Racist-in-Chief
Minorities cope in a variety of ways, some successful, some not so much. Many of these techniques are strategies of self-reassurance, the thing you say when circumstances feel threatening, but don’t amount to a five-alarm fire. They keep you from pointless, exhausting exertions, or looking for a bridge to end it all.
Much of my experience comes from my own community. Jews divide the impact of anti-Semitism into two major categories of treatment by our enemies. The first is the “normal” anti-Semitism of the Other. People say bad things about the Jews. They tell our kids that they killed The Savior and that they are going to be scorched in the fires of Hell. Sometimes they discriminate in employment or social groups. They say that we are an evil cabal who control a phalanx of space-based lasers. This is rank-and-file Jew-hatred which needs to be dealt with, but doesn’t represent an existential threat.
The other kind is a much more serious matter. It’s high-level prejudice lodged in people of consequence who have the authority to turn belief into murder. They have their hands on the levers of power and can act with lethal political authority. The Jews refer to the consequences of this prejudice as the serious business of state-sponsored anti-Semitism. It’s the kind of thing that begins with Kristallnacht and ends with Mengele experimenting on Jewish children. I’m thinking of his infamous war-time bulletin board where he pinned the eyeballs of his victims for display. For this discussion, let’s call it state-level anti-Semitism.
I’m pretty sure I know where Sauron falls. Donald Trump is all over the map on the Jews. He’s got a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren, so I can’t see him laying track to an extermination camp. But I don’t think he feels the same way about Brown people, and he seems to have a special animus toward Black Americans. They were the first people to be jettisoned in his federal purge. They are linked in his mind to the “shithole” countries who have no place in the American Homeland. He has just demanded that the experience of slavery be deleted from the hard drive of American history. For Donald Trump, black suffering is a con job.
And now quite infamously he has turned on the Obamas, who are back in the news because the former President has spoken. There is no denying the evidence of our eyes. Our vicious president woke up in the night and posted a video (which he knew to be racist) of the Obamas caricatured as tree-swinging apes. No amount of explaining lessens its offensiveness. It is exactly what it appears to be, sprung whole from the imbecilic mind of our president like the deities of Olympus vomited up by Cronus. Except instead of gods, they are demonic ideations that endanger the soul of American civilization.
This is, as they say, cause for alarm—much more alarm than we have expressed so far. What is the ape-meme if not state-sponsored racism, originating in the imagination of our highest official? What is it if not the ideological basis for a program of humiliation, diminishment, and discrimination? If Black people are apes, they are not humans like the rest of us, and thus susceptible to nazi levels of persecution.
I watched President Obama react to all of this and I commend him for his calm and reasonable response. He was all that we have come to expect from someone who does not want to be perceived as an Angry Black Man. But that means that the rest of us have a job to do. Who is ready to be an Angry White Ally?