How Do We Hold Whiteness Accountable For President Trump’s Racism
Mr. Trump Is Merely Emboldened By His Enablers. Read on, if your whiteness is making you feel uneasy, because it makes me feel the same
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Because it is just as uneasy for me to hear and witness the president’s vulgarity and cruelty vis a vis racist motivations and remarks, of which I consider to be an affixation, or an asphyxiation too, with whiteness. We should talk about the accountability for such stifling governance and unpresidential behavior. The Harvard Business Review describes accountability this way.
Accountability is not simply taking the blame when something goes wrong. It’s not a confession. Accountability is about delivering on a commitment. It’s responsibility to an outcome, not just a set of tasks. It’s taking initiative with thoughtful, strategic follow-through.[1]
The concept of Whiteness derives from an indefatigable and dehumanizing basis of prejudice and discrimination, whereas the concept of Blackness in response is based on humanity in defense of that dehumanization. It goes without saying that racist outcomes are unproductive, unequal, divisive, unconstitutional, demoralizing, immoral, illegitimate, fraudulent, unethical, and not very thoughtful when it comes to the commitment of democracy — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said it was not “constructive” for Trump to have referred to African and other countries as “shitholes” but that it was “unfair” to call him racist.
Senator Paul’s definition of fairness is pretentiously awkward and repulsively condescending here. However, this widely shared countenance of what’s best for America reflects the absurd ambivalence of racism and its performativity at the highest and most visible of levels in governance. This sort of whitewashing is typical by many Trump apologists who seem to ameliorate or harbor racial sentiments while giving the appearance of some civility towards it.
“You can’t have an immigration compromise if everybody’s out there calling the president a racist,” Paul told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “They’re actually destroying the setting. And he’s a little bit of it, but both sides now are destroying the setting in which anything meaningful can happen on immigration.”[2]
You’re kidding right!? By essentially blaming the victims of racism for the racism perpetrated itself, that would be akin to blaming the victims of rape for the rape that occurs 🤨.
Whatever compromise comes of this so called immigration compromise reflects the degree of prejudice and discrimination (also known as racism) that Congress will deem acceptable as law and as proffered by the president 🧐.
I take a little offense to allegations that the president is racist,” Nielsen said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
Sure you do Ms. Nielsen, as do many of the ignorant viewers of Fox News, or even racists themselves would feel by taking offense of the admonishment of the sincere fiction in those actions and words (also known as tough language) that you feel entitled to. That offense stems from the fragility of whiteness. This sociopathic self concept of whiteness can be broken down, as I see it, and as sociologists Hernan Vera, Joe R. Feagin and Andrew Gordon sees it, as the “sincere fictions of the white self”.
Racist or other discriminatory actions always involve a representation of the other, who is acted upon, and a representation of the acting self. The self-concept that the presence of the other activates in the perpetrator, as much as prejudice about the other, helps to explain racial oppression and violence. For example, by seeing the other as lazy and dirty, the perpetrators of racism view themselves as industrious and clean.[3]
So when republican congresswoman Martha McSally, an ex-fighter pilot, now running for retiring Senator Jeff Flake’s seat, exclaims that she too uses salty language because that is what fighter pilots presumably all do, then this virtuous view of themselves overshadow and legitimate the derogatory views they have of others.
I’m a fighter pilot and I talk like one,” she said in an announcement video, a fiery beginning to one of the nation’s premier Senate contests. “That’s why I told Washington Republicans to grow a pair of ovaries and get the job done.”
Later, she refused to condemn Trump’s closed-door description of African countries as “shitholes.”
“I speak a little salty behind closed doors at times as well, so I’m not going to throw the first stone on using any language,” McSally said after facing dozens of supporters inside a Tucson airport hangar.[4]
Okay then.
After Dick Durbin said Friday that President Trump had complained about the United States taking immigrants from “shithole countries,” two Republican senators who attended the meeting took issue with their Democratic colleague.
“[W]e do not recall the president saying these comments specifically,” David Perdue (Ga.) and Tom Cotton (Ark.) said in a joint statement that read like it was drafted by a lawyer.
The doubling down and conviction of our senior lawmakers makes the sincere fiction of America First prideful, but its racist leanings seem plausibly deniable.
Plausible deniability is the ability of people (typically senior officials in a formal or informal chain of command) to deny knowledge of or responsibility for any damnable actions committed by others in an organizational hierarchy because of a lack of evidence that can confirm their participation, even if they were personally involved in or at least willfully ignorant of the actions. In the case that illegal or otherwise disreputable and unpopular activities become public, high-ranking officials may deny any awareness of such acts to insulate themselves and shift blame onto the agents who carried out the acts, as they are confident that their doubters will be unable to prove otherwise. The lack of evidence to the contrary ostensibly makes the denial plausible, that is, credible, although sometimes it merely makes it unactionable.
The emboldened word “unactionable” is what begs the question in my mind as to how can we hold whiteness accountable for Trump’s racism? Are we simply going to be held captive to this ideology and notion for as long as the United States can exist? Do we simply not hold whiteness culpable for the ensuing misery and violence it portends for the world over? Do we simply absolve it as being helpless and, or haplessly complicit in its undue influence to the overwhelming resources that capitalism has afforded them over centuries in the making, aided and abetted by the sincere fictions of the white self?
I understand that I may be subject to rebuke over what I have written here. That in defiance or in noncompliance of the status quo, I may face a withering disrepute from many who perceive my thoughts as, granted Black struggle and rage — excessive and unwarranted which ultimately invites resentment, the white fog, and white rage, even reverse racism. I have responded to such retort in many of my philosophical reasonings here on medium. But I guess it could be better received coming from Steven Michael who took a huge step in accountability with his interpretation.
Instead of proving to us how advanced you are collectively at lying, deceit, and at creating falsehoods, show some accountability. These sincere fictions only show how entrenched you are in the existential false narratives of your groupthink persistence and your unsustainable grip on a delusional reality.
And by the way to my fellow Black readers who normally don’t provide much commentary to my articles…
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[2]
[3] Vera, H., Feagin, J., & Gordon, A. (1995). Superior Intellect?: Sincere Fictions of the White Self. The Journal of Negro Education, 64(3), 295–306. doi:10.2307/2967210
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