His rhetoric is racist, painting Mexicans as rapists. Couple this and his desire to ban Muslims from entering the country, especially from Syria, because we don’t know if they are terrorists. His behavior is racists, failing to disavow the Klu Klux Klan and David Duke by lying about his knowledge of who Duke was and the KKK. At his rally’s in the past several weeks black people have been spit on, pushed around, called the n-word, threatened and injured.
Yes, sadly none of this is all that surprising. The black population has never integrated after years of slavery followed by continuing Jim Crow practices such as restrictive voter laws, extrajudicial killings of black people by police officers, and mass incarceration that has roots in the drug war of the 1970’s. The persistence of racism is a stubborn monster and hard to slay. Most white people in the U.S. today have little knowledge of black history, much less the history of the African continent. Most black people in the U.S. know little about either of the subjects.
Black remains linked to depravity, sexual deviance, violence, anger, theft, rape and lesser intellect (or as existential philosophers such as Fanon would recognize as the Other).The consequences are lethal. The political right seized on the protest mounted under #BlackLivesMatter to dilute the significance of what the protest is all about. The counter-rhetoric of #AllLivesMatter works to undermine the truth of disproportionate numbers of black people being killed for no good reason. The point isn’t that some lives matter more than others (though certainly the right is very glad to admit it is okay for the state to execute, and so perhaps do think some lives matter more than others). The point is to remember that black people are being killed and incarcerated in disproportionate amounts and that blacks are rightly afraid for the lives.
When white people bandy these trite counter points, they are failing to recognize the reality of millions of blacks in the United States who must have conversations with their children about how to avoid being beaten and or shot by police even if they are doing nothing wrong. Police for some reason have decided that due process – that pesky constitutional right – does not apply to black suspects and the reasons for being a blacks suspect relies in part on being black. If you never had to worry each time your child drove a car they could be targeted and harassed, beaten or killed by a police officer. If you don’t fear that police could break into your house and kill you for little or no cause, then you don’t understand. If you have no fear that when you are walking down a street, the police might harass, detain, beat, rape, or kill you. Then you are failing to understand why the protest linked to #BlackLivesMatter is about serious events that need to be talked about and prevented. If you are of white identity the fact that you don’t have to have a survival strategy to avoid the police killing you or your children is what activists call White Privilege.
The fact that a candidate for the office of the President of the United States is comfortable lying about his knowledge of racist organizational support and his affiliation with David Duke because of a wish not to anger his white supremacist fan base is deeply and emphatically disturbing. The mounting evidence of the degrading treatment of black people at Trumps recent rallies goes to show how dangerous this rhetoric is and how too many white people support this behavior. Unfortunately, some black people support Trump as a candidate despite the fact they are not welcomed.
Trump blames the Democrats and the other candidates for being divisive, but he is riding a movement of denial of the reality of being black in the U.S… Which is highly divisive. If you do not understand why #BlackLivesMatter, if you don’t acknowledge that the new voter laws in many states worked as planned to keep voting numbers down especially for disadvantaged minorities including blacks, you are blind to the racism in 21st-century racism and are part of the problem. Of course, black is not the only identity category that is persecuted and killed, but the numbers show that being black in the U.S. is particularly dangerous and often deadly.
I hope that the people who have been bamboozled by Trump and the circus surrounding him will be in the minority when it comes to electing the next president of the U.S… However, even without Trump, it is evident that the U.S. needs to break the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism. Trump has provided a focal point for white supremacy supporters, but those supporters were racists before supporting Trump.
We cannot hope to solve this until more stories are told and understood, more history is shared and promoted, and more people decide to embrace the best thing about Christian teaching – love everybody like your own, and don’t judge what you don’t know.
melungeon mullins 