President George W. Bush's
chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, has a message for people who are excusing
President Trump's racism:
"I had fully intended
to ignore President Trump’s latest round of racially charged taunts against an
African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an
African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in
it.
I had every intention of
walking past Trump’s latest outrages and writing about the self-destructive
squabbling of the Democratic presidential field, which has chosen to shame Joe
Biden for the sin of being an electable, moderate liberal.But I made the mistake
of pulling James Cone’s 'The Cross and the Lynching Tree' off my shelf — a book
designed to shatter convenient complacency. Cone recounts the case of a white
mob in Valdosta, Ga. in 1918 that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner.
Turner’s enraged wife,
Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her
and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children.
According to one source, Mary was 'stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked
with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man
opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground
and was stomped to death.'
God help us. It is hard to
write the words. This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in
dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime,
of U.S. history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing
that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing
that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving
widow to death and killing her child.
When the president of the
United States plays with that fire or takes that beast out for a walk, it is
not just another political event, not just a normal day in campaign 2020. It is
a cause for shame. It is the violation of martyrs’ graves. It is obscene
graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial. It is, in the eyes of history, the betrayal —
the re-betrayal — of Haynes and Mary Turner and their child.
And all of this is being
done by an ignorant and arrogant narcissist reviving racist tropes for
political gain, indifferent to the wreckage he is leaving, the wounds he is
ripping open.Like, I suspect, many others, I am finding it hard to look at
resurgent racism as just one in a series of presidential offenses or another in
a series of Republican errors.
Racism is not just another
wrong. The Antietam battlefield is not just another plot of ground. The Edmund
Pettus Bridge is not just another bridge. The balcony outside Room 306 at the
Lorraine Motel is not just another balcony. As U.S. history hallows some
causes, it magnifies some crimes. What does all this mean politically? It means
that Trump’s divisiveness is getting worse, not better.
He makes racist comments,
appeals to racist sentiments and inflames racist passions. The rationalization
that he is not, deep down in his heart, really a racist is meaningless. Trump’s
continued offenses mean that a large portion of his political base is energized
by racist tropes and the language of white grievance. And it means — whatever
their intent — that those who play down, or excuse, or try to walk past these
offenses are enablers.
Some political choices are
not just stupid or crude. They represent the return of our country’s cruelest,
most dangerous passion. Such racism indicts Trump. Treating racism as a typical
or minor matter indicts us."— Michael Gerson
