Reckoning With a Post-Orange America
One day, our long nightmare will be over.
One day, he and his regime will be gone.
We don’t how much of America will be left, how much of a tattered, weathered, thoroughly wrecked country will remain.
One thing won’t change.
Even after he’s gone, America will be a haven for White Supremacy.
The president didn’t cause White Supremacy.
He didn’t organize or refine it.
But he’s been elected president twice in large part because of it.
In recent days, many have shared a sad but wonderful quote by President Lyndon Johnson.
The quote totally encapsulates America’s White Supremacy problem.
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."
This was a private conversation with the late Bill Moyers. He didn’t intend this quote to become public, but the truth of what he says smacks you in the face.
A Southerner from Texas, the sitting president of the United States, couldn’t say the quiet part out loud publicly.
Credit to Moyers for making sure that the truth came out.
Racial prejudice has always existed. Some people naturally look for a scapegoat for their problems.
They need someone to look down on to make themselves look better and smarter.
Mankind’s inhumanity towards others begins with the need to look and feel superior.
It morphs into hatred and enmity, causing the bearer to “other” people.
When America took upon itself the mantle of slavery, it further nourished the seeds of White Supremacy that began with unsettling and massacring Native Americans.
When the nascent country decided it needed more than indentured servitude, it opened the door for every other kind of malicious hatred to manifest itself on these shores.
As slavery was suspended in the North, but flourished in the South, more evil took root.
The slave was forbidden to learn but was derided as ignorant.
The slave worked unmercifully but was chastised as lazy.
The slave was treated as less than human but was branded inhuman by their enslavers.
When the Civil War ended, opportunities to comprehensively address White Supremacy were ignored.
The Confederate states should have been severely punished.
Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, and the entire Confederate cabinet should have been tried and executed for treason.
The Confederate States should have undergone a rigorous process to reapply for statehood.
There should have been government monitoring of race relations.
None of this happened.
The White men who governed the nation thought it was better to be gentle and mild with insurrectionists.
The subversives who left the country to create their own were virtually welcomed back with open arms.
When Reconstruction ended under the watchful eye of racist President Andrew Johnson, Confederates were pardoned, their states easily readmitted to the Union, and the South passed Jim Crow laws that effectively disenfranchised Black Americans for a hundred years.
These actions signaled to White Supremacists that racial prejudice was safe to flourish in America, and it did.
The Ku Klux Klan was organized and terrorized Blacks.
Lynchings occurred all across the nation.
Towns like Rosewood and Tulsa saw Black communities decimated by Whites emboldened by the lack of liberty and justice for all.
Black soldiers returning from the World Wars were quickly reminded that their usefulness on the battlefield did not lead to equal treatment back home.
As the Great Migration from the South to the North continued, the calls for integration in the South grew louder and stronger.
The party reversals that had begun under the Franklin Roosevelt administration took permanent root.
The Democratic Party became the party seeking to establish equal right for all people.
The Republican Party became the party of repression and prejudice.
Southern Democrats began to switch their party allegiances from the Democrats to the Republicans.
Even as President Johnson won a landslide victory against Barry Goldwater in 1964, the South became a Republican stronghold.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed.
Thurgood Marshall, who has successfully argued Brown v Board of Education before the US Supreme Court, joined the Court as its first Justice of Color.
Progress was being made.
But at the same time, racist FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover waged an anti-civil rights campaign against civil rights activists.
With the help of local police forces, the FBI infiltrated civil rights organizations, sowed the seed for the assassination of Malcolm X, and the annihilation of the Black Panthers.
White Supremacy, both private and government sponsored, was very active.
Schools became integrated although racist Whites resisted.
Blacks and other People of Color were elected to public office throughout the South and the nation.
All the while, the Republican Party ran campaigns strategically targeting disaffected White racists with stories of “welfare queens,” Willie Horton, and states’ rights.
Ronald Reagan was elected and declared a War on Drugs, which miraculously targeted Black drug addicts and dealers, but did nothing to stem the trafficking infrastructure.
George Bush was elected using the same racist tropes.
His son was elected as a “compassionate conservative,” but many White Supremacists in his party were elected or reelected to Congress.
Then, in 2008, the unthinkable happened.
A Black man was elected president.
For all of the indignities heaped on White Supremacists in the past forty years, this was the straw that broke the racist camel’s back.
For the first time, a Black person sat in the White House.
There were lots of other firsts.
For the first time, the president and the First Lady were compared to monkeys and apes.
The president was taken to task as a racial divider, even though the only true source of division was the color of his skin.
He was hated, reviled, and despised.
When he had the nerve to wear a tan suit, it was seen as an act of depravity.
When he was reelected in 2012, White Supremacy outrage grew exponentially.
The next president had to reverse what had occurred since the Sixties.
In 2016, they found their candidate – a failed businessman who professed Christianity despite being a rampant adulterer.
A man who was sent by God but who never went to church except for funerals and photo opps.
A man who touted his intelligence and business acumen but who nevertheless has bankrupted casinos.
And most importantly, someone who had always demonstrated both casual and overtly dramatic racism.
He was elected and proceeded to dismantle as many civil rights gains as possible.
He lost reelection in 2020, only to be reelected in 2024 after running against a much more qualified Black woman candidate.
He has installed the worst cabinet in the history of American presidents.
He is actively engendering racism, bigotry, sexism, misogyny, and nativism.
His chief advisors in both administrations are ardent White Supremacists.
Even when his rule is at an end, when he has finally left the world stage, the seeds sown by slavery, the “Lost Cause” mythology, an environment that saw military installations named after racist traitors will still be reaping an evil harvest.
The president is a virulent symptom of the disease known as racism, but he is just a symptom, not the disease itself.
New seeds of love, tolerance, and understanding must be planted, watered, and nurtured now – not when he leaves office, but before, so they will have time to take root and grow.
Because there will be others like the president.
There will be those who believe that the only way to make America great is to subjugate the “other.”
White Supremacy will not leave the scene with the president.
It is likely that it will always be with us, but the extent of its power and influence depends on those of us who will fight against it.
Who will call it what it is without ceasing.
Who will shed a light on its darkness and continue to illuminate the truth.
And the truth is that we will not survive in this world without each other.