Category: Equality

AS AMERICA BEGINS TO ATONE FOR RACISM, TRUMP EMBRACES IT

It’s been a head-splitting two months since George Floyd died for the sins of white privilege.  Outside of the White House, important Caucasians in all walks of life are suddenly rushing to atone for the totems of racism. 

Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have finally been put to rest, a scant 158 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. NASCAR banned the confederate flag. HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its streaming platform. Walmart stopped locking up Black hair products.  The Dixie Chicks drove old Dixie down, and will forever be known as simply the Chicks. 

None of these symbolic gestures, of course, begin to touch the deeply entrenched economic and quality of life disparities based on race. Still, it is hard to remember a point in our history when attitudes on racial injustice changed so dramatically in such a short period of time.  Four years ago, the Black Lives Matter movement’s approval rating hovered around 40 percent.  As of two weeks ago, more than two-thirds of the country supported the BLM protests. One poll showed that 88 percent of white respondents found the protests to be justified.  

With the election only three months away, America faces its most profound racial reckoning since the 1960s. Two opposing forces are at work. One is a sustained and rapidly growing movement to eradicate systemic racism. The other is a racist president, doubling down on the white power ethos that propelled him into office. That we are trapped in this bizarre odyssey more than two decades after the death of George Wallace is depressingly mindboggling.

Donald Trump entered this arena by enthralling his supporters with the racist lie that the nation’s first black president was a Kenya-born Muslim. He’s been playing to that crowd ever since. Yet, anyone who has ever run for office, from student council on up, knows that political resiliency flows from an ability to read your constituency and pivot accordingly.  Trump neither reads nor pivots.  Instead, he clings to his signature bigotry, and is cranking it up several notches.  

As a result, our president is now far to the right of Mississippi Republicans. That party’s governor and legislators just passed a law removing the confederate symbol from the state’s flag. Trump, on the other hand, spent the past several weeks as a national spokesman for confederate flags, monuments and ideology. He has opposed his own military advisors and Senate Republican leaders who support changing the names of military bases named for confederate generals. He insists that preserving the memory of men who fought to retain slavery as a vital part of our “Great American Heritage.”

The Mississippi GOP is by no means the only entity that showed our president up when it comes to shedding the worn and weary cloak of white power. The Washington, D.C. football team, over Trump’s objections, is ditching the “Redskins” nickname.  The NFL, also over Trump’s objections, reversed itself on the practice of players taking a knee during the National Anthem to protest police violence against Blacks. Juneteenth, commemorating the freeing of enslaved people, has been made a paid holiday by a number of states and large companies. The American Medical Association declared racism a public health crisis and called for an end to police brutality against Black Americans. Many corporate leaders have resigned after claims of racism and a toxic organizational culture.

All of this happened since George Floyd’s Memorial Day death under the asphyxiating knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.  Through it all, Donald Trump has stood alone as a force against the dismantling of systemic racism.  He insists it doesn’t exist, an assertion with all of the credibility of his earlier claim that the coronavirus was no big deal and would be gone by April.

So here’s the narrative of Trump’s reelection campaign: An unpopular president, already wounded from his failure to manage a pandemic response, hits the accelerator on racism at the height of a seismic racial justice movement.  Outside of an Ayn Rand novel, the storyline makes no sense.  A Marist poll found that 67 percent of Americans say Trump has increased racial tensions since Floyd was murdered. Why is this guy going full bore on racism while the vast majority of Americans are all in for racial reconciliation?

The answer is quite simple: That’s who Donald Trump is. This president’s belief in white supremacy is the closest he gets to an actual ideology.  On all other issues, Trump formulates a position based not on core values and beliefs, but on whatever he thinks is best for him at the time. His racism, however, has been forever embedded in his heart and soul. 

Back in 1973, the federal Justice Department accused the Trump organization of discriminating against Black Americans at its housing project in Brooklyn. As part of the litigation, Elyse Goldweber, a Justice Department lawyer, questioned the now-president in a deposition. According to Goldweber, Trump walked up to her during a coffee break and said, “You know, you don’t want to live with them either.”

With anyone else, you could say that was 47 years ago, enough time to grow out of that mindset.  Not Donald Trump.  Just last week he sent out this tweet: “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”  

Trump lifted an Obama-era requirement that municipalities receiving federal housing funds had to address biased practices connected with low-income areas. His tweet was no dog whistle. The president of the United States was telling suburban white folks that he was protecting them from Black people.  (As The Washington Post’s Eugene Scott noted, most of today’s suburbs are quite diverse, as opposed to the white flight days of the ‘60s and ‘70s, an era Trump equates with greatness.)

