That was President Donald Trump during a Thursday roundtable on race and policing. On its face, it was a ho-hum moment, hitting the usual beats of this kind of Trump statement: a tremulous appeal to unity, a blithe oversimplification of race in America.
One thing that stood out, however, was the fact that the words were as neat a distillation of the President's priorities as might be possible: Following weeks of protest against anti-black state violence, Trump's biggest concern was the tag of "racism," instead of racism itself.
To the surprise of no one, James Baldwin diagnosed a similar kind of thinking more than 50 years ago.
"I don't know what those white people in this country feel, but I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions," the writer said on a 1968 episode of "The Dick Cavett Show." "I don't know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don't know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to."
Baldwin's focus was on confronting the evidence of racism -- not on unriddling the heart and mind of mid-century white America. Why elevate white discomfort at the expense of interrogating real, structural oppression?
That Trump seems incapable of acknowledging the incredible depths of racism is all the more repellent in light of his upcoming rally (his first since the coronavirus pandemic began limiting gatherings in March) on Juneteenth -- the June 19 holiday that recognizes the end of American slavery. The event will take place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city that in 1921 was the site of the massacre of as many as 300 black Americans.
Trump said that the scheduling of his Juneteenth rally wasn't on purpose.
"It wasn't done for that reason, but it's an interesting date," he said in a Fox News interview taped Thursday.
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale defended the rally date, tweeting on Thursday that "as the Party of Lincoln, Republicans are proud of what Juneteenth represents and the Emancipation Proclamation." (It says lots that Trump's camp must call back to a time before the Republican and Democratic parties realigned to showcase civil rights bona fides.)
As California Sen. Kamala Harris put it on Twitter on Thursday: The rally "isn't just a wink to white supremacists -- (Trump is) throwing them a welcome home party."
In addition, on Thursday, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced that Trump will accept the Republican nomination in Jacksonville, Florida, delivering a speech on August 27. (Notably, this move would ignore public health guidelines cautioning against large convenings.) Like Tulsa, Jacksonville has its own history of racial violence: "Ax Handle Saturday."
According to the Florida Historical Society, on August 27, 1960 -- exactly six decades before the President's planned speech -- "a group of 200 middle-aged and older white men (allegedly some were also members of the Ku Klux Klan) gathered in Hemming Park armed with baseball bats and ax handles. They attacked the protesters conducting the sit-ins. The violence spread, and the white mob started attacking all African Americans in sight."
The RNC has sought to characterize the scheduled event as a learning opportunity. But it's no less revealing of Trump's general racial myopia that he's wandered into the thick weeds of yet another controversy concerning black Americans.
Indeed, it's to be expected when racism is viewed more as a word to be avoided than as an evident moral failing to be rooted out.
"danger" - Google News
June 13, 2020 at 04:03AM
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Juneteenth, Ax Handle Saturday and the danger in Trump's racial myopia - CNN
"danger" - Google News
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