“My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge.” – Old Balkan proverb
Those words are an example of how and why people consistently ignore things and make alliances with evil forces in order to justify maintaining the status quo. We face a time when recent political events provide evidence of just how much people are openly willing to side with forces damaging to the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers. America has been here before. The world has been here before.
Far too many people have tried to compare Trump to Hitler. They give him far too much credit. Only time will tell who he really is, historically speaking. He is not the elephant in the room, his supporters are. The Nazi killing machine could not have done the horrendous things it did without widespread support from the German citizenry.
Hitler did not invade Poland in 1939 without advance warning. His policies toward European Jewry had been clearly laid out, and in many ways were just an extension of German antisemitism. The Western powers in France and Great Britain were well aware that trouble was brewing but chose to ignore it to the peril of millions in WWII. Hitler had already invaded the Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria in 1938.
By the time he invaded a defenseless Poland in 1939, there was not much the British could do. Great Britain was so busy trying to avert war that it participated in the September 1938 Munich Conference, where Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to step aside and freely let Germany invade and occupy the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Back in Great Britain, most greeted this agreement with jubilation because they erroneously believed appeasement would help them avoid war.
Winston Churchill was one of the few voices of dissent, calling it “an unmitigated disaster.” Hitler did not wait long to break his promise of expanding his land grab. Just six months later his thirst for more land led to occupying the remainder of Czechoslovakia. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and the war with Great Britain and France was on. From September 1939 until May 1940 the actual fighting between the British and Germans came to be named the Phoney War. Scandinavia and Western Europe were the next targets of the Nazis, they attacked Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France by May 1940. By that point, Chamberlain’s disastrous policies led to his resignation and Winston Churchill’s rise to the office of Prime Minister.
The attempt to ignore Germany and its widespread pronunciations of racism did not lead the powers in charge to prepare for the inevitable. Fascism in Germany and Italy was ignored, leading to the most destructive war in the history of the world. Appeasement was a massive failure. Looking the other way to ignore the elephant in the room could not save the West.
The rise of fascism, then as well as now, portends a very ugly future. So many pundits now are telling us that the MAGA movement is not fascism. They ignore history and all of us might suffer the consequences. No one has a crystal ball to predict the future but we have hindsight to guide us.
I remember very clearly the 2008 election of Barack Obama, and how people told us that it was a sign America had found a way to transcend its ugly racial past. Some called America post-Obama, a post-racial America. They ignored the exit polls which showed very clearly that support for Obama among Whites was far from a majority. He received somewhere in the neighborhood of 42 percent of votes from the White community in 2008, and during His reelection in 2012 that number dropped to less than 40 percent.
The exit polls screamed to me that the so-called post-racial America was just the latest American myth. Many ignored the racial dynamics during the rise of Trump. As a result, the Democratic Party was left in the dust four years later when Trump defeated, in the Electoral College at least, Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of the United States.
I recently became aware of the research of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. He used data from Google searches to understand the hidden racism of Americans. While many people still falsely believe racism is only practiced by White people in the former Confederate states in the South, His research told him that was just not right. He used data from Google Trends to track to use of the N-word on the night of Obama’s first victory, one in every hundred Google searches including the word Obama included “KKK” or some form of the N-word.
That same night there was a huge spike in searches for the White Nationalist website Stormfront. The searchers were ten times higher than they were previously. He found there were more searches for “N-word president” using the actual epithet than they were for “first Black president.” For those skeptical of the appeal of Obama among Whites, that information is anything but surprising. Every White person claims to have voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but exit poll data tells us that just could not be true.
In 2012, for the first time in American history, the Black community saw a candidate they fell in love with and the Black voter turnout exceeded the White voter turnout, which was not widely spoken about by political pundits in the media or the Democratic Party. There was a lesson to be learned, but it was ignored.
In each election since 2012, the lack of excitement by Black people for Democratic candidates shows up in lower turnout around the country. Nearly 66 million votes were cast for Obama in November 2012. Fast forward to 2016 and a man who made a name for himself questioning the birthplace of the first Black president, reality television star Donald Trump, who had never run for political office in his life, managed to get just shy of 63 million votes and 304 Electoral College votes to best the 65.9 million votes and 227 Electoral College votes of Hillary Clinton. Can we ignore Trump’s appeal to racist White people in 2016 and 2024? I refuse to do so.
