Читать книгу Dispatches from the Race War - Tim Wise - Страница 19

FOR EIGHT YEARS, it seemed as though those of us who write and speak about race had one job: to convince white people that racism and racial division in the United States were still problems. Or instead, that they were problems neither created by Barack Obama nor solved by him. Although presumptions of post-raciality tended to temper over his eight years in office—as one might expect, given the racial flashpoints mentioned in the previous section’s essays—as reality set in, a new white narrative emerged. Yes, racial division was a problem, but now it was one made worse by Obama himself. He is the one who divided us.

He inserted himself into the Henry Louis Gates debacle in Cambridge. He said that if he had a son, he might have looked like Trayvon Martin. He initiated consent decrees against police departments with histories of racist abuse and misconduct, meaning he had taken the side of the protesters in places like Ferguson. His first attorney general, Eric Holder, accused Americans of being cowards when it came to talking honestly about race, and white people heard Holder blame them, even though he had never specified the color of those lacking courage.

It was a strange argument, especially coming from many of the same people who had proclaimed his election as proof that racism was dead. After all, if Obama had killed racism by having won the presidency, then it must have existed before him. He could not be its author. But inconsistency aside, this became the new mantra: Obama was the divider-in-chief. So naturally, outraged by his divisiveness, white people would be looking for a unifier, someone to bring us together and bind up the wounds of a nation torn apart by the likes of its first black president, right?

No, not right. Not right at all. Quite the opposite. White America, instead, returned to type, exceptions duly noted, with an overwhelming majority opting to throw their support behind a has-been reality television character and mediocre real estate developer, Donald Trump. Though he posed as a champion of the working class, Trump’s actual history with working people was one of fraud and deceit: failing to pay subcontractors and driving them to the brink of destitution in the hopes of procuring a settlement in court for their work. But his treatment of working-class folks didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he hated the right people: Muslims and immigrants from Mexico, first and foremost.

He began his campaign with a harangue about Mexican immigrants being rapists and drug dealers, though some might be “good people.” He went on to insist that a Mexican American judge overseeing the lawsuit against his phony and fraudulent “University” couldn’t be fair-minded precisely because of his ethnicity. He bragged about sexual assault, made fun of persons with disabilities, called for a complete shutdown of Muslim migration to the U.S., and promised to erect a wall on the nation’s southern border and somehow force Mexico to pay for it.

It was this combination of bigoted and hateful stances that propelled him to victory. Ultimately his voters either voted for him because of these things or, at the very least, were willing to say that racism, xenophobia, sexism, and assorted bigotries were not deal-breakers for them. Either way, the result was the elevation to the presidency of a man who traffics in prejudice to gain and keep power. That is all Trumpism is about.

Apparently, millions of white Americans were shocked by the outcome on election day 2016. I was not. Surprised? Oh, sure, I didn’t actually think Trump was going to win. But my expectations that he would lose were never rooted in a faith that the American people, and particularly white folks, would reject the politics of prejudice itself. I figured Hillary Clinton would win solely based on get-out-the-vote efforts and the weight of Trump’s self-inflicted wounds as a clearly execrable human being. But I always knew white people were capable of this. To not know that would be to ignore the entirety of U.S. history, and that of some other ostensibly white nations, which have done this and a whole lot worse.

After the dust had settled, there was no silver lining to be found except perhaps this: that now it would become harder for white liberals to ignore what even they had often ignored previously. It would now become more difficult to labor under the impression that race was a secondary issue in American life. Hopefully, it would also become apparent to more whites—especially those proclaiming their progressivism—why all liberal and/or left organizing must be antiracist and challenge the politics of prejudice head-on. Trump has proven that there can be no dancing around the edges of the issue. The only way out is through, as the saying goes.

This section begins with essays written in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory and inauguration, followed by pieces that document the abundant evidence of Trump’s racism both in rhetoric and in action. Throughout, I explore the way he has deployed bigotry cynically to gain and maintain political power, and how his presidency has revealed an underlying sickness at the heart of the American experiment.

By the time this volume is released, Donald Trump will either have been reelected or have returned to private life; but whatever the case, the damage Trumpism will have done to the fabric of the nation will continue on. And the deep-seated fissures that it did not create, but which it has uncovered for millions to see, will continue to grow unless we commit to a new and different way of being.