So We’re Wrong For Calling The Racist President Trump A Racist?!
Evidently the First Amendment does not apply to us either since telling the truth hurts “real American” feelings
My hope is that they try to comprehend this. Mr. Trump could never disprove to us, nor to the entire world watching this shitshow unfold, that he is not a racist. Psychoanalyzing white people has become a chore for us in resistance and in protest, and I remain steadfastly aware that this too indirectly feeds into the vanity and insanity of whiteness. Exposing them or forcing them to look at themselves in the mirror (self-introspection) mires them in this pathetic denialism, while solipsistically pegging non whites as incredulously envious and covetous of their corruptible self-described social status.
The indefatigable denialism invoked and insulated by this pack mentality typifies the cultural crisis that we are confronted with as a nation under this particular presidency. A man this crass, that unfit, and so inept has managed to become president in this day and era, and to top it off he did so solely and simply by being an uninhibited racist. Even if he wanted to or tried to hide it Trump just can’t help himself from being a bona fide racist. And his apologists, sympathizers and enablers are are all to happy to indulge him because they are hopelessly the same. Ignorantly, they have come to define American culture and we shouldn’t allow them to do so in contempt of American values.
American culture has taught whites to believe they represent the intellectual and cultural vanguard, to conclude that racial inequalities cannot be traced to their past or present behavior and to view their dominant status — their privilege — as natural and yet invisible. Joe Feagin, Sociologist.¹
That invisiblity is quite visible to the trained eye of many who have been wronged, insulted, assaulted, and corrupted by this unearned privilege and ahistorical sense of entitlement. It only seems impressive due to: unquantifiable benefits reaped from slave labor and its ensuing legacy; the redistribution of wealth under various social programs (that seem like the socialism they claim to abhor to me); and corporate welfare everytime the U.S. economy goes into a tailspin.
Even poor whites who willlingly impoverish themselves mentally by upholding a lost cause would rather allow the 1 percent to continue to disadvantage them so long as they and the government are seen as treating them better than people of color. It’s just stupefying stupidity.
And it is indicative of the vast majority of people in our Congress. Here are some of the congressional voices speaking, as captured by Slate, on their constituents behalf in defense of the indefensible racist tweets by their president. They think that by politicizig their answers they could throw the stench of racism off of their president.
Sen. Roy Blunt (Missouri)
“Just because the so-called squad constantly insults and attacks the president isn’t a reason to adopt their unacceptable tactics,” Blunt said in a statement to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “There is plenty to say about how destructive House Democrats’ policies would be for our economy, our health care system, and our security. I think that’s where the focus should be.”
Sen. Susan Collins (Maine)
Collins released the following statement: “I disagree strongly with the views and comments of some of the far-left members of the House Democratic Caucus — especially when it comes to their views on socialism, their anti-Semitic rhetoric, and their negative comments about law enforcement — but the President’s tweet that some Members of Congress should go back to the ‘places from which they came’ was way over the line, and he should take that down.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina)
Graham said on Fox & Friends, “Mr. President, you’re gonna win. Just knock it down a notch. We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists. They hate Israel. They hate our own country. They’re calling the guards along our border — the border patrol agents — concentration camp guards. They accuse people who support Israel of doing it for the Benjamins. They’re anti-Semitic. They’re anti-America. Aim higher. We don’t need to know anything about them personally. Talk about their policies. … I think they’re American citizens who were duly elected that are running on an agenda that is disgusting.”
Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio)
Portman said in a statement to Slate, “I think it’s divisive and wrong. I wish the President would talk more about the strong economy that he has helped create, and unite people around that.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah)
Romney told NBC10Boston, “I certainly feel a number of these new members of Congress have views that are not consistent with my experience and not consistent with building a strong America.” Romney said, “At the same time, I recognize that the president has a unique and noble calling to unite all Americans regardless of our creeds or race or place of our national origin, and I think in that case, the president fell far short.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (Florida)
Rubio told reporters, “The president shouldn’t have written that. I think it damages him. It damages the country, and none of us should be participants in identity politics.” But when asked if Trump’s tweets were racist, Rubio said he doesn’t “read into people’s intentions.”
Sen. Tim Scott (South Carolina)
Scott tweeted, “Prior to this weekend, we saw the Democratic Party embroiled in a racist controversy. From Kamala Harris attacking Joe Biden on segregationists, to four black and brown women chastising Democratic leadership for attacking women of color, it is clear that the Democratic Party has serious issues along these lines. Instead of sharing how the Democratic Party’s far-left, pro-socialist policies — not to mention the hateful language some of their members have used toward law enforcement and Jews — are wrong for the future of our nation, the President interjected with unacceptable personal attacks and racially offensive language. No matter our political disagreements, aiming for the lowest common denominator will only divide the nation further.
