Boomerang
President Donald Trump’s racist twitter fusillade against Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings last weekend came as no surprise. By now anyone who doesn’t think that Trump is a racist is a racist himself or herself. They may not think they are racist and, they may say they don’t have a racist bone in their body. They may deny their own racism and Trump’s racism, and they may even believe it. That doesn’t change the fact that Trump is a racist and they are too.
That last statement will upset many people, and that’s good. Change doesn’t come from complacency or having a good conscience.
So how can people not be aware of the president’s racism or even their own? There are many factors, but I will start with the simplest explanation, which is usually the best one.
There has always been racist current in American history, from the Mayflower to Donald Trump’s last tweet. It’s sometimes strong, and sometimes it weakens making us think it is disappearing. But it has not disappeared, merely become an undercurrent, detectable if you dive a little under the surface.
As a swimmer and diver, I know that when you are going with the current you may not be aware that there is a current. It feels good, normal, natural. In contrast, if you are going against the current or worse, caught in one too strong to swim out of, you certainly realize it. You can’t ignore, it can kill you. It’s alarming, threatening, downright scary. But if you float easily with the undercurrent of American racism, it’s easy to deny there is any such current, you feel no threat, no fear and may not accept or even understand what the others are screaming about. The victims of racism cannot help to perceive it; those who flow with the racist current, which makes their progress in the water faster and easier, can easily ask: what current?
Denial of racism is made easier by the fact that for most of its history, racism has been normal in this country. Making America great again means restoring that normal state, eschewing “political correctness,” and being able to call an undocumented person an illegal alien.
Currently, many people lament the fact that Trump is “dividing the nation.” That’s true in a sense, but in fact what Trump really does is to exploit and worsen already-existing divisions, not conjure up brand-new ones, and to convey the message that it is OK to loudly proclaim the ugly ideas and feelings that flow from those divisions.
Trump discovered that America’s historical fault lines were still there, and ever since he has been fracking and setting off TNT charges to create earthquakes to bury what remains of the racial progress made since the 1960s. Like a magician, the president then uses the racial ruckus he creates to distract people away from the other point in the Republican agenda: redistributing wealth from the bottom and middle to the top.
It is true, as Jose Marti wrote, that “come from where it may racism divides.” But while Trump has been busy maliciously widening divisions, Trump has also deliberately or unwittingly united. Trump has united all those who, consciously or unconsciously, define the nation through the lens of white supremacy, from the people in the white robes to the genteel suburbanites who delude themselves about their own racism. And, he has divided this group of heavy and lite racists from everybody else.
But Donald Trump has unwittingly done another important thing. That’s because there is a kind of political parallel to Newton’s third law: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Trump has united not only the racists but also all those who, regardless of race, loathe racism and racists like him. In this, his greatest accomplishment has been to produce a spontaneous, reflexive solidarity of resistance, especially a black-brown solidarity that has always existed in words but seldom, as now, in praxis.
What the heck is praxis? It’s a useful concept. Wikipedia gives an excellent definition: Praxis is “the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practiced, embodied, or realized.”
Praxis. When Trump directs his racist fire against four women political leaders of color–including a naturalized African immigrant, a Puerto Rican Latina born in the Bronx, an African American whose ancestors were here long before Trump’s German ancestors, and an Arab-American from Detroit—he unites the resistance. When heavyweight African American political leaders like Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings jump up, irate, to denounce the unconscionable treatment of immigrant Latino children on the border, this unites the resistance.
Brown-black solidarity, largely symbolic BT (Before Trump or before T-Rex), is now increasingly concrete, material. Trump’s own white supremacist praxis—which starts with his racist rhetoric and then is embodied in practice through a wide range of policies and actions—from the hounding of immigrants to cuts in food stamps to reinstatement of capital punishment at the federal level—has eradicated the differences among the targets.
Trump has enabled a praxis of mutual defense and joint resistance against abuse and for dignity. He has even helped change the language and frame through which race is viewed. To encompass, for example, the members of Congress singled out for attack by Trump—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—in a single term, women of color, reflects a new language rooted in a new praxis, a higher level of unity and consciousness. Trump has made us aware that, when it comes to the racist current in America, embodied openly by Trump and covertly by the Republican Party, we are all in the same boat. This realization is the worst news possible for the president and for the GOP.
