Even with the vile racial and ethnic violence that has assaulted the American spirit in recent days, I have no doubt that there are still whole segments of white America who take Black misery to be a performance and certainly nothing for which they are the cause or need to be concerned. But racism is never a causal opinion. It enjoys a certain heft. Although admittedly elementary, it is deeply idiosyncratic and rarely arrives without the imagined monologue the keeper of it must utter to himself to feed its equally imagined power. But the nature of this opinion cannot seriously be called thinking.
Nothing devoid of a critical vocabulary can be thusly identified. And so in the place of genuine rigor, it relies on sensuality. Ambiguity. Myth. And mystery. So that it might hide the inability to speak in particular terms behind the more excepted practice of reducing people down to crude generalities. Racism is the art of distortion. The original American religion. A borrowed language whose syntax is mostly burdened with the kind of nostalgia that makes a constructive vision impossible. Racism in this country is an old indulgence. It is, as it were, a deplorable heirloom of a past that never was, now handed down to unsuspecting white children in an effort to feed their egos at the shameful expense of their minds. For to be a racist is to be a shadow of one’s lesser self, because racism is the sad epilogue of a formerly free spirit. It is, most regrettably, what happens to our humanity in the absence of sincere reasoning. A triumph of the insecure. The mediocre. The impotent. All of whom would rather create a caricature of Black existence than turn the power of their gaze back upon themselves. But that should not surprise us.
Bigots, racist and anti-Semites are only able to affirm their place in the world by directing their resentment outward. On to other people. But never in the direction of themselves. That is to say, for them to exist, they require the presence of external stimuli. Something to hate. Oppositionalism. Psychologically speaking, their entire existence is a reaction to the presence of an invented hostility, because without something to fight or conquer, they have no reason for being. They have no power. So to seem powerful they exacerbate differences and systematically say no to anything that might represent an alternative embodiment. Genuine diversity. Transcendental Blackness. Or more specifically the spontaneous inversion of the inflexible contempt the bigoted mind rejoins each time it looks out upon the world with seedy eyes. Theirs is an affirmation of negation. So without even thinking, they say no to anything that might be a threat to the triumphant resentment they feel.
Moreover, today racism in America is used to compensate white people for a fictitious crime by means of an equally fictitious revenge. The great and sad irony of America is that increasingly more and more whites experience the equalities finally extended to other people to be a form of discrimination against them. Only a truly entitled group of people could conjure the gall it takes to confuse equality with oppression, but white people ran to Donald Trump in droves because he convinced them that America owed them something. He convinced them that they had been wronged, and that they (not the people their laws and moral apathy had systematically broken) were justified in feeling resentful toward so-called American social progress. The election of Trump proved once and for all that unmitigated and unrefined resentment can be a potent organizing principle for reckless political sophistry.
Trump is not only an aversion to democratic goodness, but hides his pathologies behind his apparent belief in racial conquests. Trump is a white insecurist of the worst kind. That is to say, he looks upon the landscape of life through a slit. And because of it his humanity is trapped within the clutches of a perpetual squint. A narrow vision through an even narrower window, as he is perhaps worst of all tragically Hobbesian. A celebration of each against all. Subsequently he can only make sense of the world through the telling of lies. His mind loves hiding places, secret paths and backdoor conspiracies. All of which feed into his not so provisional self-deception that has sadly become the necessary condition for the possibility of his public existence. And now, as he radicalizes dangerous segments of the American population, people are dying. But Election Day has come. Perhaps now we will see if the will to be better is still alive in America.
