Is Trump Going to Cause a Segregation Again?
I.
Marine One waited for the president of the United States on the Southward Lawn of the White House. It was July 30, 2019, not long past 9 a.m.
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Donald Trump was headed to historic Jamestown to mark the 400th anniversary of the commencement representative assembly of European settlers in the Americas. But Blackness Virginia legislators were boycotting the visit. Over the preceding two weeks, the president had been engaged in one of the most racist political assaults on members of Congress in American history.
Like and then many controversies during Trump's presidency, information technology had all started with an early-morning tweet.
"And then interesting to see 'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and full ending, the worst, almost corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they fifty-fifty have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and well-nigh powerful Nation on world, how our government is to exist run," Trump tweeted on Sunday, July xiv, 2019. "Why don't they go back and aid gear up the totally broken and offense infested places from which they came. So come up dorsum and evidence us how information technology is done. These places need your help desperately, y'all can't leave fast enough."
Trump was referring to 4 freshman members of Congress: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali American; Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, an African American; Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a Palestinian American; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a Puerto Rican. Pressley screenshotted Trump's tweet and alleged, "THIS is what racism looks like."
On the South Lawn, Trump now faced reporters and cameras. Over the drone of the helicopter rotors, one reporter asked Trump if he was bothered that "more and more people" were calling him racist.
"I am the least racist person at that place is anywhere in the world," Trump replied, hands upwards, palms facing out for emphasis.
His hands came down. He singled out a vocal critic, the Reverend Al Sharpton. "At present, he'south a racist," Trump said. "What I've washed for African Americans, no president, I would say, has washed … And the African American community is so thankful."
It was an cool statement. But in a twisted way, Trump was right. As his administration's first term comes to an end, Blackness Americans—indeed, all Americans—should in one respect be thankful to him. He has held upwardly a mirror to American society, and it has reflected dorsum a grotesque image that many people had until now refused to meet: an image non just of the racism withal coursing through the country, only also of the reflex to deny that reality. Though it was inappreciably his intention, no president has acquired more than Americans to stop denying the beingness of racism than Donald Trump.
Ii.
We are living in the midst of an anti-racist revolution. This spring and summertime, demonstrations calling for racial justice attracted hundreds of thousands of people in Los Angeles, Washington, New York, and other large cities. Smaller demonstrations erupted in northeastern enclaves such as Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Bar Harbor, Maine; in western towns such as Havre, Montana, and Hermiston, Oregon; in midsize cities such as Waco, Texas, and Topeka, Kansas; and in wealthy suburbs such every bit Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Darien, Connecticut.
Veteran activists and new recruits to the crusade pushed policy makers to hold violent police officers accountable, to ban choke holds and no-knock warrants, to shift funding from constabulary enforcement to social services, and to end the practice of sending armed and dangerous officers to respond to incidents in which the suspect is neither armed nor dangerous. Only these activists weren't merely advocating for a few policy shifts. They were calling for the eradication of racism in America once and for all.
The president attempted to portray the righteous demonstrations as the work of looters and thugs, just many of the people watching at home didn't come across it that way. This summer, a majority of Americans—57 per centum, according to a Monmouth University poll—said that police officers were more likely to use excessive force against Blackness "culprits" than they were confronting white ones. That's an increase from just 33 per centum in December 2014, afterward a k jury declined to indict a New York Metropolis police force officer in the killing of Eric Garner.
What's more, by early June, roughly three out of 4 Americans were saying that "racial and indigenous discrimination" is a "big trouble" in the U.s.a.—up from only about one-half of Americans in 2015, when Trump launched his presidential campaign.
It would be piece of cake to meet these shifts every bit the directly effect of the horrifying events that have unfolded in 2020: a pandemic that has had a disproportionate effect on people of colour; the video of George Floyd dying beneath the knee of an impassive Minneapolis police officeholder; the ghastly killing of Breonna Taylor, shot to death in her own home.
Withal fundamental shifts in American views of race were already under way before the COVID-19 disparities became articulate and before these latest examples of constabulary violence surfaced. The per centum of Americans who told Monmouth pollsters that racial and indigenous discrimination is a large problem fabricated a greater leap from January 2015 (51 percent) to July 2016 (68 percent) than from July 2016 to June 2020 (76 percent). What we are witnessing right at present is the culmination of a longer process—a procedure that tracks closely with the political career of Donald Trump.
III.