“What has really happened here is that the president and his supporters have been forced to endure months of allegations of racism,” said Representative Dan Meuser, Republican of Pennsylvania. “This ridiculous slander does a disservice to our nation.”
And this republican representative from Maryland, named Andy Harris, went on the radio in Baltimore and said “Clearly it’s not a racist comment, he could have meant, ‘Go back to the district they came from, to the neighborhood they came from”.
Yeah. Delusional.
Yeah, but most Democrats too, have run on platforms that conclude the presumption of innocence and the aiding and abetting of privilege invisibility to assauge the pack mentality of whites so that they can obtain and hold their opportunistic political office. They consider these tropes and bootstrapping allusions by most whites today as valid arguments. Arlie Russell Hochild conducted a investigation about this for her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, and Brando Starkey of the Undefeated summarizes this presumption with clarity here.
[…] They feel as if black folk, other minorities, immigrants and refugees have cut ahead of them in line, meaning the government caters to others before them. The line-cutting angers them, although they never question why they should occupy the first position. That implicit assumption — I should be tended to before all others — encapsulates how they view white privilege as natural and invisible.¹
Senator Rubio and Senator Scott would like to impress upon whites that they earned their spots on the line and worked just as hard as ordinary whites do to get where they are today in a lamentable defense of white resentment and groveling effort to appease it. This is what self-deceit looks like.
Once again it is worth me citing this well written and well researched journal in the Association for Psychological Science about the pyschology of racially white privilege.
[…]Whites can cloak unearned advantage by denying it is unearned. For instance, in the context of social class, we find that the privileged claim to work harder and will even expend more effort when exposed to evidence of their advantage (Phillips & Lowery, 2018). Other work finds that individuals who garner a job through personal connections, as opposed to hard work, will nevertheless claim that their personal effort was responsible for their success (Belmi, Phillips, & Laurin, 2018; DiTomaso, 2013; Phillips, 2016). Given that racial privilege is propagated in part by segregated access to advantaged hiring networks (DiTomaso, 2013), the reinterpretation of such advantage as merit is all the more important. Indeed, claims of effort in the face of privilege allow for the interpretation of systemic inequity as deserved.
Critical to the everyday psychology of privilege is that innocence does not require effort on the part of every privileged person. Individual Whites are born into a society that predates their individual experiences, motivations, and behaviors. Like privilege, innocence can be enjoyed today, thanks in part to the accrual and maintenance of innocence yesterday (Haney-López, 1996; Katznelson, 2005).
Now somehow Trump is seen as protecting that white innocence and their denialism, and now the tables have turned with the protectee protecting the protector from a serious (but still not serious) enough backlash that still has not warranted much less a censure, or presidential rebuke. The House vote is a nonbinding resolution.
Resolved, That the House of Representatives —
(1) believes that immigrants and their descendants have made America stronger, and that those who take the oath of citizenship are every bit as American as those whose families have lived in the United States for many generations;
(2) is committed to keeping America open to those lawfully seeking refuge and asylum from violence and oppression, and those who are willing to work hard to live the American Dream, no matter their race, ethnicity, faith, or country of origin; and
(3) strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color by saying that our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should “go back” to other countries, by referring to immigrants and asylum seekers as “invaders,” and by saying that Members of Congress who are immigrants (or those of our colleagues who are wrongly assumed to be immigrants) do not belong in Congress or in the United States of America.
This. Resolves. Nothing.
The U.S. Constitution allows Congress to censure its own members and even to expel them. None of which I expect coming down for many of its own despicable bunch of racists.
The president could and should receive censure but he basically received a campaign boost for reelection. This campaign rhetoric has all the trappings of what initially got Trump elected in the first place as Adam Serwer of TheAtlantic summarily writes.
This is not, fundamentally, a battle over facts, but a clash of values. Trump’s rise to the leadership of the Republican Party began with his embrace of the racist conspiracy theory that the first black president was not born in America. The point was not that birtherism is false, which its adherents all know; the point was that people like Barack Obama — a black man, a second-generation immigrant with an Arabic middle name — can never truly be American the way white people who got here yesterday can. Embracing birtherism meant embracing the idea that American citizenship only truly belongs to white people, a principle from which Trump has never wavered since.
The Vanity and Insanity Of Whiteness Series
It Knows No Bounds, Has No Shame, and Is Of No Moral Value
Now even a foreign country like Israel is seen as mattering more than non white American citizens. It is now more apparent than ever that they want what they perceive as their country back.
