The Real Power Behind Trump is White Fear

stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Civil Rights, Democrat, Donald Trump, Election, Hillary Clinton, Labor, Obama, Politics, Prejudice, Racism, Republican, Social Justice, voting, White Allies, White Fragility, White Privilege, Whiteness, ,

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White people are terrified.

Shaken, panicked, scared beyond our capacity for logical thinking.

We’re so apprehensive, we elected Donald Trump, a reality show clown, to the White House.

Yeah, I know. Hillary Clinton wasn’t exactly inspiring. And the Democrats dropped the ball ignoring the populist mood of the country and the needs of middle class workers.

But 58% of white folks supported Trump. He only got 21% of nonwhite voters. In fact, Whites is the only major group he won – not black people, not Hispanics, not any other race or nationality.

Just white folks.

Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women – and yet 53% of white females voted for him.

Trump is an admitted serial monogamist who cheated on various ex-wives – and yet 65% of white Christians voted for him.

Trump promised to bring back outsourced manufacturing jobs while his own clothing line is foreign made – and yet 67% of white laborers voted for him.

That’s how panic-stricken we, Caucasians, are.

We held our hands over our eyes and ears and loudly proclaimed our loyalty to a charlatan.

Oh, we’ll pay for it. He’ll break campaign promises, disappoint us with retrograde policies and perhaps even hurt the people we love.

But in the meantime, many of us are in denial.

“Let’s give him a chance,” white folks say.

Yet Trump has already appointed a wife-beating, Jew-hating, white supremacist, Stephen Bannon, to be his chief White House strategist.

Just stop, white people. You’re embarrassing yourselves.

So why are we so damn scared?

Answer: we’ve been pricks throughout American history.

Yeah, I know. None of us were around for slavery. Many of us weren’t even on the scene for Jim Crow. But all of us have benefited from the society these institutions built up.

The 13th Amendment ended forced bondage except as a punishment for crime. And ever since then our justice system has found ways to unfairly accuse, sentence and enslave black people into the prison industrial complex. We live in the wealthiest country in the world, and much of that wealth is a direct result of laws that raise up white folks and crush black and brown people under our heels.

And we know it.

Don’t give me some story about how you never asked for it. You’ve got it. If you do nothing to fight it, you’re a member in good standing of the white supremacy board of directors.

White folks don’t talk about this stuff. We ignore and deny and whistle past the graves of millions of lynched and murdered people of color. What do you think the fascination is with zombie movies? It’s just another manifestation of white fear – fear that we’ll be overrun by the countless have-nots and devoured.

Few of us have articulated it, but we know our time is running out. The black and brown population is increasing faster than ours. We’re letting in too many dark skinned immigrants and too few light skinned ones. In three short decades, we won’t even be the numerical majority anymore.

Every year we find it increasingly more difficult to enforce this racial caste system. Our police gun down more unarmed black folks in the street. Our prisons can’t swallow them all.

Even now our majority is so slim that if just a few of us side with the dark underclass, we can elect a black President – well multiracial but who’s counting?

That infuriated a lot of us. How dare they pretend like THEY can run the country? After Obama, we were rushing to the gun store in our soiled pants afraid that the time for justice had finally come. Black folks were finally going to come for us because of the centuries of oppression.

That’s really the fear. Black people will seek justice.

At best we’ll lose our exalted positions in society. At worst, WE’LL be the ones crushed under the boot. And turnabout will be fair play.

That’s why we elected such an obviously unqualified blowhard as Donald Trump.

We want him to make America great again – and by “great” we know exactly what we mean.

It’s a sad reflection on white society.

We could admit the truth. We could take a deep breath and help our oppressed brothers and sisters take their places as equals among us.

After more than two centuries, we could throw off our denial.

But that’s not what most of us did.

History will judge us harshly for this election. We did nothing to turn back time. We’ve only engaged in a tantrum – this, the last gasp of white supremacy.

26 thoughts on “The Real Power Behind Trump is White Fear”

  1. The election is more complex than being about race. Most states that went for Trump this time voted for Obama in the last two elections. Michigan and Wisconsin voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. I don’t agree with Obama on much, but today he said the election result is about peoples fears of the consequences of globalization. Moralizing and getting self-righteous about race will not end racism. Identity politics is based on differences and division. It plays into the usual divide and conquer strategy of elites to keep the masses divided. Only the people uniting to develop a government that will end inequality will end racism.