In the days leading upwards to Trump's assail on Omar, Pressley, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez, Fox News slammed the "Squad," especially Omar. All iv had been publicly sparring with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a $4.6 billion border-aid package that they thought did not sufficiently restrain Trump's immigration policies.
Nonetheless Pelosi promptly defended her fellow Democrats on July 14, 2019. "When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries," Pelosi tweeted, "he reaffirms his program to 'Make America Great Over again' has always been about making America white again."
It has ever been a racial slur for white Americans to tell Americans of colour, "Go back to your country." Because their country is New York City, where Ocasio-Cortez was born. Their state is Detroit, Tlaib's birthplace. Their land is greater Boston, where Pressley lives. Their land is the United states, to which Omar's family immigrated when she was young.
Every bit Democratic politicians raged at the president that Dominicus, Republicans were silent. "It'south become frighteningly mutual for many of my Republican colleagues to permit these moments sail by without maxim even a give-and-take," Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor.
To exist off-white, past Mon, a few Republicans, including Representatives Mike Turner of Ohio and Will Hurd of Texas, had called the president'south tweets racist. But Trump, emboldened by the silence from the remainder of his caucus, doubled down on his attacks.
"IF Y'all ARE NOT HAPPY HERE," Trump wrote to the iv women on Twitter, "Y'all Tin LEAVE."
The president added: "If Democrats want to unite around the foul linguistic communication & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and deportment of these very unpopular & unrepresentative Congresswomen, it will be interesting to encounter how it plays out."
Past Monday night, House Democrats had had plenty. They introduced a resolution to "strongly" condemn the president's racist tweets.
Trump woke up the next morning once again in a state of aroused denial. "Those Tweets were Non Racist," he tweeted. "I don't have a Racist bone in my body!"
Iv.
For ameliorate or worse, Americans see themselves—and their country—in the president. From the days of George Washington, the president has personified the American body. The motto of the Usa is Due east pluribus unum—"Out of many, one." The "one" is the president.
To Trump, and to many of his supporters, the American trunk must exist a white body. When he launched his presidential campaign, on June 16, 2015, he began with attacks on immigrants of color and on the person whose citizenship he'd falsely questioned equally a peddler of birtherism: Barack Obama. They were all desecrating the American torso. Of Mexican immigrants, he said: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." Of Obama, he said: "He's been a negative forcefulness. We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and brand information technology slap-up again."
Trump presented himself every bit that somebody. To brand America great again, he would brand it seem equally if a Blackness man had never been president, erasing him from history by repealing and replacing his signature accomplishments, from the Affordable Care Deed to DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. He would also build a wall to proceed out immigrants, and he would ban Muslims from inbound the country.
Days after offset proposing his Muslim ban, in December 2015—still early in his candidacy—Trump told CNN'southward Don Lemon, "I am the least racist person that you have ever met."
Trump's denial was audacious, but dorsum then, his audacity simply contributed to the conceited sense amid many Americans that this interloper from reality television posed no serious threat. Still the Americans who dismissed Trump's chances were living in denial themselves.
For many, Obama's presidency was proof that the state was ascent to its ideals of liberty and equality. When a Black homo climbed to the highest function in the land, it signified that the nation was postracial, or at to the lowest degree that history was inexorably angle in that direction. The Obama assistants itself boasted that it was fighting the remnants of racism—a mop-upwards operation in a state of war that was all only won.
I was less sanguine. In the months leading up to the 2016 ballot, I told family unit and friends that Trump had a good chance of winning. Across American history, racial progress has normally been followed by its opposite.
So I was glad to be lonely on Election Dark. I did not desire to see people I loved shocked that a racist nation had elected a racist president. On November 8, 2016, I watched the returns come in by myself, on the couch. My daughter, Imani, was sleeping in her crib. My wife, Sadiqa, was at the infirmary, treating patients during an overnight shift in the pediatric emergency department.
I stayed up until 1:35 a.m. When Trump carried Pennsylvania, I turned off the tv set and called Sadiqa to hear how her shift was going. Our conversation was brief; she had to go dorsum to her patients. Subsequently, I would read about how, around 2:fifty a.one thousand., Trump greeted his exuberant supporters in New York City with a victory spoken language. He pledged to be "a president for all Americans."
V.
Within days of being sworn in, Trump broke that hope. He reversed holds on two oil-pipeline projects, including one through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which was opposed by more than than 200 Indigenous nations. He issued executive orders calling for the construction of a wall along the southern edge and the deportation of individuals who "pose a run a risk to public safety or national security." He enacted his get-go of three Muslim bans.
