Erasing America

Ta-Nehisi Coates warned us, years ago:

His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is a shameful yet common view among racists that Blacks are "unqualified," a long-standing myth since the (first) Civil War that Blacks can't be literate, intelligent, or successful. Frederick Douglass spent his adult life as abolitionist defending his eloquence, writing skills, and self-learning. It's a myth that defined the segregationist Jim Crow era that prevented Blacks from achieving better employment, and reaching higher ranks in the military until the Second World War; when the more vicious racism of the Nazis compelled America to look for our better angels.

Even after all of the efforts of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s - after all the attempts to equalize educational and employment opportunities - that racist world-view is what got trump his electoral chances to enter the White House and impose his fearmongering and rage onto the nation's already broken psyche.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch... that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

As Coates noted, trump entered the White House as the least-qualified person ever - since arguably Andrew Johnson, who at least had political skill to win elections in his career - only because he exulted his whiteness. trump was a disaster as a businessman, filing more bankruptcies than people have had hot dinners, and yet marketed himself as a deal-making "genius" all to get people to buy his next scam. 

If a black man had even filed once for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, he'd never get another loan to start a new business ever again. But trump did repeatedly, even after banks realized he was a money pit from which they'll never get their interest back. 

If a black man got exposed as a sex offender, his political career would end in a heartbeat. trump exposed himself repeatedly, was even found liable for sexual assault that the judge equated to rape, and most of the media and national leadership ignored it all while enough Americans voted for the monster to gain - and regain - the presidency.

All of the warning signs were there that trump is a monster, and yet his whiteness became the very thing that lifted him into power. And now, he's using that power to drag the rest of us backwards into our racist past to rebuild an America that was never all that great. As Adam Serwer noted this weekend at the Atlantic (paywalled):

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration...”

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else...

It should be noted that Marxism - and Communism, and even Socialism, all equated to Liberalism by the Far Right - is the go-to dismissal of civil rights, painting the Civil Rights movement as a Soviet plot to undermine American greatness (it was also accusations by the South African Apartheid system to suppress Blacks in their country). The Far Right didn't want to accept those equality gains of the 1960s, and they are desperate to undo everything LBJ, hell everything Truman and FDR and even Teddy Roosevelt ever did to advance the rights of all of us.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly...

Serwer seems to think that these acts of erasure by trump and his wingnut allies will only go as far as resetting our nation back to the segregated days of Jim Crow. But I see something more ominous, tied into the efforts by trump and his cohorts to undo birthright citizenship. They may be currently aiming at the children and families of Latino immigrants, but going after those rights opens the door to allowing whoever is in power - and right now it's that racist bastard trump - to expand denying citizenship to so many others.

I wrote about this before, when wingnut punditry and politicians were talking about undoing the 14th Amendment years ago:

What could happen then in a world where Citizenship is not an automatic given based on birth but instead vulnerable to the whims and interests of whichever political party is in charge of Congress, the White House, and the Courts?  Nowadays the Republicans can call you "Un-American" and that would be just another insult.  If the 14th Amendment were gone... A Republican With Authority can call you "Un-American" and mean it... which would also mean no rights under the law, no protection from immediate arrest, no Habeus, no home, no life...  This is the true danger of what the Republicans are proposing to do by getting rid of the 14th Amendment.  They claim it'll be to get rid of unwanted illegals... but also consider that the Republicans have no love of Muslims right now, and not much love for Blacks, and very little love for Liberals... and so on, and more, and also...  Repeal the 14th Amendment and NO ONE would be safe from the charge of being "Un-American."

We're looking at a reality where trump - backed by a cowardly Republican-controlled Congress that won't stop him and a supine Supreme Court that's already enabled trump's criminality - can erase the rights of any group he despises, which is a lot of us who aren't rich, white, and male.

With citizenship gone, the minority groups across America - Blacks, Latinos, Asians, even women (the GOP will try to carve out exemptions for White women who register Republican, no doubt), and even the handicapped (trump has a serious hate-on for them) - will lose their right to vote which Republicans hope would ensure their control of government forever, will lose their rights to own property, will lose any possibility of getting good jobs at good wages because companies will ignore or abuse them, will lose any chance at higher education (and see their basic education weakened to the point of uselessness), will lose any standing before the courts where in theory (alas, not in practice) we're supposed to be equal before the law, which was the major horror of the Dred Scott decision, when Taney proclaimed Blacks - even freedmen - had no rights. That was why the birthright citizenship clause was formed in the first place. 

It won't matter how qualified a Black or Latino or Asian person will be with their education, their experience, their genuine skills. It won't matter how qualified a woman will be with her education, her experience, her genuine skills. It won't matter how qualified a military veteran or handicapped person will be for those jobs or educational opportunities offered through the civil service. They will all lose their standing compared to White men who have not enough education, not enough experience, not even the skills for the jobs and opportunities that are out there. All because trump and his ilk are convinced "unqualified" minorities are taking all the good jobs away from "deserving" White men who aren't competent or deserving at all.

In this version of trumpian dystopia Black- Latino- Asian- and Native Americans, the poor and starving, the women and families fighting to feed and care for their own, will have no recourse but to submit to every demand and folly the powers that be - the patriarchy of mediocre white guys - can squeeze them and get away with it. All because mediocre White guys can't abide sharing anything with others they can't perceive as being human. They will all be erased - from the history books, from our archives, from our rollcall of legends and heroes - to allow these mediocrities the delusion that they alone are superior over everyone, even fellow Whites who won't play to those fantasies.

It's been noted before: White Privilege White Grievance is a hell of a drug.

And our nation is truly going to suffer for this. Any and all competency and expertise we tend to see in our civil service - our communities even at the municipal and county levels, where the lack of federal aid and quality of service will be felt most - will disappear in a wave of cronyism and hackery that would make the Spoils system of the 19th Century seem quaint.

All because trump and his racist allies cannot see the beauty and strength of a diverse and unified community that America could be.

That long arc bending our history towards justice is no longer tied up in a pretzel. It is now a solid u-turn back to the dark ages of ignorance, racism, and fear. The next thing we'll see is the campaign of violence and terror that defined the horrors of the Jim Crow years, and arguably a nation caught up in a tyranny of martial law under the worst White man to ever sit in the Oval Office.

Gods help us.