The boomerang hits the target
[On August 14, 2019, Progreso published “Boomerang.” The following column revisits and updates the ideas expressed in that column.
The thesis then as now is that rather than just dividing the nation, which he did to his political benefit, Trump united two warring camps in American society—on the one hand the racists and the crypto racists, and on the other white antiracists and the black and brown victims of racism.]
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Joe Biden has defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. It was not a landslide as it should have been, given Trump’s atrocious performance on everything, especially the pandemic. It was not that close either. It was a humiliating slap in the face but not a karate kill punch.
Now we can finally say about Donald Trump: Loser, the word that hurts them the most.
Along with many other words, a dictionary full of them, I have written such a dictionary, but I will not inflict it on you here. Just a couple of selected highlights: A arrogant; B bigot; C cruel; L liar. All the way to R racist; X xenophobe.
Many charitable souls saw Donald Trump’s worst flaw as being the fact that he divided the country. He did, but that is not the central point. The divisions were already there. Like a cadaver dog, he smelled them out. Used them. Magnified them for his own aggrandizement.
Trump also united. He 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 is 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. Young people. Women with college degrees. Urban dwellers. Believers in science and reason. Fractious Democrats split between the centrist and progressive wings.
That was his greatest accomplishment, 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 is praxis? It is 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.”
Trump’s racism forced us to move from resistance as an ideal to resistance as praxis, the embodiment of an idea in action. In this case, in voting the racist out.
He did a lot of the work for us. When Trump directs his racist fire against four women political leaders of color–including a naturalized African immigrant, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican, an African American whose ancestors were here long before Trump’s, and an Arab-American from Detroit—he unites the resistance.
When heavyweight African American political leaders like the late Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings jump up, indignant to denounce the unconscionable treatment of immigrant Latino children on the border, this unites the resistance. Trump’s vicious attacks on Cummings and his city of Baltimore welds 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 enacted 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. Now we have made him aware that we will not stand for it.
