Trump and race

S P SETH

The US was built on the brutal exploitation of African slaves, which enshrined white supremacy. And it shows even today with the recent developments in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white supremacist ran his vehicle into anti-racism protesters killing one woman. White supremacy was the natural order of things. Even after the US Civil War that was supposed to end slavery, the southern states fought a rear guard action to keep their black population under control through segregation and denying them the right to vote, as well as by creating terror through public lynching of blacks.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his book, Between The World And Me, about white amnesia on the race issue: “They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs….” To further illustrate the scale of the black tragedy, Coates writes, “At the onset of the Civil War, our [slaves] stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the primary product rendered by our stolen bodies—cotton—was America’s primary export…”

The Civil Rights legislation of the sixties under President Johnson was an important advance, but a number of Republican states have passed legislation to gerrymander electorates to ensure that very few Afro Americans will be able to return their choice of elected representatives and by putting obstacles for them to vote. It is like the US is going back to the ugly past where blacks must be kept in their place. And Trump’s crass appeal to racist elements in the US as his political base is making a bad situation worse.

His response to the recent events in Charlottesville, where white supremacists and neo-Nazi elements rallied to bring back the old order by creating a moral equivalency between them and the counter-protesters says it all. Trump tweeted, “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of beautiful statues and monuments.” In a follow up tweet, he said, “The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced.”

It is sad to see President Trump elevating the Confederate statues to represent something great or noble in a history laden with brutality and exploitation of blacks. Indeed, the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was not about statues but about race. These statues were indeed built across the south in early 20^th century as a demonstration of white racial superiority. It seemed to say that southern states had not really lost the Civil War, and the new monuments were a testimony to it. This was a new narrative and southern states sought to exercise a veto over the country’s political future.

Trump’s sympathy for white supremacists is not at all surprising. This is his political base and that remains solid around 35 per cent. Reacting to the neo-Nazi protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said that there were some “very fine people” among these white racists and that their “culture” embodied in statues glorifying the Confederate/racist history should not be threatened.

Let us not mince words. Trump is a racist and his political career was built on it, with important support from elements in the Republican Party, though some of them might now seek to distance themselves because he is too ‘uncouth’ at times. As David Remnick writes in the New Yorker that during the election campaign Trump came out “… as a demagogue who had launched a business career with blacks-need-not-apply housing developments in Queens and a political career with a racist conspiracy theory as birtherism”, loudly announcing that Obama was not born in the United States. Interestingly, though, about the same percentage of people, who constitute Trump’s solid base, also subscribed to the belief that Obama was not born in the United States. And he found his political roots in the Republican Party.

Watching the adulation for Trump from some people during the election campaign, President Obama reportedly said in despair at the time, “ We’ve seen this coming. Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years.” Obama added, “What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails.” And: “…on November 9^th”, as editor Remnick writes, “the United States elected a dishonest, inept, unbalanced, and immoral human being as its President and Commander-in-Chief…”

Imagine another nearly four years of Trump with his racism!

Commenting on Trump’s response to Charlottesville events, the British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, reportedly said, “I thought he got it totally wrong and I thought it was a great shame that he failed to make a clear and fast distinction which we all are able to make between fascists and anti-fascists, between Nazis and anti-Nazis.”

And Obama simply quoted Nelson Mandela: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

Note: this article was first published in the Daily Times.