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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a primary-night event at the Mar-a-Lago Club’s Donald J. Trump Ballroom in Palm Beach, Fla., March 15, 2016
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Donald Trump continues his march to the Republican presidential nomination, spurred on by tapping into the racist paranoia of white conservatives all across the country who have found in him a leader who gives voice to their base nature.
As the inevitable drum beats, many white liberals have basked in their own sanctimonious outrage that this kind of stark violence, racism and xenophobia has gained momentum in the United States of America. Some have even expressed utter disbelief that it even exists.
They have pontificated on the dangers of a Trump presidency—the embarrassment it would bring upon the nation, the perilous position in which it would place our international relationships. They have wrung their hands and lamented the impending doom that awaits us if Trump wins and plunges the United States into a dark well of chaos, destruction and hatred that they claim ran dry long ago.
They have buried their heads in the sand and pretended that Trump is an anomaly, a fluke that is not representative of what this country stands for—and in that, they could not be more wrong.
Racism is a system, not just a word or a feeling, or even a Confederate flag. It is not just a white man assaulting a black woman at a Trump rally. It is not just a white man assaulting a black man at a Trump rally.
I have written previously that Donald Trump is as American as the Ku Klux Klan, and though true, that is much too obvious.
Trump is as American as the friendly white woman who told me that the racism her preferred candidate has displayed really bothers her, but she’s casting her vote for her anyway because it’s really time for a woman to be president.
He is as American as the nice white man who told me that he fully understands why some black people are frustrated that no politicians speak to the special and urgent concerns of many black people in America, but that we all have our priorities, and dismantling white supremacy just isn’t high on his list.
He is as American as the mainstream media, which has trafficked in false equivalency and protest porn for ratings, speaking of the morally bankrupt actions of Trump supporters in the same breath as they speak of black people fighting for freedom, as if they were flip sides of the same coin.
He is as American as the concerned white people who applaud Chicago activists putting their lives on the line to shut down a Trump rally but who take no risks of their own.
He is as American as a Wall Street-loving, Democratic mayor who closes public schools and covers up a police officer’s execution of a black man on a public street.
He is as American as black people who traffic in respectability politics, drawing distinctions between themselves and black people in poverty who are constantly targeted by police and unable to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
He is as American as the nation’s first black president disingenuously mislabeling Trump’s hate speech as free speech, and the actions of protesters as “misguided.”
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