Past the end of the bound, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had directed federal prosecutors to seek the harshest prison sentences whenever possible. Sessions had as well laid the background for the pause of all the consent decrees that provided federal oversight of law-enforcement agencies that had demonstrated a pattern of racism.
Led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the administration worked on ways to restrict clearing past people of color. There was a sense of urgency, considering, equally Trump said at a private White House meeting in June 2017, Haitians "all have AIDS" and Nigerians would never "become back to their huts" once they came to the U.s..
Then came Charlottesville. On Baronial xi, 2017, about 250 white supremacists marched on the University of Virginia campus, carrying torches that lit up the night sky with racism and anti-Semitism. Demonstrating against Charlottesville'south plan to remove statues honoring Confederates, they chanted, "Claret and soil!" They chanted, "Jews volition non replace u.s.!" They chanted, "White lives matter!"
The white supremacists clashed with anti-racist demonstrators that nighttime and the side by side afternoon. White lives did not matter to the white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. He collection his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counterprotesters, murdering Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others.
"We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, this egregious display of hatred, discrimination, and violence on many sides, on many sides," Trump said in response. He spoke about there existence "very fine people" on "both sides."
On September 5, 2017, Trump began his long and unsuccessful attempt to eliminate DACA, which deferred deportations for roughly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.Southward. as children. The Trump assistants also began rescinding the Temporary Protected Status of thousands of refugees from wars and natural disasters years ago in Sudan, Nicaragua, Republic of haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Republic of honduras.
Most the end of his first year in office, Trump wondered aloud at a White Firm meeting: "Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" He was referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and nations in Africa. He suggested that the U.S. should bring in more than people from countries like Norway.
Three days later on, on January 14, 2018, speaking before reporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, he was again asked if he was racist. "No, I'm not a racist," he responded. "I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed."
VI.
The America that denied its racism through the Obama years has struggled to deny its racism through the Trump years. From 1977 to 2018, the General Social Survey asked whether Black Americans "have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people … mainly due to bigotry." In that location are just ii answers to this question. The racist answer is "no"—information technology presumes that racist bigotry no longer exists and that racial inequities are the result of something being incorrect with Black people. The anti-racist reply is "yeah"—information technology presumes that zippo is incorrect or correct, inferior or superior, nigh whatsoever racial group, so the caption for racial disparities must be discrimination.
In 2008, as Obama was headed for the White House, only 34.5 percent of respondents answered "yes," a number I'll call the anti-racist charge per unit. This was the second-everyman anti-racist charge per unit of the 41-yr polling catamenia. The rate rose to 37.7 per centum in 2010, mayhap because the emergence of the Tea Party forced a reckoning for some white Americans, but information technology brutal back down to 34.9 percent in 2012 and 34.6 percent in 2014.
In 2016, every bit Trump loomed over American politics, the anti-racist rate rose to 42.6 percent. It went upward to 46.2 pct in 2018, a double-digit increase from the first of the Obama administration. In big part, shifts in white public opinion explicate the bound. The white anti-racist charge per unit was barely 29.8 pct in 2008. Information technology jumped to 37.7 percent in 2016 and to twoscore.5 pct two years into Trump'due south presidency.
The deniers of racism, those who blame people of color for racial inequity and injustice, have mostly been white, but non exclusively and so. Between 1977 and 2018, the lowest anti-racist rate amid Blackness respondents—47.ii percent—came in 2012, the midpoint of Obama's presidency. That rate climbed to 61.1 per centum in 2016 and 66 percent in 2018, a nearly 20-betoken swing from the Obama years.
It has become harder, in the Trump years, to blame Black people for racial inequity and injustice. Information technology has likewise become harder to tell Blackness people that the fault lies with them, and to urge them to improve their station past behaving in an upstanding or respectable manner. In the Trump years, the problem is obvious, and it isn't Blackness people'due south behavior.
Seven.
The United States has often been called a land of contradictions, and to exist sure, its failings sit alongside some notable achievements—a New Deal for many Americans in the 1930s, the defeat of fascism abroad in the 1940s. Merely on racial matters, the U.S. could just as accurately be described every bit a land in deprival. It has been a massacring nation that said it cherished life, a slaveholding nation that claimed it valued liberty, a hierarchal nation that alleged it valued equality, a disenfranchising nation that branded itself a democracy, a segregated nation that styled itself separate simply equal, an excluding nation that boasted of opportunity for all. A nation is what it does, not what it originally claimed it would be. Ofttimes, a nation is precisely what it denies itself to be.
