U.S. President Donald Trump hosts a roundtable event in the East Room of the White House on July 13, 2020.JONATHAN ERNST/Reuters
From a distance, it was hard not to regard the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the White House as an important milestone in race relations in the United States.
America was putting its ugly racist past behind it, we were lulled into thinking. Young Black children could grow up believing that rising to the most powerful job in the country was possible – and with the full endorsement of their fair-skinned fellow citizens.
Yes, well – so much for that fantasy.
As much as many of us wanted to believe that Mr. Obama represented a harbinger of good things to come in the fraught association between white and Black America, it turns out it was a mirage. That became clear the moment Donald Trump put his hand on a bible on Jan. 20, 2017, and was sworn in as the country’s 45th president.
The U.S., once again, had a racist in the White House.
Mr. Trump’s intolerant views toward minorities are a matter of public record. They stretch back to the 1980s, when he took out newspaper ads in New York calling for the execution of five Black and Latino men accused (wrongly, as it turned out) of raping a woman in Central Park. In the lead-up to his campaign for the presidency, he helped fuel the “birtherism” conspiracy – the idea that Mr. Obama was not born in the U.S. Mr. Trump also campaigned for the presidency on the nativist call to build a wall to keep out Mexicans entering the country illegally, many of whom he described as “drug dealers” and “rapists.”
As President, he’s complained about the quality of the immigrants coming to the U.S., wondering why the country couldn’t entice more people from places such as Norway instead of those from “shithole countries” in Africa. In August, 2017, following a violent confrontation in Charlottesville, Va., between white supremacists and anti-racism protesters, Mr. Trump said of the clash that there were “very fine people on both sides.” It’s impossible not to link a recent surge in harassment of Asian-Americans to Mr. Trump’s insistence on calling the novel coronavirus the “Chinese virus” or the “kung flu.” The list goes on. There are examples of his toxic and bigoted thoughts pandering to an entrenched segment of white America traversing at least four decades.
All of which is to say that we should not be surprised by the deeply disturbing incidents of racism we are witnessing in the U.S. today. Or the fact that hate crimes in America reached a 16-year high in 2018, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Over the recent Fourth of July weekend, at a park in Bloomington, Ind., a Black man was surrounded by a group of white males screaming racial epithets. One put the victim, Vauhxx Booker, up against a tree while yelling to a buddy to “get a noose.” Meantime, the main writer (a white male) on Tucker Carlson’s ratings-topping show on Fox News was recently fired after he was revealed to be the author of a trove of horrifyingly racist and sexist comments on the internet.
“White supremacy is the biggest racial problem this country faces, and has faced,” Charles Blow, a Black opinion writer for The New York Times, wrote this past week. “It is almost always the cause of unrest around race … It manifests in every segment of American life.”
The Black Lives Matter movement didn’t start with the death of George Floyd. It began in 2013, with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Black teenager Trayvon Martin. The movement has made sporadic appearances amid the various atrocities committed against Blacks, by whites, in the interim. Will the murder of Mr. Floyd be any different? Will the call to action be any more lasting than it has been over the last few years?
Sadly, I have my doubts. I don’t believe the majority of whites in America are racists, but I do believe that there is a very healthy minority of white people, emboldened by Mr. Trump, who are. And this is what scares me the most about that country’s future: the pending collision on the horizon.
Racism in America – and it must be acknowledged that Canada is not immune to this scourge – will not go away with the defeat of Mr. Trump. It didn’t go away with the victory of Mr. Obama. So I’m not sure what it’s going to take to begin to address the horrible racial inequality that exists in the U.S., or more importantly, the horrible racism that underlies the brutal statistics.
All I know is Mr. Trump has given racists in his country the cover they were looking for. Now their voices are louder and more dangerous than ever. And they are destroying America.
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