Over the past week, President Donald Trump has answered the million-dollar question, “When exactly does Donald Trump think America was great?” In his tweets and remarks attacking professional athletes, Trump told the American people he is nostalgic for a time over 150 years in the past. Beyond demanding black athletes respect the honor of meeting him, Trump insisted the protests by other black athletes are a “total disrespect of our heritage.” There can be no mistaking what heritage Trump is referring to. It is America’s dark heritage of slavery and, since its abolition, the racism that has been more deeply ingrained in this country than nearly any other value.

Trump’s words this week confirm a theory author Ta-Nehisi Coates laid out in his article “The First White President.” Coates’ work has been the subject of debate in The Daily’s opinion section over the past week. Coincidentally, his words are particularly salient here, as we try to place Trump’s racist words into some sensible context. Coates writes, “for Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally.” It was the fact of Obama’s blackness that propelled Trump into politics, first through his birtherism claims, and then onto the campaign.

This week, Trump was once again personally insulted by the fact that a handful of black men had the power and notoriety to challenge him and embarrass him. There is nothing that embarrasses and angers Trump more than when he feels his authority is being questioned by someone who does not look like him. Think back, for example, to when Trump tried to silence the Indiana-born, Mexican-American judge who was supposed to try a class action lawsuit involving Trump University, or when the White House suggested ESPN fire host Jemele Hill after she labeled him a white supremacist. Trump has not been merely pandering to his base with his racist and coded language. Rather, he possesses an ingrained racism deep within his being, a rigid sense of where a person’s place is in this world, a perspective that belongs far, far in the past. Donald Trump is, in fact, a white supremacist.

Of course, none of this is anything new. Media commentary is ripe with people more qualified than me calling out Trump’s coded and not-so-coded language. What little I can offer is a call-to-arms to take this commentary into electoral politics. We should not merely let our white supremacist president be the fuel to our fire, but also make it the very essence of our upcoming campaigns. Just as Trump’s presidency is the rejection of Obama and blackness, the next presidency, as well as down-ballot elections in the coming years, must be a rejection of Trump and whiteness, or at the very least, white supremacy.

Many worry this will alienate the low-income white voters who have become such a concern over the past year. This was part of Jake Gordon’s primary critique of Coates in the first Coates-themed opinion piece in The Daily this week. Gordon worries Coates is denying the “struggles” of low-income white voters that contributed to the Trump presidency. In fact, as Sky Patterson pointed out, Coates’ article is focused largely on middle to high-income white people, who also overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Regardless, no economic condition is an excuse for what Trump voters did. As Coates himself writes, “certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.” Just as getting laid off is not a legal excuse for murder, hard economic times or a feeling of neglect from “coastal elites” are not moral excuses for electing a white supremacist. Should the alienation of some low-income white people –– who fell under the spell of a white supremacist –– be a side-effect of a campaign against white supremacy, then that is a cost we Democrats must pay. A presidential election can be won without the vote of a single white supremacist, and it must be done.

Nothing but a total attack on Donald Trump and his white supremacy will suffice. Just as Trump invigorated supremacist masses with vicious anger, Democrats must do the same with masses who reject all that Trump stands for. Just as Trump uses not-so-coded language to discredit his opponents, Democrats must loudly label him and his collaborators as racists, not just in opinion pieces but on the debate stage. Just as Trump challenged Obama’s right to be president through birtherism, we must challenge Trump’s right to be president on the grounds that his continual enforcement of racist norms pose an existential threat to our country. Michelle Obama’s words — “when they go low, we go high” — will forever ring true, and we must fight just as hard as those whose lowness is destroying everything we hold dear.

Calvin Anderson is a Weinberg junior and co-president of College Democrats. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.

Comments