… Real white of you
by David Benjamin
“You're
a slave in your own country, White Man. Each year you get to keep less
of the fruits of your labor; each year it gets more difficult to carry
the burden the aliens have placed upon you; each year the cheap labor of
aliens makes your future less secure…”
— George Lincoln Rockwell
MADISON,
Wis. — In the aftermath of seven killings on the streets of America,
our black spokespeople seem to be acquitting themselves so much more
gracefully than their white counterparts.
While Donald Trump was
channeling Richard Nixon with a nudge-wink proclamation about being
“the law and order candidate,” and George W. Bush was issuing vague
nostrums about our worst selves and our best intentions, black speakers
were responding to tragedy with eloquence, indignation, complexity and
solutions.
In a Dallas eulogy during which he chided all
Americans for our indifference to bias and a high tolerance for
violence, President Obama spoke healingly: “I am reminded of what the
Lord tells Ezekiel. ‘I will give you a new heart,’ the Lord says, ‘and
put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone, and
give you a heart of flesh.’ That’s what we must pray for, each of us. A
new heart. Not a heart of stone, but a heart open to the fears and
hopes and challenges of our fellow citizens.”
Dallas Police Chief
David O. Brown defined the deadly gap between cops and the urban
community more clearly than most people have ever heard when he said,
“Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough
mental health funding, let the cop handle it. Not enough drug addiction
funding, let’s give it to the cops. Here in Dallas we got a loose dog
problem. Let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, give it to
the cops. Seventy percent of the African-American community is being
raised by single women. Let’s give it to the cops to solve that as well.
Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”
Even a 15-year-old, Cameron Sterling,
who had seen video of two Baton Rouge police officers pin his father,
Alton Sterling, to the ground and pump him full of 9mm slugs, spoke
gently of brotherhood and reconciliation. “I feel that people, no matter
what the race, should come together as one united family,” said
Cameron. “There should be no more arguments, disagreements, violence,
crime. I feel that everyone, yes, you can protest… But protest in the
right way — with peace, not violence.”
The kid has a point, but
the kid’s black, swimming against a tide that has reinstated whiteness —
the mere genetic absence of pigment — as an active political ideology.
For a swelling swath of the electorate, being white is sufficient as a
political identity. Neither Democratic nor Republican, Libertarian,
Socialist or Green. Just…
…colorless.
Donald Trump,
bless his tiny heart, has become the prophet for the national white
people’s revival movement. Loyalists praise his willingness to “say what
he thinks,” without regard to “political correctness.” But, really? I
see a man more politically correct than Hillary or Bernie. If Trump were
really saying what he thinks, candidly expressing the deep-dyed id of
the nation’s aggrieved Caucasoids, he would come right out and roar,
“Hey, I’m white and I’m entitled — because I. Am. White.”
(Yes, I
understand that he’s not strictly white. Depending on foundation,
blusher and lighting, he ranges from a sort of carbon-monoxide pink to
an overripe apricot tone. But let’s not split hairs.)
Trump is not saying, “You people, my white followers, are better than all those Others — because You. Are. White.”
At
Trump’s rallies, the microphones occasionally capture true believers
spewing what they think and feel, words Trump still avoids because he’s
trapped in the craven grip of political correctness. He has been caught
using the “f” word but never the two syllables that would bring
Trumpniks to their feet in ecstatic ovation. Trump says, ironically, “I
love my protesters,” even as he urges the mob to beat them up. But what
he means, and the mob knows it and adores him for it, is: “I love my
niggers.”
Followed, of course, by: “Get ‘em outa here!”
Although
he’s still pulling that knockout blow, Donald Trump intuits how we
working-class white males feel. Nobody knows the troubles we’ve seen.
Along with the decline of an almost exclusively white middle-class
America, white males have been ridiculed into absurdity by beer ads and
the Farrelly Brothers. We’ve lost jobs, income, houses, opportunities,
marriages and — if all those Cialis commercials are any indication — our
very manhood. Our wives are using separate bathtubs.
We need
someone to blame. We need to lash out. We need to throw a punch, ideally
at someone who’s not looking. Our corner man? Trump.
The thing is, guys…
What’s
been taken from us hasn’t gone to the dusky outcasts whom we’ve dumped
into ghetto schools, redlined out of our neighborhoods and racially
profiled into the biggest incarceration state in the history of the
world. While we’ve been recently screwed, they’ve stayed screwed all along.
Face
it, man. You can’t lose your job — and your career, your dignity and
your erection — to a black guy who hasn’t been around to take it because
he’s been in jail since he was 14. Or to a Muslim refugee languishing
in an ICE detention cell. Or to a Mexican tomato-picker, a single
mother, an unemployed teenager or even a Chinaman in Shenzhen. All these
“losers” are even more impotent than you are.
That Chinaman
didn’t pick up his marbles and move all U.S. computer manufacturing, all
the mobile device making, every TV factory, all the shoemaking,
garment-making and most of the steelmaking from the U.S.A. to sweatshop
nations where 12-year-olds work for a dollar and a dime a day.
Patriotic, GOP-voting Americans did all that packing up and hauling ass.
Big fat pink Americans — men who look a lot like Donald Trump, men know
the secret handshake and play golf at the country clubs where the vast
majority of us white guys can’t afford to even peek through the fence.
Talk
about walls? Guys like Trump have been walling us off all our lives. Go
ahead, Bubba — try trespassing at Turnberry. And don’t even think about
applying for work there, or at Mar-A-Lago — not as long as there are
dirt-poor Haitians, desperate Dominicans and H2-B temporary visas.
Donald
Trump keeps telling white men we have enemies. He’s right. But he’s not
pointing his stunted finger toward all the copper-toned upper-crusters
like him who’ve taken the loot and bricked it up inside their gilded tax
shelters. Trump is benevolently scattering at our feet the scraps,
chicken bones, potato peels, fish heads and big promises that have
always been the bounty of riffraff like us. If we ask, “Why so little?”
he points warningly downward into the teeming depths.
He says, “Look out below.”
Friday, July 15, 2016
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