November will mark a year since DT/45 has been president of the United States. Dumbfounded white liberals still can't acknowledge that DT/45 is a white supremacist. In the latest (as of this writing) example of his regard (or disregard) for Black people, DT/45 stands in front of heads of state, from Africa, bragging about his wealthy friends getting rich--in Africa! I'm sure he and his wealthy friends dream of erecting a TRUMP TOWER in "Nambia" one day.
When I'm asked if I've heard the latest DT/45 reference to African American athletics as "sons-of-a-bitches," I'm not given an opportunity to respond. Trump! My interloper whispers this name and shrugs her shoulder. New subject.
But I'm to understand that she, stunned, is with me, now. Like Michael Corleone whispering to his seriously wounded father lying in his hospital bed, "I'm with you now. I'm with you," the whole interaction has an unspoken narrative that I, again, am burdened with understanding. Acknowledging and abiding by: Don't associate me with the madness of white supremacy--racism, sexism, homophobia. The school boy bully taunting another school boy bully. We see it now: the one flexing his muscles by ordering the firing off of nuclear missiles while the other fires off tweets, sun up and sun down.
Anyone challenging DT/45's reality isn't loyal to him and the reality he stands for reflects whiteness. Intruders must be fired. We get it. Now!
But it's them!
And this is on a good day in America! More often, "the job" justifies an icy silence as when I mentioned Ken Burn's The Vietnam War film to a librarian. The head drops and suddenly there's something to do. Or did she not hear me--deliberately.
Shocked by DT/45 and his supporters, in the last few months, particularly since Charlottesville, white liberals want to separate themselves from the lunacy most of us would consider living-while-Black in the US. But it would do so much to turn away from the historical legacy of white supremacy if these white liberals would ask themselves, what is it that separates them from DT/45's supporters? Is it their way of thinking about racism, the foundation of this nation, and the historical plague of injustice beginning with the conquest of land and massacre of Native Americans, from white supremacists?
What is it that makes a white supremacist? And for once, just once, we don't want to hear that trite comeback: Why, it's those guys waving Confederate flags! Sheriff Arpaio! Or maybe Steve Bannon!
The Bannons and Arpaios believe in the righteousness of whiteness, the superiority of whiteness; they believe in the inferiority of what isn't socially constituted as white.
But these individuals aren't alone, no more than Hitler or Himmler or Goring were alone, crafting and implementing a justification for the slaughter of millions.
In the US, the operation of slavery was a business. An industry. And as such, it required not just slaveholders, but also traders, ship builders, captains, crew, bounty hunters, border patrol personnel, iron workers producing chains and leg irons, map makers drawing up the best routes from Africa to Europe to the New World. Organizers and advertisers of auctions as well as auctioneers. Slavery required the skills of bankers, railroad personnel, architects. Office clerks and secretaries. Just hard-working, patriotic Americans making a buck"
And people who enjoyed a good cup of tea or coffee, or a glass of rum, or a box of chocolates, just as other fellow citizens enjoyed the enslaved serving as cooks, servants, midwives, maids, horse groomers, cotton pickers.
Regular folks. Industrious folks.
Many of those who arrived in the US in the 1920s and 1930s as Irish, Italian, German, or Polish passengers in search of a new life, a new beginning, stepped onto an old foundation. They became Americans because they would never be Negro, colored. n-word. And, with no competition from the inferior, whole families of these new Americans became members of the working class, the middle class, the liberal class--aspiring to the likes of those "self-made" millionaires"
And for the last 40 plus years, while still aspiring to fulfill the Dream, white liberals, of the working class and the middle class, begged, if not outright participated in the repressing Black voices in protest to injustice. And, no, Bill Clinton, too, wasn't alone!
Those who supported DT/45 had something in common with liberals in the 1990s who behind closed doors, among their families, applauded as Clinton dismantled welfare programs and increased the incarceration of Black Americans.
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