It is another day. With it comes another entry in the category "ugly things that the horrible people at Donald Trump rallies do to people who dare to dissent against the American Il Duce.”
At a rally in Janesville, Wisconsin, last week, two of Donald Trump's minions attacked a 15-year-old white girl named Alex Drake. One of the Trumpeteers allegedly sexually assaulted her. When she fought back, the second Trump enforcer then pepper sprayed the teenager.
Drake's offense was a protest sign that said “Damn, Donald, back at it again with the white supremacy." One of her compatriots also had a "Black Lives Matter" sign.
Donald Trump's racist goon squad then, as if on cue, shouted the de facto white supremacist slogan "All Lives Matter," three words that are the new "White Power!" and "Sieg Heil" in America’s Age of Obama. Other Trumpeteers then called the teenager a "nigger lover," a "bitch," and a "commie."
Violence at Donald Trump’s rallies is part of the spectacle and pleasure that he offers to the attendees. Trump wallows in violence, and extols its virtues to his followers. Violence is “fun.” In the “good old days,” he muses, those who oppose Donald Trump’s racism, nativism, xenophobia, and misogyny would be “taken out on stretchers.”
It is almost inevitable that the violence at Donald Trump’s rallies will escalate in the months to come. At the same Wisconsin rally, Trumpeteers tried to bring guns inside the venue. Donald Trump’s supporters have punched, stomped on, and otherwise abused protesters. Racial slurs have been hurled by the Trumpeteers at people of color. Someone will be seriously hurt or killed at a Donald Trump rally. He will deny culpability. There will then be a moment of outrage by the mainstream corporate news media and the American mass public, but they are numb to Trump’s violence. It will all be forgotten and washed away by the “cleansing” waters of the 24/7 news cycle, in a country where, as William Faulkner famously described it, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
White America may not have a history. But history has not forgotten the white American public. There are zombie ideas that linger about, semi-permanent, in America’s cultural and political imaginations. They have not been purged—they simply hide in plain sight or make sharp thrusts at the weak and the vulnerable at an opportune moment.
The hateful language that Donald Trump’s supporters used against Alex Drake is anachronistic. The idea that someone would call a person a “nigger lover” or “commie” in the year 2016 sounds like the punch line for a comedy skit or joke.
Nevertheless, those words were spoken. They were violent acts of speech that accompanied the pepper spray and sexual abuse suffered by Alex Drake.
Words have meaning, context, and history. When Trump’s thugs said “nigger lover” and “commie,” they were signaling to a particular understanding of how the world ought to be (and by implication, their displeasure at how American society is organized at present).
As we grapple with the color line, Trump’s ascendance, and the resurgent racism of the American right wing, this is but one more example of the oft-cited and much overused—but still very much relevant and important—“teachable moment.”
When I hear the phrase “nigger lover” I think of the book To Kill a Mockingbird and its powerful dialogue:
"Scout," said Atticus, "nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don't mean anything—like snot-nose. It's hard to explain—ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody's favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It's slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody."
"You aren't really a nigger-lover, then, are you?"
"I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody... I'm hard put, sometimes—baby, it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you."
It’s doubtful this was on the mind or even located somewhere on the cognitive map of the man who called a young white woman such a thing. For him, a racist throwback troglodyte, “nigger lover” is a slur of the first order, an unpardonable sin for a white person to commit.
What is a “commie?” Is this some allusion to a vague and misunderstood notion of “socialism,” “liberals,” or “progressives?” A reference torn out of Fox News and the bigger sewer that is the right-wing new entertainment hate media? A catch-all phantasm that signals everything which “real Americans” hate but that “those people” (the liberals, blacks, minorities, feminists, gays, and queers) love?
I am unsure.
But as James Zeigler explains in his book Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism, there is a deep connection in the paranoid (white) American political imagination—especially among Republicans and movement conservatives—between the Black Freedom Struggle and “communists.” This is the logic and political imagination of John Birchers and their descendants who still hold great power in the Republican Party.
As they marched to their destinies on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside of Selma, Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the other freedom warriors of the African-American civil rights movement were met by a sign with a picture of King at a “Communist Training School.” This sign was but one of hundreds of such displays paid for by the “anti-Communist” “pro-American” “Christian” group, the John Birch Society.
The Ku Klux Klan, the United States’ largest terrorist organization, was also fervently “anti-Communist” and “pro-Christian.” White supremacy was understood to naturally complement those political positions:
The Ku Klux Klan tried to intimidate African-Americans by warning them of the dangers of “Communism” and how the lynching tree awaited if they dared succumb to its “temptations.”
American elites would further a narrative that linked the Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights to “Communism.”
In the highly influential and widely read Life magazine, presidential historian Arthur Schlesinger told readers during the 1940s that the Communist Party USA was sinking its “tentacles” into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover waged a decades-long war on American “leftists,” civil rights activists, labor organizers, academics, artists, intellectuals, writers, feminists, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and others marked as “suspicious” and prone to “infiltration” by “Communists.” Much of this extrajudicial and quasi-legal harassment, intimidation, violence, and even murder was conducted under the Cointel Program.
Hoover’s paranoid fantasies and racist threats echo through to the Age of Obama. The United States’ first black president has been pilloried and savaged by bizarre claims that he is a secret Muslim, hates white people, is not eligible to be president because he was born in another country, or is going to use the Affordable Care Act to “oppress” white people.
As suggested by signs at tea party rallies, Obama is also a “communist” or “socialist” or “fascist” who is planning to commit anti-white racial genocide.
This is but a continuation of the white right’s decades-long obsession with the supposed threat poised by “commies” and “black radicals.”
Generational replacement should cure America of these zombie ideas. But unfortunately, while overt white supremacy and public displays of racism are on the decline, young white people are not as racially progressive and forward-thinking as many Americans would like to believe. Racism is learned behavior: Racism and white supremacy are inter-generational lessons.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s voters are much older and whiter than the American public en masse. In isolation, those demographic markers are not absolute indicators of a given person’s political values and beliefs. For example, there are older white folks who bled and continue to fight for full and equal rights along the color line. There are older white folks who fought in the Black Freedom Struggle. There are older white folks who continue to put in work for Black Lives Matter, in support of undocumented residents, and live the principles of humanism and cosmopolitanism.
Unfortunately, there are also a core group of older, white, alienated, and racist Americans who support Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
These are the people who keep zombie ideas such as “commie” and “nigger lover” alive.
Age is no guarantee of wisdom. But,age does not mean that a person cannot continue to learn new life lessons.
Trumpeteers and others who are paralyzed with fear over America’s changing racial demographics and enraged that (to their eyes) the wages of whiteness and white supremacy are paying decreasing dividends in post-civil rights America should reflect on the following words from James Baldwin’s brilliant essay On Being White and Other Lies:
By deciding that they were white…. By persuading themselves that a Black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life…. By informing their children that Black women, Black men and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves. And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for…stable populations, cheerful natives and cheap labor…. White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people).As the truism and folk saying goes, maybe it is possible to teach an old dog some new tricks. It’s doubtful that Trump’s supporters are capable of such growth. Nevertheless, let’s continue to keep trying to teach them some new lessons.
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