    Liked by 1 person

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    • Philaken, race isn’t the only issue, but it is a major one. This is what Trump ran on and white people responded. He won because whites more than any other group supported him. And we were promised a continuation of white supremacy. You’re right that we shouldn’t ignore other factors, but we will likewise be wrong to ignore the large role racism and prejudice played in this election.

      Liked by 1 person

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  2. What about the 90 million registered voters that did not vote? How large was the white ratio in that group?

    Fear is a major factor but ignorance also feeds that feer.

    For instance, the fact that 88 percent of lost manufacturing jobs did not leave the U.S. for China, Mexico or any other country with cheap labor. Since 1979, 7 million lobs have been lost in the manufacturing sector but production almost doubled, and for most of those years, America was still the most productive manufacturing sector in the world until a couple of years ago when China slipped into 1st place and the U.S. dropped into 2nd place. Second Place! But still way ahead of #3. In fact, the U.S. still manufacturers enough steel to meet 80 percent of our domestic needs. The U.S. even imports some of that steel mostly to Europe.

    88 percent is almost 6.2 million of those 7 million lost jobs, and studies I’ve read estimate that millions more will be lost to automation in the near future.

    How many human jobs were created because of NAFTA?

    A lot of jobs were created in the U.S. that wouldn’t be there without the Mexico trade.”

    http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/nafta-20-years-later-benefits-outweigh-costs/

    How can any president bring back jobs that never left, and if the jobs that did leave do come back, how do we know that most of them won’t end up also being automated?

    Human slavery, except in the sex industry and that illegal industry is thriving and growing at a rapid pace because of the Donald Trump’s of the world, has been replaced by robot slaves. Robots are the perfect slaves. They will never go on strike, never need expensive medical care, never get moody, never get pregnant, never get sick, never need a retirement plan, never join a labor union, etc.

    But what happens when all the humans jobs are gone and there are no more human consumers with money to buy the products the robot slaves are churning out; what happens then?

    Liked by 1 person

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    • You’re right, Lloyd. My point isn’t to ignore the economic realities. The forces that came together to give us President Trump are many. I just want to make sure that racism – and in particular white fear – is not forgotten. Too many of us will only acknowledge one or two of the causes here, but we must see them all. Otherwise, we will be prevented from stopping this clown when he takes office.

      Liked by 1 person

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  4. You know what they say about 3 kinds of falsehoods: lies, damned lies – and statistics. While certainly fascinating, I’m not sure the numbers will help us figure out what happened here.

    What I see as the most logical reason for DT’s win is the disgusted anger of “the average American.” The idea that ANY new broom would “sweep clean” the actions of the establishment, regardless of personal attachment to the particular actions they most abhorred, overshadowed every single other thing DT said or did. Why else would the country elect a man with ZERO political experience and NO platform?

    Hillary’s biggest problem was actually her political experience. DT read the mood of the country and his angry clown campaign reflects that: “Look what she DID!” Her biggest mistake, in retrospect, was her “take the high road when he takes the low road” approach — her lack of passion. She needed to fight fire with fire – attacking DT’s business practices in more than her ads, overtly connecting the dots for an American public that – clearly – was no longer capable of doing so. Remaining on the calm defensive in front of live cameras made her look guilty and calculating to a great many people.

    The entire situation was fomented by the sound-bite press and the failure of the debate moderators to enforce the rules because TV delights in angry fighting, hoping to win the ratings wars — Corporate Capitalism in action.

    Even NOW that he is elected, follow the money. DT measures like Midas. Expect no spot-changing as he gloats over his most recent win – I’m sure he believes he is invincible, able to do whatever he likes from this podium. He and Mencken: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people … ”

    God help us ALL.
    xx,
    mgh
    (Madelyn Griffith-Haynie – ADDandSoMuchMore dot com)
    – ADD Coach Training Field founder; ADD Coaching co-founder –
    “It takes a village to transform a world!”

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    • For this election, more than 50 million new voters registered to vote and most of those new voters registered as Democrats. In 2014, there were about 145 million registered voters and more than 80 percent voted.

      For this election, more than 200 million were registered to vote, a historical record, but 90 million decided not to vote on election day, also a record breaker, I think.

