“It’s Not About Race!”
The other big lie.
“Stop making everything about race.”
If you’re Black and American, you’ve surely heard that one before. It’s always struck me as the grandest of ironies, though, considering who has made everything in America about race practically from day one. (Hint: It’s not Black Americans, who may have built this country but didn’t shape its priorities.) This is never more obvious to me than when someone tries to pretend it’s ever about anything else.
Yesterday that person was Anthony Scaramucci. In the 2020 documentary #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump, which I watched for the first time, the wealthy entrepreneur who spent 10 days as former President Donald Trump’s White House Communications Director in 2017 before resigning, tried his best to cast economic desperation, not race, as the root of Trumpism. Scaramucci, a Trump ally-turned-harsh critic who wrote the 2018 book Trump: The Blue-Collar President, even defended the ex-POTUS against charges of racism in #Unfit.
His deflection got me thinking: Was it really about money? Like pretty much every turning point in US history, the rise of Trump, I decided, was all about race. When I think about the psychology of 45’s most ardent disciples, I barely think about economics. Trump probably couldn’t have succeeded anyone but the first Black president.
Most of his minions probably would never admit it. They’d be the first ones to tell Black people to stop making everything about race. But from the start of his political ascent, the crux of the Trump platform that drew them in has been White supremacy.
Let us count the ways: It began with his warm embrace of “birtherism,” the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama, the US’s first Black commander-in-chief, wasn’t born in the USA and was a Muslim secretly plotting the destruction of the country. Then it trickled down to Trump’s support of Confederate monuments, the “very fine people” among the ranks of the alt right’s White nationalists, armed White people at Black Lives Matter protests, and a wall to keep brown-skinned Mexicans south of the border. The Confederate flags his followers paraded through the US Capitol on January 6 for the first time ever didn’t lie.
Race has been the powerful, galvanizing force for the folks at the forefront of Trump’s GOP. Many of them see White people as an endangered species in America, and the only way to protect their top-dog status is to rail against anything that threatens it, whether it be political correctness, cancel culture, Black Lives Matter, voting rights, or critical race theory.
The Big R even taints any legitimately economic aspect of Trumpism, for, as always, White supremacy is good for business. If Black Americans and other minority groups prosper, where will that leave White Americans? Will they have to prepare to switch places and settle in a few rungs down the social and economic ladder? As usual, it all comes back to race.
We have the racism that capitalism rode in on to thank for Trump’s staying power, too. Anti-critical race theorists may moan about how CRT is anti-capitalist and therefore anti-American, but slavery would have faded away decades before the Civil War had it not been deemed essential to the Southern economy and the financial might of rich White plantation owners. Race motivated Americans on the wrong side of history then, and it’s motivating them now.
Despite the convenient outrage the right is suddenly wielding over critical race theory, if its basic tenet — that racism is embedded into the DNA of this country — weren’t true, Trump’s presidency wouldn’t have been possible. The tight grip he continues to hold on the Republican Party, despite losing last year’s presidential election to Joe Biden, would be unfathomable.
Focusing on economic desperation makes everyone involved sound more noble than they actually are. For decades, the GOP has been peddling the principle of less government, not helping the working class. Ronald Reagan even famously — or infamously, depending on how you look at it — said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” If economic desperation drove the supposed Democratic Party defectors who helped Trump win in 2016 or the previously apolitical Americans who didn’t care about politics but saw a savior in Trump, then they joined the wrong team.
But I don’t think they did. They knew exactly what they were getting themselves — and us — into. The Republican Party has never been about saving anyone from destitution. Many of the working class who voted for the self-made man who actually wasn’t self-made at all, saw him as an aspirational celebrity, but Trump realized it would take more than that to get him into the White House and keep him there. To that end, he played the race card, and he’s been playing it ever since.
During the 2016 presidential election when “Make America Great Again” was entering our collective consciousness, Cher made the astute observation that, for Trump, what the slogan really meant was “Make America Straight and White.” That’s always been the subliminal message of it.
And for those who refuse to let him go, the ones insisting he’s still their president, he had them at “White.”