Clearly, racism will have more presence on the November ballot than it has had in more than 50 years. Despite all of the polling that shows widespread support for racial equality and justice, Donald Trump believes there is a “silent majority” out there that will give him four more years of bigotry. We’ve got about 90 days to do everything we can to prove him wrong.

THE WORDS OF GEORGE FLOYD AND DONALD TRUMP: A PORTRAIT OF AMERICA’S DISGRACE

George Floyd and Donald Trump represent the insidious polarities of black oppression and white privilege, of powerlessness and excessive, abusive power. One was a black man down on his luck, unemployed due to the pandemic, dead due to a white cop who took a knee on his neck. The other is a rich white man packed with privilege, who secured the presidency by trying to make racism great again.

Together, they represent opposing archetypes in our abyss. They demonstrate how far we have fallen from America’s ideals and values, and the enormity of the work needed to restore our country’s soul.  

What follows are the words of both men. In Floyd’s case, they were among his final utterances (here and here) between his Memorial Day arrest and death at the hands of Minneapolis police. In Trump’s case, his words were spoken or tweeted in response to the protests over Floyd’s murder.  Floyd’s remarks are in bold. Trump’s quotes are in italics. Together, they depict a gaping and deeply infected wound in the fabric of American life.  

“Please, man, I’m claustrophobic.”

“My Admin has done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln.”

“I can’t breathe, please.”

“Just spoke to (Minnesota) Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

“My neck, (long guttural groan) my neck.”

“(If protesters had breached the White House fence), they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons I have ever seen.”

“Please, please, I can’t move.”

“The lowlifes and losers are ripping (cities) apart.”

“Please, the knee in my neck. I can’t breathe.”

“The thugs must be stopped.”

“Can I have some water?”

On a conference call with governors and mayors: “Get a lot of men. You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks.”

“My stomach hurts.”

“I’m your president of law and order.”

“My neck hurts.”

“When someone is throwing a rock, that’s like shooting a gun. You have to do retribution.”

“Everything hurts.”

“Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors. These people are ANARCHISTS. . .The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe (Biden). Is this what America wants? NO!!!”

“They’re going to kill me.”

“I am mobilizing all available federal resources, civilian and military, to . . .protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights.”

“Don’t kill me.”

“I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel . . .to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property.”

“Mama, Mama. I can’t breathe.”

Against that backdrop, together with Trump’s declining poll numbers, the 45th president of the United States summoned the news media to the Rose Garden Monday and insisted that he is “an ally of all peaceful protesters.” As he spoke those words, peaceful protesters in front of the White House were being attacked by smoke, flash grenades and tear gas at the hands of riot officers and mounted police. 

The mission, on orders of the Trump Administration, was to clear a path so the president could safely walk two blocks to a nearby church and pose with a Bible for a photo op.  The New York Times reported that the stunt was the idea of his daughter, Ivanka, who accompanied him and pulled the Bible he used as a prop from her $1,540 MaxMara bag.  

George Floyd did not live in the world of photo ops and $1,540 designer accessories. He died after allegedly trying to buy cigarettes with a $20 counterfeit bill. Neither his life nor his humanity mattered to the four police officers who ushered him to his death.  To them, Floyd was, in the poetry of our president, just another “lowlife thug” they needed to “dominate.”

To be sure, a Trumpian testosterone tour of military might is the last thing we need right now. The road to fixing this problem is long and winding. But it necessarily begins with the acknowledgement that black lives matter. It ends only when that truth is fully codified in the policies and procedures of everyday life, and in the hearts of those who hold power.  

Until then, justice and peace will continue to elude us. 

WHEN IT COMES TO WOMEN, THE GOP ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

Once upon a time, in a land now unimaginable, the Republican Party was a hotbed of women activists hellbent on fighting for human rights.  Really.  Republican women led the antislavery movement in the 19thcentury and catapulted from there into their own battle for suffrage.  Ida B. Wells, an iconic African American journalist and militant civil rights crusader, was a prominent Republican who saw the party of the late 1800s as the best conduit for hope and change.

Unfortunately, those aspirations did not live forever.  Far from a bastion of human rights advocacy, today’s GOP might as well be called the Grand Old Patriarchy. Out of 535 members in Congress, there are only 20 Republican women.  The party’s gender divide in the House breaks down to 187 men and 13 women, while Democrats in that body have 146 men and 89 women.   At the state level, you can count the number of GOP women governors on one hand, with two fingers left over.  

