The New York Times Opinion
By
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Let’s come clean: President Trump is a white racist! Over the past few days, many have written,
spoken and shouted this fact, but it needs repeating: President Trump
is a white racist! Why repeat it? Because many have been under the grand
illusion that America is a “post-racial” nation, a beautiful melting
pot where racism is only sporadic, infrequent and expressed by those on
the margins of an otherwise mainstream and “decent” America. That’s a
lie; a blatant one at that. We must face a very horrible truth. And
America is so cowardly when it comes to facing awful truths about
itself.
So,
as we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we must
face the fact that we are at a moral crossroad. Will America
courageously live out Dr. King’s dream or will it go down the road of
bigotry and racist vitriol, preferring to live out Mr. Trump’s nightmare
instead? In his autobiography, reflecting on the nonviolent uprising of
the people of India, Dr. King wrote, “The way of acquiesce leads to
moral and spiritual suicide.” Those of us who defiantly desire to live,
and to live out Dr. King’s dream, to make it a reality, must not
acquiesce now, precisely when his direst prophetic warning faces us head
on.
On
the night before he was murdered by a white man on the balcony of his
room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., Dr. King wrote: “America
is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and
make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities
of life.” Our current president, full of hatred and contempt for those
children, is the terrifying embodiment of this prophecy.
We
desperately need each other at this moment of moral crisis and
malicious racist divisiveness. Will we raise our collective voices
against Mr. Trump’s white racism and those who make excuses for it or
submit and thereby self-destructively kill any chance of fully becoming
our better selves? Dr. King also warned us that “there comes a time when
silence is betrayal.” To honor Dr. King, we must not remain silent, we
must not betray his legacy.
So
many Americans suffer from the obsessive need to claim “innocence,”
that is, to lie to ourselves. Yet such a lie is part of our moral
undoing. While many will deny, continue to lie and claim our national
“innocence,” I come bearing deeply troubling, but not surprising, news:
White racism is now comfortably located within the Oval Office, right
there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, embodied in our 45th president, one
who is, and I think many would agree, must agree, without any
hesitation, a white racist.
Continue reading the main storyThere are many who will resist this characterization, but Mr. Trump has desecrated the symbolic aspirations of America, exhumed forms of white supremacist discourse that so many would assume is spewed only by Ku Klux Klan. |
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