In the spring of 1956 my parents told my brother, sister and me that we would be moving from Ottawa to Washington, D.C., which would become our home for the next six years. We were excited by the news, and spent the summer listening to the radio accounts of the Republican and Democratic conventions (even at 8 I was a political junkie), where the notable event was an unscripted run by John Kennedy for the vice-presidential nomination against Estes Kefauver.

Washington in the ’50s was very much a small, southern town, where segregation and the domination of southern politicians in the Senate and the House of Representatives was simply taken for granted.

The Supreme Court of the United States had disrupted things with its decision in Brown v. Board of Education — where the premise of “separate but equal” was cast aside because the overwhelming evidence showed that separate was not equal, and systematic discrimination had to come to an end.

The Washington school system was one of the first to be integrated as a result of the court decision, but the news that jolted our black and white TV screens was from Little Rock, Ark., where Gov. Orval Faubus tried to resist the law, and forced Dwight Eisenhower to send in federal troops to implement the court’s decision.

We were taught in school that the Civil War (whose battle sites were all around us) had ended slavery, but what we came to understand was that the issue of discrimination and segregation was not settled at all, and that the long journey to freedom, respect, and civil rights had miles to go.

Last year, my wife, Arlene, and I had a chance to visit the new Museum of African American History in Washington on a trip just before the U.S. election, and were overwhelmed by the unforgettably powerful account of the black odyssey in America. I struck up a conversation with a woman about the museum and growing up in Washington. Clearly skeptical of my claiming to have gone to school there 60 years before, she asked me which school I went to. When I told her “Gordon Junior High School,” she said, “That’s where I went!” She was just a few years behind me.

That conversation was also about her fears of the possibilities of a Trump presidency. To go from Barack Obama to Donald Trump seemed almost inconceivable — a descent into a valley that would set back so many gains and achievements.

I think of those days in Washington, both my childhood and that recent visit, often now. It is hard to come to terms with the fact that just as race has been Canada’s dirty secret throughout its history, so too has it been in the United States. I would urge everyone to watch Gone with the Wind just one more time — it is laced with fantasies about the South, romance about slavery, and vicious racism about the years after the Civil War.

Charlottesville has to be seen as America’s rendezvous with its own past and how deeply this past haunts America still. Each day of Trump’s presidency is a long descent into the deepest, darkest places. His father Fred was arrested for participating in a Ku Klux Klan rally in New York, and racial politics played their part in their management of their apartment buildings in the 1960s and ’70s.

The reason he can’t disavow white supremacists is because their ideology is so close to his own. The leadership cult, the rabid birtherism, the appeals to hatred and loathing, even the title of his last book, Crippled America, reveals the full extent where he wants to take his country.

The determination of many world leaders to try and normalize this leadership has to be brought to ground. He should not be welcome in our country. He may be the president of the United States, a great country and a great ally over generations. But he does not speak for us, he does not in any sense represent us.

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Stay home, Mr. President. And let the party of Lincoln come to terms with what they have visited upon us all. A man who does not care to see the difference between a Nazi and those resisting hatred should be speaking to empty halls, shouting at his television set by himself, with no support, no air, no resonance.

Bob Rae is a partner at Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP and teaches at the University of Toronto.

Correction – August 18, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled former Arkansas governor Orval Faubus’ given name.

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