This is tortuously obvious unless you live in a bubble of white male obliviousness, in which case this message, like much of today’s American reality, will escape you.
But despite its having been repeatedly shrieked by gobsmacked commentators of color since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, it still needs to be said, again and again: Trump’s presidency itself is ranting, babbling proof of the official immunity of white men to standards of common decency and competency to which people of color, and women, and other non-members of America’s traditional ruling cabal, are held.
To me, as an educated and, most days, civil black American male, each morning that I awaken to Trump’s continued presence in the Oval Office is a hard knee to the gut. It is a wicked daily reminder of the monster baby that white male American power has become after five centuries: foul, infantile, brutally entitled, cluelessly empowered. Like an infant who pumps his fist at his own genius at having been born.
No American president of color would have his or her fitness for office still subject to debate after one month, let alone one year, of boasted sexual assault and proven continual lying and blatant economic conflicts of interest and increasingly unhinged and crude conduct that mocks even the pretense of presidential mettle. Such a disgrace of a president, if brown, would be gone – censured, condemned, impeached – within weeks, if that. Even Barack Obama – who, like many black achievers, brought an exponentially excessive degree of intellect and tact to a job for which far lesser whites are readily accepted – would have immediately been kicked to the curb for even one of the uncounted obscenities that Trump has acted out to date. And even with Obama’s impeccable conduct and qualifications and diction, his very presence as president still brought the racist white-rage constituency back into the streets.
Trump is a mentally ill, abusive, delusional, brazenly racist and misogynist, recklessly dishonest, stupid, corrupt human being who, by virtue of his being white and male and rich and conveniently enraged, won an election via the archaic Electoral College (while still losing the popular vote) in a country where the two corporate parties left the field wide open to any player audacious enough to utter the obvious but forbidden truth that the system is rigged.
And now that very system is up against itself: how does it eject the uncontrollable racist maniac who co-opted hidden white rage, but at the same time continue to deflect the rage of white voters away from the white rich?
It’s as if some greater power is asking white supremacy to fish or cut bait.
