the movie theaters. I'm living on the top floor (with elevator access) of an apartment building in Elmhurst, a neighborhood in northwest Queens that had become (and may still be) the most ethically diverse zip code (11373) in the entire nation. The hallway on which my apartment is located includes two Indian families, a single East European woman, a gay African-American and Hispanic male couple, and a Caucasian-Japanese straight couple.
Far from being frightened by all of this, I'm enjoying the diversity, even though it includes nightly visits from that well-known New York pest, cockroaches. I find myself, even as I write these words, aching with a sense of loss for these friends from my early adulthood.
And then, one Saturday night, I decide to go see "Rocky II" at a movie theater in Flushing, a neighborhood in northeast Queens that, at the time (and no longer) was still predominantly a white-ethnic conclave. And my eyes are opened, not only to the spectacle of Sylvester Stallone and Carl Weathers duking it out in the ring, but to the spectacle of racial hatred that the film's climatic fight unleashed. I was surrounded by young white men in a small, neighborhood theater, all of whom suddenly, and then for the rest of the fight scene, chanted almost in unison "GET THAT [N-word]! GET THAT [N-word]!"
I hated having to sanitize the memory, because it robs you of experiencing the full impact of the hatred I experienced. But I feel that to not sanitize it is, in some real sense, to become complicit with it, which I refuse to do. In any case, I realized that night that Queens, regardless of my Elmhurst experience, was not a racial paradise.
And neither is New York. And, for that matter, neither is America.
So it should not be surprising that a President from Queens should be the one to unleash the inner bigot of so many Americans who attempt to sanitize their feelings with cliches about being hard-working, everyday, not-those-coastal-type, economically-left-behind Americans. What far too many of the white people who hide behind these cliches are, fundamentally, is the thing that can never speak its true name, but must always hide behind a pretense of nobility it can neither earn nor deserve.
They are bigots. And they now feel free, in the age of Trump, to be who they really are. Loudly, proudly, and destructively.
You can see them doing it here.
And here.
And here.
And here.
And here.
And here.
So pervasive a pattern is this--white police attacking innocent black people--that it has been identified, researched, and reported as a systemic problem. And that problem is reflected in our nation's prison system as well.
But why should that be surprising? Systemic racism is openly reflected not only in public policy on behalf of "the poor" (i.e., those who are presumed to be black but very often are white), or with reference to "national security," but even within the halls of government itself, in the way that white public officials relate to their colleagues of color.
In fact, racism is the single most rational explanation for the fact that immigration, and racist attitudes against it, are at the center of the current national political debate. Let's go back to New York for a moment here--in fact, to Manhattan, that supposed citadel of open-minded tolerance--and take a look at this incident, involving the most horribly naked bigotry being displayed against people of color, for no reason other than the fact that they are people of color.
Do you really have any doubt that this explosion of hate rests on Trump's shoulders? Does that really seem far-fetched to you?
Well, from the vantage point of persuasion on this argument, I've deliberately saved the best piece for last. Take a long look at this, and tell me if you still think everything I've documented here is somehow separated from our Criminal-in-Chief.
So, how do we fight it? One thing we don't do is respond in kind, such as petitions like this one. For one thing, people have a civil right to bigotry. Sad, but true. The irony of freedom is that it protects many ugly things, in no small part because freedom is what exposes the darkness to the light, ultimately killing it.
That, in fact, is what we must do.
We must expose the fundamental bigotry on which America is built to the light of public discourse and debate, and ultimately to our political process. We must re-shape not only our politics, but also our economy and culture, to fight against and ultimately destroy hate in this country. But do so without destroying either the haters, or the hated. It is bigotry itself that must be destroyed because, left unchecked, it will destroy all of us.
It destroys no one, however, to simply remove them from public office, thereby preventing them from spreading the poison within them throughout all of the people. Donald Trump has not been the first President who also happened to be white but, as Coates has so eloquently described, he has certainly been the first White President.
By peaceful means only, let's make sure he's the last one.
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