There was a grand moment, withal, when a large swath of Americans walked away from a history of racial denial. In the 1850s, slaveholders expanded their reach into the Due north. Their slave-catchers, backed past federal power, were superseding land and local law to capture runaways (and complimentary Blacks) who had escaped across the Mason-Dixon Line. Formerly enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, also as journalists such as William Lloyd Garrison, stood in pulpits across the North and West describing the brutality and inhumanity of slavery. Meanwhile, slaveholders fought to expand their power out west—where white people who did not want to compete with enslaved Black labor were calling for costless soil. Commencement in 1854, slaveholders went to war with costless-soilers (and abolitionists like John Brown) in Kansas over whether the state—and the United States—would exist free or slave. The Supreme Court's Dred Scott conclusion, in 1857, implied that Black people and northern states "had no rights" that slaveholders were "bound to respect."
Slaveholders seemed intent on spreading their plantations from body of water to shining bounding main. As a event, more than and more white Americans became antislavery, whether out of concern for the enslaved or fear of the encroaching slave ability. Black Americans, meanwhile, fled the state for Canada and Republic of liberia—or stayed and pressed the cause of radical abolitionism. A disquisitional mass of Americans rejected the Southward'south claim that enslavement was good and came to recognize the peculiar establishment as altogether bad.
The slaveholders' attempts to perpetuate their arrangement backfired; in the years before the Civil State of war, the inhumanity and cruelty of enslavement became too blatant for northerners to ignore or deny. Similarly, Trump'due south racism—and that of his allies and enablers—has been as well blatant for Americans to ignore or deny. And just as the 1850s paved the style for the revolution against slavery, Trump's presidency has paved the way for a revolution against racism.
Viii.
On July 16, 2019, the Firm bitterly debated the resolution to rebuke Trump for his racist tweets against the four congresswomen of color. The four were members of the most diverse class of Democrats in American history, which had retaken the House in a midterm repudiation of the president.
"Every single member of this institution, Democratic and Republican, should join us in condemning the president's racist tweets," Speaker Pelosi said from the House floor. Republicans sounded off in protest. Pelosi turned to them, voice rising, and added: "To practise anything less would be a shocking rejection of our values and a shameful abdication of our oath of office to protect the American people."
Republicans claimed that Pelosi had violated a House rule by characterizing an activity equally "racist." They moved to accept the word struck from the Congressional Record.
The motility to strike racist from the record failed along political party lines. "I know racism when I meet it, I know racism when I experience it, and at the highest level of government, at that place's no room for racism," Representative John Lewis, the civil-rights icon, said during the debate.
I afterward another, Republicans rose to defend their president. "What has actually happened hither is that the president and his supporters accept been forced to suffer months of allegations of racism," said Representative Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania. "This ridiculous slander does a disservice to our nation."
In the finish, only four Republicans and the Business firm's lonely independent voted with all the Democrats to condemn the president of the United States. That means 187 Business firm Republicans, or 98 percent of the caucus, denied that telling four congresswomen of color to become back to their countries was racist. They believed, equally Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, that "the president's not a racist."
To call out the president'due south racism would accept been to call out their own racism. McConnell had been quietly killing anti-racist bills that had come out of the Business firm since January 2019, starting with the new House'southward commencement pecker, which aimed to protect Americans against voter suppression.
The day later on existence rebuked by House Democrats, Trump held the first rally of his reelection campaign. He spent a big portion of his speech in Greenville, North Carolina, railing against the iv congresswomen. As he was pummeling Omar with a round of attacks, the crowd started chanting, "Send her back! Send her dorsum! Ship her back!"
Trump stopped speaking. He fabricated no try to stop the chant every bit information technology grew louder. He basked in the racial slur for xiii seconds.
"Send her back! Send her dorsum! Send her dorsum!"
On Thursday, Republicans were quick to denounce the chant. "In that location's no place for that kind of talk," Tom Emmer of Minnesota said to reporters. But, he added, "there'due south not a racist bone in the president's body."
Trump disavowed the "Send her back" chant, but by Friday he had disavowed his disavowal, calling the chanters "incredible patriots" and denying their racism along with his own. Many Americans saw through these apparently false claims, nonetheless. By the end of July, for the kickoff fourth dimension, a bulk of voters said the president of the United States was, in fact, a racist.