Stephens-Davidowitz’s research using Google Trends found that in 2012 Obama lost 4 percentage points nationwide from explicit racism when he defeated Mitt Romney. His research was rejected by five academic journals and peer reviews showed people could not believe a post-racial America could be filled with such racism.
History is filled with other examples of elephants in the room when it comes to racism. In 1948, the government of South Africa adopted segregationist policies it called Apartheid, which stood until the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1994. How did the West react to these ugly policies? They were applauded by segregationist-minded politicians of the Democratic Party in the U.S. That same year, Senator Strom Thurman ran for president on the States Rights Democratic Ticket, also known as the Dixiecrats. He easily won the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina and did fairly well in Tennessee. Thurman won 39 Electoral College votes and received 1.2 million votes overall.
The crime of Apartheid was ignored by American administrations beginning in 1948 and for nearly five more decades. President Harry Truman became the first American president in the twentieth century to speak out against racial discrimination and acted to reverse employment discrimination in the war industries and the U.S. military. At the same time, to kept his mouth closed about Apartheid, forging a formal diplomatic relationship with the South African Government during the earliest years of the Cold War.
That policy was continued under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan. American corporations decided to do business with the Apartheid government, over 300 were doing business worth nearly $2 billion dollars in 1977, or nearly $33 billion today, making profits exceeding 12 percent, primarily because of the near slave labor of Blacks under Apartheid.
The list of companies included: General Motors, Ford, Coca-Cola, Mobil, Polaroid, General Electric, Firestone, and IBM. In the early 1970s, Blacks in America and South Africa began to demand divestment in South Africa. Bobby Kennedy had spoken out against Apartheid during a speech he gave in Cape Town in 1966. Had he not been assassinated in 1968, perhaps he would have been the first U.S. president to do something about US policy toward the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope; and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” – Robert F. Kennedy, to White anti-apartheid students at the University of Capetown (June 6, 1966)
I speak of that history to show how decades of denial of the elephant in the room, horrendous racial discrimination and anti-Black rhetoric which drove a political movement, is alive and well all these years later. America has not cleansed itself of racism.
Unfortunately, once again far too many people are willing to stand on the sidelines and do little or simply nothing as we face an existential threat to racial justice again. This is not to say that all of the White supporters of the MAGA movement are racists. However, I do not believe it would have such a strong attraction if not for racism.
Every since Trayvon Martin was murdered in Sanford, Florida in 2012, race became an open sore festering in the conscience of America. The progress made during the turbulent earlier years of the twentieth century seemed to have been erased when a simple slogan, “Black Lives Matter,” aroused such anger in segments of White America.
When Eric Garner was choked to death by a police officer in New York, Mike Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore, we began to see a pattern of vigilante and police killings of Blacks that aroused anger and protests around the country. Americans were beginning to hear the voices of Black people in similar ways to what occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. It came to a head in 2020 with the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.
“And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Other America” speech at Grosse Pointe High School (March 14, 1968)
The protests after Floyd’s murder seemed at the time to prove that the long overdue racial reckoning had arrived. I warned that all the White people advocating and marching with Blacks from coast-to-coast would run out of steam when the emotional energy driving them dissipated. Later that year Trump issued a directive in the form of an executive order which banned equity-related training at the federal government.
It was eventually overturned by President Joe Biden in March 2021, but from September 2020 through 2024, the language of that executive order by Trump was copied and pasted into laws across the country, leading to a strong backlash to the racial justice advocacy which had been impacting the hearts and souls of many in the White community.
We have subsequently seen a poisoning of ideas related to equity-related issues driven by an attempt to make White people feel victimized and attacked by what they believe is “reverse racism.” My attempts to work in this atmosphere were curtailed. Now I find that it is nearly impossible to have real, fact-based, constructive conversations about discrimination and systemic racism.
Likewise, friends and colleagues tell me they see the same in spaces where they are trying to discuss sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and antisemitism. We have allowed the elephant in the room to grow and do massive damage to this country. Kennedy spoke about what this led to in 1966.
“Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard – to share in the decisions of government which shape men’s lives. Everything that makes man’s life worthwhile – family, work, education, a place to rear one’s children and a place to rest one’s head – all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity of man can be protected and preserved only where the government must answer – not just to the wealthy; not just to those of a particular religion, not just to those of a particular race; but to all of the people.” – Robert F. Kennedy, to White anti-apartheid students at the University of Capetown (June 6, 1966)
© Art
DALL-E
