Racism, bigotry, hatred.
They're still unacceptable.
Social media suffers from no shortage of shared experiences, anecdotes, even videos that immediately go viral, documenting, in what may end up being seen some day as the textbook example of irony, the inhumanity that humanity seems more and more predisposed to inflicting on itself these days.
In one of those videos, for example, a white woman in line in a grocery store in Oregon overhears a black woman's phone conversation. She believes the woman is trying to sell food stamps illegally. She confronts the woman and the exchange becomes heated, the white woman being told, in impossible to miss terms, to mind her business. The white woman responds "oh, it is my business...because I pay my taxes..."
That's not the end of her response. The end of that response might surprise you. Sadly, though, it might not surprise you at all. And, no, she doesn't yank the N word from her holster and open fire with it.
The injury she added to insult....momentarily.
In June of 1968, Bobby Kennedy stood before a packed room of supporters and followers celebrating his victory in the California Presidential primary.
He ended a poignant and optimistic acceptance speech with these words.....
"....I think we can end the divisions in the United States...we are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country. And I intend to make that my basis for running over the period of the next few months. So, my thanks to all of you and it's on Chicago and let's win there."
Those were the last public words he ever spoke.
Shot in the head a few minutes later, he died a few hours later and was buried a few days later in Arlington near his assassinated brother.
The romantic and/or sentimentalist in all of us would, most likely, like to think that, were he around today, Bobby would still believe that America is a great country...an unselfish country...a compassionate country.
It's getting increasingly more difficult each day to resist the temptation to cynically suggest that would be a mountain even a Kennedy couldn't climb.
Eddie Glaude, Jr. is a Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University. In a piece he wrote for Time Magazine this past September, he relates the story of the Oregon grocery store food stamp confrontation and goes on to offer some insight worth more than just a little consideration.
It's relatively easy...to blame our current struggles on the loud racists who have been emboldened by the election of Donald Trump. But this is typical American racial melodrama. We need easily marked villains and happy endings.
The fact is that Americans have grown comfortable with racism resting just beneath the surface of our politics...to be activated whenever a politician or a community needs it, exposed when a racist incident exhumes it, only to see us bury it again. The result was the illusion that America has become less racist merely because racists were not as brazen as they once were.
Donald Trump shattered that illusion. He rode race, once the third rail of American politics, straight to the White House. He challenged, even refuted, Obama's citizenship, called Mexicans rapists and criminals, proposed banning all Muslims from entering the country, preached the need for "law and order" arguing that immigration was changing the "character" of the United States.
And he openly courted white supremacists.
Trump exists in a sweet spot between the soft bigotry of self contradictory American liberals...and the loud racism of those who shout "nigger" and demand that Latinos go back to Mexico, all the while stuck in an economic system that sputters and chokes along with a startling gap between the top 1% and those who bust their behinds to make ends meet.
Trump sits right there, amid the mess and false promises....with a smirk on his face.
Professor Glaude goes on to elaborate, correctly, that Donald Trump isn't some cross burning version of a Bond villain, the likes of which we've never seen before. A few quick minutes doing a little Google on the subject and names like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace appear, their presidential campaigns, Thurmond in 1948 and Wallace in 68 and 72, markers on the American history timeline noting candidates who moved the crowds with their "plain talk" and "blunt truth" with little, or no, regard for the consequences. Each of them seeking to, and succeeding at, giving voice to a deeply felt sense of "white victim-hood".
America, in 48 and 68 and 72, responded by endorsing the idea that the grievances may have been valid, but those messengers and their easy to read code of racial pot stirring were a negatory, good buddy. The bottom line turned out to be that America saw these demagogues as "marginal men with marginal thoughts."
In 2016, America, the melting pot, was turned into America, the stirring pot. And the marginal man with marginal thoughts...manipulated the marginal into electoral madness.
Again, with apologies for mangling Shakespeare's spin on Ecclesiastes, Trump ain't nothing new under the sun.
And, yet....
Police are
continuing to search for the man who opened fire from a pickup truck on another
vehicle early Sunday morning (December 30th) near Houston that had a woman and
her four daughters inside, killing one of the girls, seven-year-old Jazmine Barnes. The attack was
unprovoked, with the man, who's described as a bearded white male, possibly in
his 40s, just pulling up next to LaPorsha Washington's vehicle and opening
fire, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office. The 30-year-old
Washington, who suffered a gunshot wound, sobbed from her hospital bed while
speaking to reporters about what happened, "Every time I wake up, I want it to be a dream. I want to wake up
and see my seven-year-old run through the door and give me a hug and a
kiss." .
"...It's relatively easy, Professor Glaude reminds us...to blame our current struggles on the loud racists who have been emboldened by the election of Donald Trump. But this is typical American racial melodrama. We need easily marked villains and happy endings...."
The white woman in the Oregon grocery store who confronted the black woman responded, "oh...it is my business....because I pay my taxes..."
And then she landed one more punch.
"...we're going to build this wall..."
...loud racists, the Professor mentions, who have been emboldened by the election of Donald Trump...
The tribal atmosphere that has existed since the day Trump announced distills down to a very basic, primal, inevitable attitude.
When it comes to the Trump Train.....you is either "fer us....or you is agin' us.."
A rock solid case can be made that when it comes to racism, emboldened by the election of someone to the highest office in the land, that office holder's position on the matter distills down to a very basic, primal, inevitable choice.
He is either agin' it. Or he is fer it.
And it's a choice that practically makes itself.
If you're against it, say so. Every hour. Every day. Every time the opportunity presents itself.
Like when a white woman in Oregon warns a black woman that "we're gonna build this wall..."
Like when a seven year old black child is shot to death for no other apparent reason than she is black.
If you're for it, then stop insulting our intelligence, show some spine and say so.
Or just say what you're already saying.
Nothing.
Racism, bigotry, hatred.
They're still unacceptable.
Just not unacceptable enough.
Actually...not even close.
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