Listening to stories from the families and friends of black women and men lost to violence, especially to recent police violence, what is striking is the grinding fear underlying their lives. Fear that the society that advertises so much freedom and opportunity delivers so little. Fear that their existence is at best only tolerated, never really valued. Fear that people sworn to protect their lives might take them over some trifling offense, real or imagined, any time they leave the house. Breonna Taylor and Atatiana Jefferson did not even have to leave theirs.
Some of what they have to fear are fearful white people. Fear is something they share in common without realizing it. Only what white people fear is losing control, losing face, losing power to people they consider lessers in the social pecking order.
It is said that the higher one stands on the social ladder, the more insecure one is about maintaining status. Thus the propensity to kiss up and kick down. After observing racial epithets on signs his motorcade passed in Tennessee, President Lyndon Baines Johnson observed to Bill Moyers, “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Those undervalued and ground underfoot for so long by this society’s inequities are telling the world they have had enough. Like Howard Beale, they are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. Only they are not simply screaming out their windows. They have taken to the streets. Allied with them are a lot of white people who, thanks to cell phone video, finally see the fearful reality their nonwhite brethren live with day in and day out.
The sham of it all. Of chest-thumping American exceptionalism, of flags and USA#1 tags, of red MAGA hats. And “values.” The same United States that preens and struts about freedom jails more of its people than any other country on Earth. Americans feel obliged to walk around armed to the teeth, fearful that death or disrespect lies around any corner. Or worse, fearing the loss of somebody to look down on. Their response to fear is to instill it in others.
The months-long stress from COVID-19, the loss of incomes and failed businesses, the floundering non-response from the White House, and death “like nobody’s ever seen,” to borrow a phrase, finally put the lie to American supremacy. The videoed strangulation murder by police of George Floyd and Donald Trump’s military crackdown on protesters exposed America’s underlying white supremacy to disinfecting sunshine. We are humiliated before the world.
Police are on the defensive and so are some white people. The Anti-Defamation League finds, “Amid the ongoing threat of the coronavirus, there are surging reports of xenophobic and racist incidents targeting members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in the U.S.”
Just south of Brunswick, Georgia where black jogger, Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, was hunted like game by white men in trucks, Thomas Langdale on Friday was charged with aggravated assault. The white man aimed a gun at Eric Dawson, a black man, in a grocery store parking lot. Dawson’s son had accidentally brushed against Langdale’s car:
“He yelled out, ‘I’ve been watching him in my rearview mirror. He doesn’t need to brush up against my car. He’s not worth enough to brush up against my car. Don’t ever come up beside my car again,’” Dawson said.
Dawson tried calming Langdale down, but instead, Dawson said Langdale raised his gun and at one point called him a racial slur.
“He pointed it directly at me in my face. All I could see was the barrel of that gun,” Dawson said. “Then he said, ‘I’ll shoot you. I’ll kill you.’”
Fear is something they have in common. Different fears, but fear still. Admittedly, Langdale seems to have an edge in rage.
“White rage is something Trump knows well; he rode it all the way to the White House,” Paul Waldman writes at Plum Line. Rage and white fear of losing status — Trump means to stoke them as we head into the political summer of 2020. He will have help and plenty of fuel.
“This may be a lot of things, this moment we are living through, but it is definitely not about black lives and remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will,” Tucker Carlson told his white Fox News audience on Monday.
White supremacist monuments to the Confederate “Lost Cause” are coming down across the South. Non-supremacists think it is time the Lost Cause got lost. Christopher Columbus’ place of honor in American cities may be over as well.
NASCAR announced Wednesday it would ban Confederate flags from its events and venues.
The Trump campaign has announced plans to hold its first rally since March in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 19 (Juneteenth). Tulsa was the site of the largest white massacre of blacks in America history. One hundred years ago next year, a white mob burned hundreds of black-owned businesses and homes over 48 hours. The Washington Post recounted last year, “Historians believe as many as 300 black people were killed and 10,000 were left homeless.”
The acting president is likely too ignorant to know that. But senior policy advisor and Trump speechwriter Stephen Miller is not. Ronald Reagan was a comparative piker when he launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. If Reagan meant to send a thinly veiled signal to white southerners, Trump’s Tulsa gambit screams “It’s on!” to armed white supremacists itching for a race war.
Public anger over racial injustice and Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus have dropped his net approval rating 19 points in a month. The Trump campaign is so unnerved about its reelection campaign against Democrat Joe Biden that it sent a cease and desist order to CNN demanding it retract and apologize (that’s oddly familiar) for its poll showing Trump “trailing the former vice president by 14 points, 55%-41%, among registered voters.“
Perhaps the Trump campaign sees igniting a race war as its Hail Mary play.
Charlie Pierce writes at Esquire Politics that fraught matters of race may not be swept away under history’s rug this time:
None of us really knows where this is headed. All we really know is that the momentum is, at the moment, ceaseless. It is strong enough to prevent its being wedged in the mossbacked categories of our ongoing culture war. It has been strong enough to force already serious changes in police practices in a number of cities. It has been strong enough to force a change not only in police precincts, but also in the upper echelons of The New York Times.
It has been strong enough to get Gone With The Wind pulled from the HBO playlist. It has been strong enough to reinvigorate the campaign to rid the country of memorials to those who committed treason in defense of slavery, and it has been strong enough to reach overseas and bring an overdue reckoning to memorials to slave traders in England and genocidal rulers in Belgium. It has been strong enough to bring the phrase BLACK LIVES MATTER to the street in front of the White House. It has shaken history and language as it has passed through them, and left them changed in its wake. It is real, and it is not going away.
The Democrats’ nominee for president gets it:
It’s “definitely not a good time” to be white supremacist.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.