Ix.
I thought I appreciated the power of denial from studying the history of racist ideas. But I learned to empathise it in a personal manner during the first year of Trump'due south presidency. In 2017, I vicious ill; I felt as sick as I'd ever been. But I told myself the hourly trips to the bathroom were nothing. The claret wasn't serious. I ignored the symptoms for months.
I waited until the pain was unbearable before I admitted that I had a trouble. And even then, I wasn't able to acknowledge information technology on my own. My partner saved my life.
Sadiqa saw the totality of my symptoms during a weeklong vacation over New Year's. Information technology was the first time in months that we were together all day, every day. As soon as we returned home, in January 2018, she dragged me to the doctor.
I acquiesced to the appointment, but I withal wouldn't permit the idea that my status was serious. I did not take any of the commonly known take chances factors for the worst possibility—colon cancer. I was 35, and I exercised regularly, didn't fume, rarely drank, and had no family history. I was a vegan, for goodness' sake.
I realize now that I was engaged in a powerful tour of denial. Americans, too, can easily summon a litany of reasons their country is not racist: Look at the enlightened principles upon which the nation was founded. Look at the progress the country has made. Look at the election of Barack Obama. Await at the dark faces in high places. Look at the diversity of the 2020 Democratic field.
Fifty-fifty afterwards the doctor establish the tumor, my denial persisted. One time I accepted that I had cancer, I was convinced that it had to be Phase i, for all the reasons I had been convinced that I did non take cancer at all. A routine surgery was in lodge, and so all would exist practiced.
I fearfulness that this is how many Americans are thinking right now: Routine surgery—the defeat of Donald Trump at the polls—will heal the American body. No demand to look deeper, at police departments, at schools, at housing. Are Americans at present acknowledging racism, but telling themselves the problem is contained? Are they telling themselves that it is a big trouble, but it can't have spread to well-nigh every part of the torso politic? Volition this become the new form of American denial?
False hope was my new normal, until it wasn't. When they scanned my body, doctors constitute that the cancer had spread. I had Stage 4 colon cancer. I had two choices: denial and decease, or recognition and life. America now has two choices.
X.
Trump's denials of his racism volition never cease. He volition continue to merits that he loves people of color, the very people his policies harm. He will continue to call himself "not racist," and turn the descriptive term racist back on anyone who has the temerity to call out his ain prejudice. Trump clearly hopes that racist ideas—paired with policies designed to suppress the vote—will lead to his reelection. Only at present that Trump has pushed a critical mass of Americans to a point where they can no longer explicate abroad the nation's sins, the question is what those Americans volition exercise virtually it.
Ane path forrad leads to a mere restoration. Barack Obama'southward vice president unseats Trump, removing the bad apple from the butt. With Trump dispatched, the nation believes it is once more headed in the right direction. On this path, Americans consider racism to exist a significant problem. Just they deny the true gravity of the trouble and the need for drastic action. On this path, monuments to racism are dismantled, but Americans shrink from the awesome job of reshaping the country with anti-racist policies. With Trump gone, Americans make up one's mind they don't need to be actively anti-racist anymore.
Or Americans can realize that they are at a bespeak of no render. No returning to the bad old habit of deprival. No returning to cynicism. No returning to normal—the normal in which racist policies, defended by racist ideas, lead to racial inequities.
On this path, Trump's denialism has permanently changed the way Americans view themselves. The Trump effect is real, and lasting. The reckoning nosotros take witnessed this bound and summer at public demonstrations transforms into a reckoning in legislatures, C-suites, university-admissions offices.
On this path, the American people demand equitable results, not speeches that make them feel good nearly themselves and their land. The American people give policy makers an ultimatum: Use your power to radically reduce inequity and injustice, or be voted out.
The abolition of slavery seemed equally incommunicable in the 1850s every bit equality seems today. But just as the abolitionists of the 1850s demanded the immediate eradication of slavery, firsthand equality must be the demand today. Abolish police violence. Abolish mass incarceration. Abolish the racial wealth gap and the gap in school funding. Abolish barriers to citizenship. Abolish voter suppression. Abolish health disparities. Not in 20 years. Not in 10 years. Now.
This article appears in the September 2020 impress edition with the headline "The End of Denial."
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/the-end-of-denial/614194/
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