Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(52)
— Gregg Popovich
Beloved, the deed has been done. We have—since that “we” must contain, by virtue of our system of government, if not the will, then at least the implied consent, of even the people who opposed with all their souls the choice you made—elected Donald J. Trump as president of the United States of America. Please take measure of every phrase in that sentence. Donald J. Trump, the man who unjustly called into question the citizenship of Barack Obama, our first black president. The man who gave consolation to a gnarled federation of bigots. The man who lent his considerable indignity to berating Muslims, Mexicans, black folk, the other-abled, women, and so many other vulnerable populations. This man has now become the world’s most powerful man because he is president of the United States of America, the most powerful nation in history. For millions this is nothing short of a nightmare, or perhaps more accurately, a whitemare.
The election of President Trump was all about whiteness. How whiteness is ingeniously adaptable to a gross variety of circumstances. How it is at once capable of exulting in privilege while proclaiming it is the least privileged of identities. How it is able to hide in plain sight while detesting every other identity that doesn’t, and can’t, conform to its imperative to invisibility. And how it howls in primal pain at being forgotten while it rushes to spitefully forget and erase all suffering that isn’t its own. You will deny it, of course. Already many of those who once bitterly denounced what President Trump stood for have, in startling reversal of their previous positions, embraced the possibility of his goodness, or, at least, his fitful utility, a trend that will no doubt continue into the future.
My friends, the mistake we often make is to believe that whiteness is only prejudice, that it is only bigotry, that it is only racism, that it is only the cry of hate. That is only partly true. The other part of whiteness is the delusion that it can supply every need that our country has. Both of these impulses suffocate the vitality of democracy. Beloved, Donald Trump is what we are left with when whiteness drains the body politic of crucial self-awareness and we stiffen into a moral corpse.
When the defenders of whiteness proclaim that it is not whiteness that was at stake in electing Trump, but, instead, the ache of poverty and class, what they mostly always fail to mention is that millions of black and brown folk are poor, or working class, too. It is only the white lower and middle classes whose silent suffering is portrayed as having got a president elected. As important as their economic vulnerability is, it is not the major engine of their disgust; rather it is the fury of whiteness unleashed, of whiteness unbounded, of whiteness made, not less white, but even whiter by its class rage, a rage that oddly leaves aside solidarity with millions of other hurting souls whose only reason for exclusion is their color.
Beloved, when the defenders of whiteness argue that the white folk who supported candidate Trump were not magnetized by his miserably shining hatefulness toward so many “others,” they defy the physics of race and the algorithm of bigotry. There is a fairly easy calculus to racism: if it increases, rather than decreases, the force, energy, and structure of racial antagonism, then it is racist, no matter the intent or conscious aim of its perpetrator.
Many white folk, including the wealthy, and the surprising numbers of women who voted for him, whether they can admit it or not, were attracted to candidate Trump, not because he wasn’t President Obama, which is a reasonable political choice, but because he wasn’t the black man who had taken their country. “Make America Great Again” is hardly coded, and not primarily, or merely, a brilliantly deceptive campaign slogan, but a sturdy credo, and the gist of faith in whiteness. To “Make America Great Again” is in truth to make America white again. Some might argue that that can’t possibly be the case. After all, America twice elected Obama to the presidency. Yet we fail to see that a majority of white folk never liked Obama and never wanted him as their president. They never invited him, metaphorically, into their homes. The majority of white folk just got outvoted twice.
Beloved, a massive white rebellion was fomented in our midst, a rebellion driven by resentment of a black man in charge, resentment, too, of the widely perceived, yet grossly exaggerated, black benefit under Obama—that black folk got an unfair leg up, all because, finally, for the first time in 220 years, a black man darkened the Oval Office. It is hard to overstate just how poisonous Obama was believed to be in the precincts of a spurning, rebutting whiteness, a whiteness that measured the seconds until he would no longer be in that white house, in our, or rather, their, White House. Millions of whites couldn’t wait to return power to the white hands from which it had been cruelly snatched for eight years, couldn’t wait to celebrate the victory of the most brazenly white man to claim the presidency since Andrew Johnson.
Beloved, there is a truth to Trump’s election that many of you refuse to see: too many white folk are willing to imperil the ship of state because they lust for revenge. It is, in truth, wevenge, the unrepentant mutiny of a rogue white crew. They seem willing to cast aside a seasoned leader because of her gender, and her connection to the previous captain. Instead, they have embraced a fatally inexperienced skipper who threatens to wreck the vaunted vessel of government in the rocky waters of political ignorance.
Whether he wishes to be or not, Donald Trump is the epitome, not only of white innocence and white privilege, but of white power, white rage, and, yes, even of white supremacy.