Photo via Creative Commons
As the November 3 presidential election draws closer, conversations about race in America cannot be avoided. After several shootings of unarmed Black people—Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd—happened seemingly back-to-back, protests against police brutality and systemic racism erupted across the nation and even abroad.
While it’s true that Donald Trump’s dog-whistle speeches have emboldened racist violence across the country, I don’t have the privilege of blaming America’s current state of race relations on one man.
The protests had a ripple effect, and soon Black professionals in every industry—entertainment, sports, education, politics—began calling out the unjust treatment they had experienced.
As people scramble to find Black authors to read and Black thinkers to follow on social media, even nonfamous Black citizens like myself have found ourselves bombarded with texts and emails from well-meaning white friends expressing horror and disbelief about “everything going on.” A white acquaintance from my hometown of Byron, Georgia, told me how startled she felt when her dad taught her she was worth more than Black people; she followed this statement with asking if I thought our hometown was racist.
This is the same horror and disbelief the nation expressed when Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016. The night of the election, as the results rolled in, I decided to go to bed early. I’ve never been a fan of election nights; the stress is usually too much for me.
The next morning, I woke up to “What just happened?” and “Is this real life?” texts, none of which I had the heart to respond to. On his late-night show, Jimmy Fallon played a classic clip from Family Matters, relating America’s collective shock to Steve Urkel’s famous line: “Did I do that?” White liberals in particular were surprised that the nation would follow a Black President who spoke of hope and inclusion with a man whose campaign employed bullying on the basis of race, gender, immigration status, physical appearance, and disability.
Unfortunately, people of color in America do not have the luxury of disbelief.
In announcing his plan to run for President, Donald Trump said: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you . . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
The “you” in this statement is telling, especially when considering Trump’s majority white, Christian audience. When I listened to this speech, I heard: They’re not sending people who look like you, or believe what you believe, and that is scary.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of white nationalist groups in the United States rose by 55 percent from 2017 through the end of last year. The group said data from 2019 showed “a surging white nationalist movement that has been linked to a series of racist and anti-Semitic terror attacks and has coincided with an increase in hate crime.”
It’s true that, over the past four years, it feels like incidents of racially and religiously motivated violence have dominated the news. With each incident, Trump is careful to not point the finger at his base. He’s even refused to criticize one of his supporters who shot three people, killing two of them, at a recent protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the police shooting that left Jacob Blake, a young Black man, paralyzed.
In 2017, when the impending removal of a Robert E. Lee statue led to violent and fatal protests from white nationalists and neo-Nazi organizations in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said there were “very fine” people “on both sides” of the issue.
In August of last year in El Paso, Texas, a man opened fire with an AK-47-style rifle inside of a Walmart, killing twenty-three people and injuring many more. The shooter, a twenty-one-year-old white man, had posted a racist manifesto online just minutes before the shooting began.
“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” he wrote. Trump blamed social media for the “racist hate” that led to the attack, but The Guardian newspaper noted that Trump’s re-election campaign had used the word “invasion” to describe immigration in more than 2,000 Facebook ads in 2019.
While it’s true that Donald Trump’s dog-whistle speeches have emboldened racist violence across the country, I don’t have the privilege of blaming America’s current state of race relations on one man.
In fact, while these incidents are hard to hear about in the news, I am never surprised by them. I wasn’t surprised when Trump won the election in 2016, and I wasn’t surprised when his words started to ignite violence. Perhaps the Obama Administration and a desire to believe in a “post-racial society” lulled some white people into a sense of security that people of color in America have never felt.
I was in my third month of college the night the United States elected Barack Obama as the forty-fourth U.S. President, watching the news unfold while sitting in a still unfamiliar dorm room. My new roommate, another young Black woman, was doing the same on her side of the room. We faced away from one another, silently taking in the news as though we were alone.
I watched with my own case of mild disbelief. I’d voted, but no part of me thought a Black man was actually going to be President. I knew there had been progress in our country’s race relations, having been raised by two Black parents who helped integrate their high schools in the 1970s. Growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, I’d seen plenty of Black achievements: Colin Powell became Secretary of State, Halle Berry won the best actress Oscar, and Venus and Serena Williams dominated at Wimbledon.
But the hatred some people held about my skin color was one of the first things I learned in life, and it was a lesson often repeated. I was only eight years old when three white supremacists killed a Black man, James Byrd Jr., by tying him to their truck and dragging him for three miles on an asphalt road in Texas. I’d seen the government’s lack of aid to the poor, mostly Black residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. My life experiences did not prepare me, or my roommate, for seeing a Black man be elected President.
We turned to look at each other. “What just happened?” I asked.
She cracked a dubious smile and raised her hand to cover her mouth. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I think . . . he won?”
Soon other students started to gather on the front lawn, and from our fifth-floor view it looked like a celebration. I grabbed my shoes and asked my roommate if she wanted to join them, but she decided to call her parents to celebrate instead.
When I left the dorm room, the hallway and common areas were empty. Pushing open the door to the stairwell, I was surprised to see two young white women sitting on the landing below me. One of them was crying fitfully into her hands, while the other nodded silently and reached out to place a hand on her shoulder.
“I didn’t even know you were political,” the girl said to her friend. “He’s Black,” the crying young woman shouted in response. “He’s going to ruin our country.”
I shut the door as quietly as I could, my presence undetected, and returned to my dorm room, my brief elation popped like a balloon. When she asked, I told my roommate I’d simply changed my mind. “It was just a little too cold outside,” I said.
I began writing this piece just as news came about the shooting of Jacob Blake. He was shot seven times in the back while trying to walk away from police. Three of his young children saw the whole thing. He was considered such a threat that he was shackled to his hospital bed.
I turned my phone off, so as not to be distracted by the incoming calls and texts I knew would soon be on their way. Do you know what it feels like to have to point out the knife in your back to the same person who is twisting it deeper? This feeling is very familiar to me, and every other Black person in the country.
If the past four years have done anything for race relations in the United States, I hope they’ve at least killed off white America’s sense of disbelief that racism remains a problem in this country. In my own life, I’ve decided to treat that disbelief as willful ignorance. Some people don’t see the knife in my back, because it suits them not to.
I’m thrilled at the number of people who’ve claimed to have had an epiphany this past year, but Black people can’t do anything with white guilt and disbelief. If Trump winning the presidency in 2016 was a wake-up call, hopefully you’re no longer hitting the snooze button.
We’ve had four years of grieving for the country we live in; let us hope, come November, we vote for the country we want.