Tuesday, Dec 6, 2016 03:00 AM +0300
Those who elected Trump want to undo progress and harm black and brown people. Who cares what's in their hearts?
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(Credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking)
One of my best friends teaches English at a community college located in one of the Rust Belt-like towns along the Connecticut River, where good-paying industrial jobs long ago vanished overseas. Her students are working class and poor strivers. Many are immigrants.
These several dozen students are white, black and brown. Most of them are the first in their families to receive any amount of post-high school education.
My friend explained that most of her students were uninterested in politics until they realized what Donald Trump and his policies would do to people like them. Now they are terrified and scared. But there is one student in her class who was happy. He is white and working class. My friend told me how he sits in the corner of the room with apparent contempt on his face whenever the class discusses racism or sexism. During one of the days after Trump’s election he demanded to talk in class about the outcome. But the class was doing something else and my friend asked him to be quiet. This angered him.
He stood up, taking off his belt and then putting it on her desk. Smiling, with a mix of threat and joy, he announced that “We won!” His point was made: This is “his” country — and by extension (at least in his mind) his classroom — now and again. For this angry young white man, America’s natural order of things had been restored with the election of Donald Trump.
There have been many such instances in the days and weeks after Election Day. Unfortunately, a good number have escalated from mere words to serious threats and acts of physical violence. For example, an 8-year-old black child had his arm broken as he tried to defend his 4-year-old sister from white children who taunted and assaulted them.
VideoPriebus: Trump is a "Socratic method guy"
Mosques have been sent letters saying, “There’s a new sheriff in town – President Donald Trump . . . He’s going to cleanse America and make it shine again. And, he’s going to start with you Muslims.”
Three white men are also now being investigated by police for the killing of a black man — an apparent post-Trump election hate crime in America’s most liberal city.
In total, in the days since Trump’s victory, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented at least 900 hate crimes against people of color, Muslims, gays, lesbians and others who are marked as the Other in America. Trump’s election is not coincidental to this foul behavior. It is causal.
This post-Trump election outbreak of hate is yet another reminder that the United States is a violent society. Political violence is neither foreign nor strange here; it is part of the nation’s cultural DNA. But even by those standards, this political moment somehow feels different and out of step with the America that elected Barack Obama twice as president and the decades of social and political progress that made his victories possible. Something is very much amiss.
For many white Americans, socialization through the schools and news media aided by the historical myth of American exceptionalism has consigned that history to the memory hole. First Nations people know that America is a country built on violence. African-Americans know that, too. The twin crimes against humanity — genocide and slavery — which lie at the heart of the nation’s founding belie any innocent notions about the country’s essentially benign character.
One would think that the descendants of the poor, white and working-class folks who were slaughtered in mining towns by Pinkerton goons and other agents of the robber barons in the 19th and 20th century America would remember that history, too. Alas, it seems that many of them have either forgotten this pain or had it washed away by the promise of whiteness and the American Dream. Or perhaps those white voters turned that pain in the wrong direction and in an act of political masochism backed Donald Trump.
* * *
Politics
is often discussed using abstract and seemingly neutral language.
Politics is about who gets what, how and why. In a democracy, “politics”
and “public opinion” are often explained as being fundamentally about
“matters of public concern” to which elites feel obligated to respond.In all, politics in America is often made to feel and sound like something distant and sterile — matters for bureaucrats and political candidates to fight about. This is a veneer and a mask. The political is very much the personal, and the decisions of politicians impact our day-to-day lives and futures in a myriad of ways. But Trump did something relatively novel in recent American politics: He was able to take the naked anger and rage of members of his public and successfully direct it at their fellow Americans.
During his presidential campaign, Trump often spoke about enemies abroad and “fat cats” on Wall Street or in Washington who hustle the system. But the real enemies were actually elsewhere — groups like Latinos, Arabs and Muslims and black folks, who are not at the top of America’s social pyramid but much closer to the bottom. Driven by authoritarian leanings and what social psychologists call “social dominance behavior,” Trump’s voters could not resist the chance to put their boots on the backs of other people in order to lift themselves up, psychologically and perhaps materially as well. Ultimately, Trumpism is an opportunity for angry white conservatives and their allies to do violence and harm to other Americans.
By repealing the Affordable Care Act, Donald Trump will quite likely shorten millions of people’s lives. It is estimated that lack of health insurance kills at least 45,000 Americans a year.
Trump has promised to forcibly remove millions of “illegal aliens” from the United States. Beyond the actual physical violence involved in this grand plan, this would also inflict emotional, economic and psychological harm on countless people.
The president-elect has threatened to create a de facto enemies list for Muslims. His advisers have even suggested using the World War II-era internment of Japanese-Americans as a model for how best to deal with Muslims living in the U.S. who are perceived as threats to “national security.” This is dangerous. Beyond the indignity and violation of civil rights, such an action would result in psychological and physical harm to those Muslims and Arabs targeted by Trump’s security forces.
Read more: http://www.salon.com/2016/12/06/forget-dialogue-with-donald-trump-and-his-supporters-they-have-empowered-hatred-and-harm/
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