      Did the voters that decided to stay home, make that decision based on Trump’s campaign that targeted this group with the goal to cause a sense of depression so they would stay home, and/or did these registered non-voters stay home because they didn’t think Hillary Clinton could lose because all but one or two polls out of many predicted she’d win and tRumps odds of winning were slim?

      How many voters decided they didn’t want to waste their time because they thought Hillary couldn’t lose and she didn’t need their votes; they allowed themsevles to be deceived by the polls, to be manipulated b tRump who is clearly a master con-man and manipulator.

      Liked by 1 person

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      • I am working on forgiving the lazy and self-focused who couldn’t get it together to get themselves to the polls, but 90 MILLION?! Give me a break.

        I’d love to see the demographics on that group — I’d bet that a great many of their names would show up on the call lists of scam artists: high self-interest, low cause-and-effect thinking skills.

        I agree that the polls no doubt inspired the incredibly stupid act of sitting out this election (sorry – forgiveness not in place, yet). If you are suggesting that those polls were possibly manipulated as a campaign strategy, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that they were — precisely because “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of . . .”
        xx,
        mgh

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      • Thank you so much for these sources, Lloyd, but I still can’t fathom why ANYONE would bother to register and then choose NOT to be counted.

        I have read the complaints of a few [mostly black] registrants who were turned away or forced to vote provisionally. It is certainly possible that the ballots sent from outside the country weren’t counted – and perhaps foul play could have accounted for SOME missing votes.

        But 50 MILLION?! Still not able to forgive it.
        xx,
        mgh

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      • You not alone in being unable to forgive these registered voters. They all should be taken out to the barn and fenced pastures, and told the muck out the horse and cattle stalls and corrals for the next 100 years.

        Liked by 1 person

      • If the GOP impeaches Trump and boots him from the White House about the time of the midterm elections in 2018, and the Re-pubs lose both Houses of Congress, Pence will become isolated and limited in what he can do. And if he abuses the power of president, the Democrats in Congress can impeach him and tie him up with investigations, etc. like the GOP did to the Clintons.

        Liked by 1 person

      • AND like they undermined Obama, don’t forget. There were “Impeach Obama” signs and posts before he was even elected, and the GOP stated publicly that their primary goal was to vote no on *anything* Obama wanted (and WHY is that not treason?)
        xx,
        mgh

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      • If the powers that be really wanted everyone to vote, there are things they could do to increase voter turnout. For instance, they could make election day a holiday. But instead they actively pass legislation to suppress the vote. Media talking heads decry people who don’t vote, but that’s exactly how the powerful want it.

        Liked by 1 person

      • Making Election Day a holiday does not, in and of itself, make it easier for many, many people to get to the polls. There are plenty of businesses that run on holidays – many get more business than usual. There would have to be specific stipulations that no employee could be required to work more than, say, four hours or something. But since so many people in this “gig” economy work two, three, more jobs, how do you control for that? And that’s to say nothing of those who have the opportunity to vote now, but who just might take an Election Day holiday as just that – a holiday.

        A friend of mine just moved back to Illinois from Washington State. According to him, in Washington, everyone gets a mail-in ballot (return postage paid, of course), complete with a booklet outlining all the candidates for all elected offices, their bios, their stated positions, and pro and con statements about each candidate written by advocacy groups. Maybe all states could take a lesson.

        Anyway, I don’t think lack of opportunity is what kept a lot of people from voting. Voter turnout this year was down substantially from four years ago, which was down substantially from eight years ago (and that’s in absolute numbers – keep in mind U.S. population has and continues to increase). Eight years ago people proudly stood in line for 5+ hours to vote for Obama. I think the biggest factor in this election was that there was nothing to vote *for*. It was a competition between two extremely lousy, fatally flawed candidates. It’s not that Trump garnered that much support, it’s just that Hillary garnered even less. Sure, there were third party candidates (which I proudly supported), but it was made clear early and often not to even bother with them when Hillary was such a stellar (cough, cough) candidate.

        Liked by 1 person

      • Dienne, making election day a holiday might not ensure everyone votes, but it would certainly help. There are many other things we could do – even making sure there were an adequate number of polling places so no one has to wait in line for hours to vote! But I do agree with you about why so many people didn’t vote this time. Again, my point is’t that racism was the only factor. But it was significant.

        Liked by 1 person

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