The race and ethnicity picture is just as bleak. Almost 90 percent of Republicans are white. There are only two African American Republicans in Congress, and one of them – Will Hurd of Texas – just announced he will not run again. Yet, Lindsey Graham, in a rare moment of candor back in the pre-Trump days of 2012, worried that, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” We should be so lucky.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in anthropology to understand why the Republican culture has fed and sustained the party’s demographics.  All you really need to grasp this dynamic can be found in the Archie Bunker theme song:  “Guys like us, we had it made. Girls were girls and men were men. Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”

Take South Carolina’s 3rdCongressional District for example.  In the wake of the Republican’s 2018 midterm disaster, which left the party with the lowest number of female House members in more than 25 years, an opportunity to mitigate those losses emerged earlier this year.  An incumbent’s death triggered a special election in this predominately red district.  The party’s female leaders at every level – from Rep. Susan Brooks, the outgoing co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, to Sarah Palin – poured every available resource into supporting a female candidate, who seemed almost perfect for this district. 

Pediatrician Dr. Joan Perry was seen by even her detractors as a smart, personable candidate who rang the bell on virtually every conservative issue, from abortion and immigration to the sanctity of Donald Trump.  Yet her male opponent in last month’s primary election trounced her by 20 percentage points.  

According to the New York Times, Perry’s chief liability was her gender.  The paper quoted a typical voter, a 68-year-old man, saying that Perry was right on all the issues but that, “women, as you well know, sometimes get to be kind of emotional.”  Tapping into that sentiment was the virtually all-male House Freedom Caucus and its leader Rep. Mark Meadows, who endorsed Perry’s opponent on the basis that you “need a strong backbone” to stand up to the liberals. One of its TV spots portrayed Perry as “another lying Nancy Pelosi liberal.”

Research has shown that GOP women fare the worst as candidates in deeply Republican districts simply because of the dominance of Archie-Bunker-like gender stereotyping.    Hartwick College’s Laurel Elder found that the party itself, “and its increasingly conservative ideology . . . is the biggest barrier to women’s representation within the party.”  The real culprit, she said, is the deeply patriarchal culture in which Republican women play a subservient role to male leaders.

When it comes to gender equality issues, polling has demonstrated a gigantic perceptual gap among women in both parties.  For example, only 30 percent of Republican women see sex discrimination as a serious problem.  Among Democratic and Independent women, however, the vast majority see it as an extremely urgent concern.  Similarly, only 26 percent of Republican women  said there was a problem of unequal pay between men and women performing similar work.  

In a country where women make 80 cents for every dollar a man earns, and one that lags far behind other nations in terms of workplace gender equality, it’s not hard to understand the party’s lack of appeal to women.  Add to that the toxic masculinity of a Republican president who has rarely met a woman he doesn’t bully or abuse. Not to mention his policy portfolio totally void of any respect for human rights.  There is no mystery about the GOP’s estrogen deficit.  

Yet, the male leaders of this party (excuse the redundancy) still don’t get it. New York Congresswoman Elsie Stefanik resigned from the party’s congressional campaign committee, saying she wanted to devote her energies to recruiting female candidates and helping them win.  “We need to be elevating women’s voices,” Stefanik said, “not suppressing them.”  Amazingly, her words provoked a stern reprimand from her colleague, Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the GOP’s congressional campaign.  He accused Stefanik of playing identity politics instead of “looking for the best candidate” regardless of gender, race or religion.  In other words, stick with the pipeline of angry white guys.  

Emmer’s position, of course, is hardly new. The “best person” juggernaut has been used for time immemorial by white men to keep folks who don’t look like them out of the power structure.  Way too slowly, however, that insular approach of the white brotherhood has gradually dissipated in most group cultures.  Diversity and inclusiveness are now commonly seen as essential ingredients for organizational effectiveness.  The memo, however, obviously escaped the Republican leadership. Out of the party’s 200 House members, there are 13 women and one African American.  Yet, leaders like Emmer see no value in diversifying.  

Back in 1920, Republican women led the fight for suffrage and obtained the right to vote for the men who would speak for them.  You’d think that the next step in the process would have been for the party to fill at least a substantial number of elected offices with women who could then speak for themselves.  Sadly, that hasn’t happened in 100 years and is unlikely to do so anytime soon.