MAKE AMERICA GREAT WHITE AGAIN! We should not be fooled by the slogan on the Trump campaign posters, ads, and ugly trucker hats. The subtext was always there, but it has become crystal clear over the past 9 months of the Trump presidency. America used to be Great, when it was a nation of white men, and their wives and children, and thousands of African slaves. America was Great once the white immigrants killed off most of the non-white native people, and moved those who survived into de-facto detention camps, or "reservations" on the least valuable lands. America was Great in the glory days before the Civil War when white men owned humans as a commodity, to labor for free and be bought and sold. But America isn't Great any more.
America started to lose it's Greatness when the Confederacy lost the Civil War and slavery became illegal. But White Supremacy did not die in the Civil War, it survived in many forms, such as Jim Crow laws, segregation within public institutions and spaces, a justice system that was not just when it comes to non-white people. White Supremacy survived in the form of restrictive and nativist immigration laws and policies that primarily let non-white immigrants in if there was a need for cheap labor (Chinese, Japanese, Latin Americans, etc.), and then turned against them once their labor was no longer needed. White Supremacy survived in the form of bigotry against Americans with ancestries like Jewish, Irish, Italian and other not-the-right-kind-of-White people.
The Great America 150 years after the Civil War is experiencing a blossoming as a result of the fertilizer applied by Trump and his ilk. Trump has given White Supremacy a green light to crawl out from under the rocks where they have been surviving and into the light of day.
The White Supremacy march in Charlottesville, Virginia will be a landmark moment in U.S. history. Yes, there have been other marches of this sort over the years, but few have galvanized the country the way this one did. Perhaps the new technologies of social media made this event so much more than it otherwise might have been. Perhaps it was the timing, in an era of identity politics and heightened awareness of systemic bigotry. Whatever the reason, the images and videos of white men, mostly young (and some women?), carrying burning torches and Nazi flags, chanting "Jews will not replace Us!" and "White Lives Matter" have been burned into our consciousness and made most of us cringe. "Can this really be happening in America?" we say. Yes, it can, because these folks, including their president, want to Make America Great (White) Again!
Let's not mince words here; the history of America is infused with white supremacy. Many of the Founding Fathers were slave owners (some of whom envisioned a post-slavery future), and the founding documents did not consider non-whites (mostly slaves) to be part of "all men are created equal" (women were also excluded). The Confederacy fought the Civil War not to protect the philosophy of slavery, but to protect an economy based on people as commodity; cotton and tobacco were profitable only because the laborers were unpaid. And the laborers were also a profitable commodity that could be bred to meet market demand.
The post-Reconstruction Jim Crow South carried white supremacy forward into the twentieth century, and despite the patina of tolerance, the North also embedded bigotry into every institution and aspect of government. Every chapter of American history has, in addition to truly good aspects, a subtext of white supremacy: expulsions, exclusions, detentions, internments and relocations of Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Native-Americans (and genocide); the refusal to allow Jews fleeing European fascism into the United States, and in some cases sending them back to their deaths in Nazi-controlled Europe; the treatment of African-American veterans after World War II; detention and deportation of undocumented workers who do the jobs white Americans won't do. American foreign policy is also rife with adventures (misadventures) overseas that had white supremacy undertones, actions taken against non-white populations that would never be acceptable if taken against white populations (consider U.S. actions in Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq). And yes, America fought the white German Nazis and their fascist allies in Europe, but only after being attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.
Don't misconstrue my thoughts; the United States is a light of hope in myriad ways, and I am a true patriot; however, as a society we need to understand our own history, with all its flaws and warts, in order to understand our present. The neo-Nazis and their fascist allies on parade in Charlottesville, in the White House, in the Congress, and throughout America are part of us, America. We cannot ignore them. We cannot simply write them off as nut jobs or deplorables, even if they are. We need to see them and understand who they are and what they represent; they are the embodiment of our white-supremacist history. Yes, they are us.
We have come a long way, in many ways, as a society, as a democracy; however, we are not yet "there." We have a lot of work to do - a tremendous amount of work to do - if we are ever to achieve anything close to the idea and ideal of America. We need to grapple with and understand the Trump Era in order to repudiate and replace it. It is not enough to hate Trump; it is not enough to shout "resist" and march in the streets. It is not enough to write blog posts like this one. We need to organize. We need to work together within our communities. We need to encourage and support progressive candidates for every level of government (and run for office ourselves if we have what it takes). We need to be vocal, but not just to shout our disapproval; we need to be proactive and vocal about what we want and need and support. We need to fight back with words, with truth, with facts, and leave the street brawling to the fringe elements. Let's be smart, and then let's be smarter.
And finally, even when we all understand the history of America, and the ugly thread of bigotry woven into its fabric, we need to stand together. We need to put identity politics into the correct frame, stop any blame and shame games, and find the common ground that we all stand upon. If we cannot work together, we cannot prevail, and the Make America Great (White) Again crowd will continue their campaigns.
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Correction (18SEP2017, 12:52PM). In the original version of this post, I mistakenly used the term "pogrom" to describe actions taken against non-whites in America. This term has been replaced.
