Let’s just say it out loud: the Republican party is the white power party.

How can we know this?

How about Representative Steve King blatantly saying that white people were superior to any other “sub-groups”? When you pair that up with Trump’s desire to “make America great again”, is not the dominant sentiment from the Republican party a kind of desire to scrub America clean of (or to at least subjugate) its non-white people?



How about that time the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, took a selfie with a group of interns so blindingly pale, the caption ought to have been: “Show us your pearly whites!”

Or Rudy Giuliani declaring: “What I did for New York, Donald Trump will do for America!” (Presumably he meant that a President Trump would follow Mayor Giuliani’s lead in curbing the speech of black artists and violently, disproportionately and lethally policing black men).

Maybe we can tell because Republican spokesmodel Scott Baio exhorted the party not just to “make America great again” – which is already white supremacist enough – but to “make America American again”. The white power sentiment under the latter phrase is that our black president (and, more importantly, our increasingly woke and rebellious black political consciousness, demanding liberation and declaring “we want it now”) is somehow not American.

Then there’s Melania Trump cribbing the words of Michelle Obama. There’s nothing unusual about white folk stealing the uncredited labor of blacks folks, of course. But it’s especially egregious that Melania – herself an immigrant – stole the words of a black woman married to the black president Melania’s husband charged wasn’t even born in the United States.

But the offense she caused was as small as her husband’s hands in comparison to the white power move of getting a black lawman – Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, who once tweeted that “Black Lies Matter will join forces with Isis” – to stand on that stage and declare “Blue Lives Matter in America”. He reminded me that one needn’t be white to be invested in white supremacy (and, as Jelani Cobb remembered: “Not all African Americans supported Emancipation”).

“This convention is almost entirely about race,” BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith tweeted on Monday. But more specifically, this Republican convention is about how to maintain white power by whipping up fear in white people about “the other” in an increasingly non-white country (and where the majority of one-year-olds are now babies of color).

But if the Republican party is mostly about race and white power, it may be primed to win this election, and a couple more, before 2043, the year when whites become an overall minority in the US – because forces in this country are still deeply committed to maintaining white power.

How do we know this?

Why have four out of six police officers escaped culpability in the death of Freddie Gray? Did the young man sever his own spine? He did not; but he lived, and died, under white supremacy.

Why do pulled-over black drivers such as Dawan Williams have to go on Facebook live because they “don’t want to die today”? The white supremacy of the police state.

Why do white people live on average five years longer than black people in America? Do we deserve to die younger? We do not, but we live and die under white supremacy.

Why is it, as the writer Kiese Laymon writes, that when “two american (sic) men with military training kill unsuspecting hard working cops” in Baton Rouge, “this country blames a liberation movement comprised of mostly unarmed black women?” This is white power at work. Laymon further charges that the US lies when it acts as if “masculinities aren’t the problem. Militarism ain’t the problem. Antiblack terror ain’t the problem” – but a “liberation movement filled with unarmed black women” somehow is.

Why did the lovely, talented and beautiful actress Leslie Jones – who should have been enjoying the success of the Ghostbusters reboot with her co-stars on Monday – instead write on Twitter: “I feel like I’m in a personal hell”? Because trolls spent the day calling her a “big lipped coon”, comparing her to an ape and driving her to tears.

Because white power means that a black woman can reach the height of Hollywood and still be denigrated.

White power is so pervasive in the US, even attempts to correct it are ruined. Take the recent push to “ban the box”, in which some local governments have made it so that employers can’t ask upfront if an applicant has been convicted of a crime. The idea was to address how the over incarceration of black people discriminates against us in the job market. But a recent study has found that when the box was banned, “the racial gap in callbacks by employers actually increased”, according to economist Amanda Agan.

Why? As NPR’s Shankar Vendantam explained: “When companies were not allowed to check on the criminal histories of applicants, what they did was they fell back on their stereotypes and said, black men are more likely to be associated with crime. So let me just reject black applicants more often or call back white applicants more often.”

Donald Trump will formally accept the Republican nomination for president this week because the Republican party is now directed towards maintaining white power. He is tied with Hillary Clinton in some polls because the US is also deeply invested in maintaining white power.

I am not afraid of Trump as an aberration from the American story. I am instead deeply worried that Trump is a creation of existing white supremacy, not simply a crude catalyst of it. Indeed, American white power, the Republican party and Trump now fit together neatly.

And regardless of whether the Trumps move into the White House, we should be terrified of what all this loud, crass and evil redeclaration of white supremacy is doing to all of us.