It doesn’t seem so long ago that “racist” was considered a bad thing to be in America. Has it really been only a year or so that a gracious, classy, scholarly black man sat behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office giving legitimate hope that America was finally ready to sprinkle ashes on its embarrassingly racist past?
How could we have plummeted so far, so fast, since then?
The tendencies and ingrained inclinations were still there, of course. Racism will always be a problem in the US, but in 2008 it felt like we had turned the lights on bright enough to at least send the cockroaches scurrying back into hiding. Even that much was a start. How profoundly and sharply we have regressed, nearly to the point of whiplash.
Donald Trump has always been a racist. A cartoonishly obvious one, in fact. It’s to the point where if you can’t acknowledge that, it’s a sure sign that you, too, are a racist. Over the course of a troubling life, Trump has refused to rent properties to blacks. He has stated that blacks are effectively too lazy to be allowed to count his money (a task, apparently, better left to Jews). He called for the literal death of five black youths accused of rape in the Central Park jogger case with a full page ad in New York newspapers—a crime for which forensic evidence would eventually exonerate the suspects. And he slithered into political relevancy by espousing a disgusting conspiracy theory that then-President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and was therefore illegitimately elected.
In recent months, Trump has been quoted calling predominantly black countries “shitholes.” He has suggested that Nigerian refugees, upon seeing the splendor of the United States, could “never go back to their huts.” (Do yourself a favor an Google “Lagos, Nigeria” to understand how dumbfoundingly racist that is). Trump is the first president in forever to dishonor the Martin Luther King holiday by foregoing any measure of public service in favor of hooking a few drives at another one of his dogshit golf properties (hey, that reminds me, wasn’t it a Trump-prompted federal offense every time the black prez hit the links)? He continues to bark about a “Muslim ban,” publicly preferring more suitably hued Norwegian immigrants. He has picked a public fight with every black citizen he could—Oprah, Colin Kaepernick, LaVar Ball, Don Lemon, Eric Holder, Frederica Wilson, and on and on.
So what happened? How did we ricochet backwards? How is this all suddenly ok? What the fuck is going in on America?
It’s been a perfect storm of confluent events: The political backlash of a black president, the birth of “fake news” and the conspiracy theories that spark to life on social media, the complicit and racially antagonistic right wing media circus, and, most tragically, the abdication of anything resembling a stopgap in a republican controlled congress. Trump’s audacious racism has forced to the GOP to either grow a spine (which is political suicide) or embrace its long festering white supremacy inclinations. The republican party has chosen racism over morality, and so far they are getting away with it.
Here’s the deal. The US has always been pretty good at intolerance—so it’s time for liberals to wrest political control from the GOP in 2018 and get down and dirty stealing a page from the conservative playbook with a little nasty intolerance of its own.
It should be illegal to purchase or fly the confederate flag in the US. Fuck your “heritage,” Dixie. Sane folks have read the history books—you owned and abused black people as property and then committed an act of treason resulting in the deaths of 620,000 Americans. If you think that’s a heritage worth celebrating, fine. Celebrate it in prison. Enough coddling the developmentally arrested Deep South.
Reinstitute the media Fairness Doctrine and, if necessary, rip shit stain Fox News off the air. There isn’t a coal burning plant in the nation that pumps more toxic pollution into the air than Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, Jesse Waters, and the rest of the hoodless Klan rally they have going on over at 1211 Avenue of the Americas.
And most importantly, make a list of all these republican scumbags who are enabling or participating in this farcical racial regression. That includes Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the rest of the GOP party leadership—they should be afraid of way more than losing the next election. Democrats should be threatening a level of invasive investigation, including ties to racist groups and PACs (which include the nauseatingly racist NRA...Philando Castile, anyone?) with a voracity that will make a cattle prod up the ass feel like a kiss on the cheek. And then find a way to make them all pay. Dearly. The gloves should be off by now.
You stop racism in America like you stop anything else. By actually doing it, totally, with every available resource. If the cockroaches are no longer afraid of the light, bust out the Raid—and use it. It’s way past time. The only folks who will be upset about it are the racists, so who gives a shit?