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News, notes, and observations from the James River Valley in northern South Dakota with special attention to reviewing the performance of the media--old and new. E-Mail to MinneKota@gmail.com

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

When will he use the n-word?

When Barack Obama was elected president,  many of us thought that the United States had achieved a milestone in its progress for achieving liberty, equality, and justice for all.  After getting rid of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutional racial discrimination, the election of a black president seemed like it marked a victory over racism.  However, the black president soon became the target of racist insult and abuse and the object of racial epithets.  Elements in the country that went silent during the civil rights era became vocal and belligerent, and a grating, discordant note entered the national dialogue.

During the time of slavery, if a black were appointed an overseer on a plantation, the whites would rise up in a violent rage.  Having a black man hold a superior position over them was insufferable to them.  For those who harbor racist attitudes, the ascension of a black man to the presidency was more than they could bear.  Racism is like the shingles.  After a case of chicken pox has infected a person,  the virus can lie dormant in the body for decades and then suddenly flare up as a virulent case of shingles,  unless one is inoculated against it.  Racism has the same effect.  It can flare up in a soul with a renewed venom.  An alarming number of Americans have been reinfected with a revived racism.

Donald Trump is both a symptom and an agent of that racism.  His campaign for president was launched on a racist note and he has revived some old anti-black defamations from the age of slavery to continue his assaults on black people.

During the last years of slavery, a prevalent racist argument was that no person of African heritage or descent could be an American citizen.  This contention was made official with the Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 which decreed that no person of African origins could be a citizen or have any standing under the laws that define civil rights.  It defined being black as a mark of inequality in all aspects.  After the Civil War, this decision was overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and by the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.  But this was the argument through which Trump tried to discredit the citizenship of Barack Obama by insisting that he was born in Kenya.  The claim ignited the dormant racism in Americans and flared up to define the base that Trump appealed to in his campaign for the presidency.  It was a blatant appeal to racist attitudes.

Trump uses another ploy from the days of slavery to discredit black critics.  The pro-slavery contingent tried to prove that blacks were not as intelligent as whites.  They produced pamphlets which claimed that the heads of blacks were less in circumference than those of whites.  This, they claimed, showed that blacks did not have room for brains in their heads that were equal in size to whites.  This whole contention was made-up and false, but it still is a favorite claim among overt racists.

Trump used the lesser intelligence meme to attack Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, an African-American.   One insult came in a speech he gave in Pennsylvania:

"And Maxine Waters, a very low IQ individual. Did you ever see her?"  
Trump was retaliating against Waters for urging people to confront Trump cabinet members in public for their policies such as separating migrant children from their parents.  Trump then  composed this tweet:
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!
Then came an interview of LeBron James by CNN's Don Lemon.  James said Trump  "kinda used sports to kinda divide us” to which Trump tweeted:

Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!
This slave-owners' kind of put down is as lowlife and blatantly racist as it is possible to be. It doesn't need the n-word to make its point. But Trump's cohorts refuse to confront it for what it is, as in this Meet The Press interview:


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