It reads like an indictment. It is an indictment. Of white male supremacy and of Trumpism as its latest point-infinity revision. “Adherents of Trumpism think they are facing a choice,” Ibram X. Kendi begins at The Atlantic, “between white male supremacy and ‘anarchy.’”
Kendi, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, considers the summer of 2020 one for the history books, one that began and ended early. It began in late May with the police killing in Minneapolis, Minnesota of George Floyd. It ended during an anti-police-violence protest in late August in Kenosha, Wisconsin when Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, allegedly shot at multiple person, killing two and maiming one.
The two events bookend a summer of anti-racist protests across the country. The Black Lives Matter movement may be the largest in U.S. history and the greatest threat ever to a prevailing power structure that has existed pretty much everywhere pretty much forever. As many as 26 million took part across 50 states (as well as in other countries). About 93 percent of the protests remained peaceful. The percent that were not gave rise to a right-wing narrative of cities lawless and ablaze from coast to coast, despite the fact that in some cases it was police who initiated the wilding. Police in Kenosha and elsewhere treated armed vigilantes as allies in the defense of white male supremacy, as Kendi sees it and as we all did.
His indictment of white male supremacy is brief, but its concentration makes it that much more potent. Here is a sampling:
White male supremacy has granted the president the power to accost women and “grab ’em by the pussy”; the power to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters; the power to call the first female major-party nominee for president “such a nasty woman” on live television and still win more white women’s votes than she did; the power to say the first Black president was not born in the United States and still have Black men say at his convention that he is “not racist.” White male supremacy has allowed the president to have a foreign power intercede in a presidential election on his behalf, to call neo-Nazis “very fine people,” to urge his supporters to vote twice, to build a monument of lies, to obstruct justice while freeing friends and punishing foes, to describe Americans who died at war as “suckers” and “losers,” and to look away as hundreds of thousands of American COVID-19 victims’ bodies pile up at cemeteries—and not face any consequences.
And Trump does not want his white male supporters facing any consequences either. Like him, they are always innocent. They are always the victims. Even violent strongmen like Vladimir Putin get a pass.
So do heavily armed groups of white male supremacists in the United States. According to a Politico report, the first draft of a recent Department of Homeland Security “State of the Homeland Threat Assessment 2020” named “White supremacist extremists” as “the most persistent and lethal [terrorist] threat” to the American people. But Trump refuses to acknowledge, let alone protect Americans from, the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time. Instead he incites carnage, and the victims include people of color demonstrating their humanity, and white people demonstrating against racism, like Heather Heyer.
Whiteness comes with the presumption of innocence just as “presumption of guilt is for all practical purposes attached to femininity, to Blackness, to queerness, to Indigenousness, to poverty.” To question that social arrangement, to demand that justice for all mean what it says invites armed insurrection in defense of white male supremacy. The summer just passing suggests it has already begun.
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