Yesterday, CNN reported:
A coalition of major civil rights and faith groups on Sunday called on President Donald Trump to “directly disavow the white supremacists” who participated in violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend — a reference to Trump’s remarks condemning the deadly clashes on Saturday.
“It represents a failure of leadership from the nation’s chief executive,” the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella group, said in a statement. “It is long past time for Trump to personally and unequivocally denounce white supremacy, violent extremism, and hate in all its forms.”
The group also called for the ouster of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka, who have drawn criticism from civil rights organizations for their associations with the alt-right, a hodgepodge of far-right, white nationalist groups that drafted off the President’s 2016 campaign to rise to national prominence.
For Trump to disavow white supremacists — to claim he has no connection with their current rise even while selecting the likes of Bannon, Gorka, and Stephen Miller as close advisers — would be dishonest. For him to denounce them after having persistently courted their support would be disingenuous.
What civil rights leaders are calling on Trump to do is something he cannot with credibility claim: that he is not a racist.
The unpalatable truth is that when Donald Trump was elected president, he won the support of voters who either welcomed his racism or at the very least were willing to turn a blind eye to it.
Just over a year ago, during the presidential campaign when Donald Trump repeatedly attacked Gonzalo Curiel (the Indiana-born judge presiding over a case against Trump University) who Trump believed couldn’t be impartial because of his Mexican ancestry, House Speaker Paul Ryan had no difficulty in describing Trump’s remarks as the “textbook definition” of racism.
Long before then and up to the present day, Trump’s racism has been no harder to detect than the odor of a man with insufferable foul breath.
And yet, in spite of this and in spite of a mountain of evidence that no one can dispute, Trump’s racism is still treated by many politicians, journalists and pundits like one of those ultimately unanswerable questions — like whether a dog has a soul.
This issue is sustained as a question on the basis that we lack enough knowledge about Trump’s interior life, which is to say that in order to know whether he is a racist we would supposedly have to be able to gain insight into what animates his very being. Only God knows whether Trump is a racist, so the implicit argument seems to turn.
This is nonsense.
Why?
To determine whether someone is a racist is a determination, first and foremost, about behavior.
To doubt, for instance, whether the birther campaign that Trump led was anything less in substance, appearance, and intent, than a racist attack on Barack Obama is a form of denialism — a refusal to accept the implications of evidence that very few people ever had any difficulty in interpreting.
Even though racism is defined in terms of beliefs, it is clear that in practice we only attach significance to such beliefs if they result in some kind of tangible expression.
If somewhere there are racists who racism leaves no discernible trace in the world, such a subtle form of racism would hardly be worthy of the name.
Since Trump on countless occasions has acted like a racist, we don’t actually have to know anything about what he thinks in order to say unequivocally that he is indeed a racist.
Under pressure or political guidance, any statements that he might make now to distance himself from the hatred he has with such determination fomented, will be utterly hollow words.
The real question is for the Republican party itself: whether it chooses to remain America’s white party, or whether it’s ready break away from the many currents of bigotry it has harbored for so long.
If it chooses the latter, it’s time for the Republicans to dump Trump.
William Faulkner stated, “The past is present.” I would go so far as to say that the Civil Rights project in America has failed. Having a “black” president only brought all the hidden and repressed racism to the surface, and the election and continued support for Trump from a large sector of the White electorate is a case of people showing their true colors, and not merely a “rise” of right-wing nationalism; it was always there but it expressed itself in more palatable forms, such as Reaganism and its offshoots. What this means is that there is no need for a political correction but rather an American cultural revolution; unfortunately I can see no other course than a long drawn-out bloody affair, because all those “racists” will still be there after Trump is gone.
From outside America it might look like the Civil Rights Movement failed, but ask any African America old enough to remember segregation and I think few would say the present is no better than the past. The fact that systemic inequality and discrimination still exist does not imply that bloody revolution is the answer. Indeed, revolutions don’t have a great track record as instruments of social justice.
As usual, glib calls for revolution have a tendency of coming from those who don’t anticipate shedding any of their own blood.