Opinion | The Rot You Smell Is a Racist Potus

Were the white people living in New York at the time racially, pathologically predisposed to criminality? Of course not. And black and brown people now aren’t. That historical and sociological context is lost on the racists.

Furthermore, there is nothing benign in Trump’s language. Infestations justify exterminations. There is a reason that Martin Luther King Jr. said, “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.” The mouth that demeans may not always be attached to the hand that destroys, but they are most assuredly connected in spirit and in spite.

It would be easy to prosecute a case against Trump on policy, but policies are not at the center of the creature. White supremacy, white nationalism and white patriarchy are.

The core of this man is racist in a way that is so fused to his sense of the world that he is incapable of seeing it as racist. It is instinctual for him to attack people of color. It is instinctual for him to denigrate the places they live and the countries to which they trace their heritage.

He has so bought into the white supremacist narrative that his ideology no longer requires, in his own thinking, a label. For him, this lie of it is just the truth of it, and what is “right” can’t be racist.

This is a means by which racists have operated throughout history, to rescue themselves from association with those who flayed the flesh of the enslaved, who raped the women and sold the children, who released the dogs and aimed the water cannons, who noosed the necks and set ablaze the crosses.

Those demonstrative few, those consumed by hatred and sadism, those were the racists. Not the exponentially larger groups who swallowed and regurgitated a warped view of the world, a doctored view of history, and supposedly damning “facts” without contextualization.

Trump is a racist. Say that out loud. Say it with the profundity that it deserves. That to me is the beginning and the ending of the rationale I need to stand steadfast in my resistance.

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