(Source: Stacie DaPonte/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Ernie McCray
Some dude on television was trying to make a case that the president is not a white supremacist.
But, hey, I’ve dealt with white supremacists for 79 plus years and I have to say that Donald J. Trump is not only one, he’s the best example of such a being I have ever seen.
Take what he did with Jemele Hill, the ESPN sportscaster, my latest hero. She called him out on his white supremacism and he wants her fired and wants the network to apologize to him for her “untruth.” Scratch the prefix “un” and you see what he really wants her to apologize for.
Anyway, that’s classic white supremacist behavior: trying to stifle the truth when the truth doesn’t flatter you, doesn’t hold you up high.
And the president’s attitude upholds a longstanding white supremacy practice of showing absolutely no tolerance for complaints against racism that people of color raise.
To avowed racists, when we speak out, it’s always wrong, should have been done in another way a.k.a. “through the proper channels” like that’s how we’ve ever gained anything.
Trump just wants us to keep our feelings to ourselves and, instead of doing that, Jemele told it like it is, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, calling out not only him but his friends too, white supremacists like him who are members of the “Say it Loud, I’m Supreme and I’m Proud” branch of their hateful fraternity.
Steve Bannon, for one. Mister Brietbart News. A racist to his very core. Trump’s best man in his marriage to the dark side. A powerful distributor of hateful idealogy.
Nazi loving Milo Yiannopoulous, a celebrity in the alt-right “racial superiority” universe, a man with many followers of the bigoted thoughts he spews.
The Daffy Duck impressionists, his buddy Alex Jones, of InfoWars and his aide, Steve Miller, a sneering Pee Wee Herman look alike, two guys who just plain don’t like dark skinned human beings and don’t mind telling you.
But one has the power of the radio and the other ridiculously silly one has the president’s ear. That’s something to fear.
For good measure: Joe Arpaio, a white supremacist superstar who once lived for the joy of harassing Latinos, got convicted for doing so, and his good buddy, a man they call number 45, signed papers to let him go.
It’s so sad to say but the truth in all this is the Leader of the Free World is, in a nutshell, the “White-Supremacist-in-Chief.” He’s all in.
We Americans and the whole world saw this man avoid condemning neo-nazis and white nationalists and the klan for their sins against humanity and, specifically, for their ugly violent behavior in Charlottesville, leading to the death of a woman who lived her life to help people – choosing, instead, to assign equal blame for the troubles on the streets to those who stood up to these “White Power” yahoos: Black Lives Matter, Cornel West, clergymen and women, peaceful folks carrying signs…
What a shameful sight to see a president so openly and suddenly, just in his lackadaisical non-caring attitude towards addressing our country’s racial divides, whip up hatred and mistrust and further embolden miscreant citizens who were already more and more shedding their sheets and boldly wearing their swastikas in the streets, trying desperately to save their hallowed statues and flags and put minorities solidly in their place.
Now they know their president shares their hopes and dreams of a whiter America.
But thanks to people like Jemele Hill we’ve got somewhat of a conversation going right now in our country about race and if we’re to create a just and inclusive society we’ll have to do just what she did: talk more openly about the racism that divides us as a nation.
We can do that in the many ways we have available to us in our country: through taking to the streets; Op-Ed pieces; letters to the editor; social media; boycotts; strikes; petitions; picketing; on stage; slogans on t-shirts; courses in our schools on bridging differences; promoting diversity in our school clubs; teach-ins; sit-ins; stand-ins; ride-ins; wade-ins; stall-ins; speak-ins…
Our mobilizing and staying on this is urgent because our history tells us loudly and clearly that white supremacists are capable of doing anything to secure their “dominance.” And I mean anything.
Like voting in Trump, their White-Supremacist-in-Chief.
But we keep the faith that there’s a better world within our reach. Don’t we?
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