Trump’s War on America
In July 1999, the writer Joe
Wood vanished while attending a conference of journalists of color in Seattle.
He was 34, a brilliant essayist, ferocious in his critiques of racism – not
least as he experienced it in the ‘liberal’ publishing world. The last time we
met, a week before his trip to Seattle, he was wearing a Malcolm X cap and
carrying a well-worn copy of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. On 8 July, after a breakfast with the
Democratic presidential candidate and former basketball star Bill Bradley, Joe
went to Mount Rainier to do some birdwatching. He never returned. The most
likely explanation is that he fell down a ravine and lost consciousness (he had
a heart condition), but Washington is a very white state, and some of his
friends and family suspected racist foul play. At the time I doubted this; now
I’m not so sure. One of his friends told a reporter that he hadn’t packed any
provisions because he was only ‘going out for a couple hours ... sort of like going to Central Park’.
I thought of Joe when I
read about Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who crossed paths with a
white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day
George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck
for nine minutes. There are ‘white spaces’ in Central Park, and the Ramble, a
wooded area popular with birdwatchers, is one of them. Cooper is 57 – almost
exactly the age Joe would have been – a Harvard graduate, a member of the
Audubon Society and a civil rights activist. He politely asked the woman to put
her dog on a lead, as is required in the park. She refused and grew
increasingly aggressive, eventually calling the police to report that ‘there’s
an African American man ... threatening me.’
As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in a 1932 essay for the Crisis: ‘Nothing in the world is easier in the United
States than to accuse a black man of crime.’
The same could be said
today, more than half a century after the end of legal segregation. In 1989
five black and Latino teenagers, described by the police as a pack of ‘wilding’
youths were wrongfully convicted of the assault and rape of a white female
jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump took out advertisements in four New York
City newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York;
although the men were later cleared of all charges, he continues to insist on
their guilt. Amy Cooper may have known to use the polite expression ‘African
American’, but she grasped intuitively that in the eyes of the police Christian
Cooper would be guilty until proved innocent. In fact, as Ida B. Wells pointed
out in 1895, black women ‘have always had far more reason to complain of white
men in this respect than ever white women have had of Negroes’: one of the
engines for maintaining the supply of slave labor was the rape of black women.
(The fact that Christian and Amy Cooper have the same surname is a reminder
that many white and black Americans have mixed ancestry.) But the idea of the
violent, rapacious black male is deeply embedded in the American unconscious,
and Cooper tried her best to tap into it, even if, this time, the strategy
backfired: she lost her job at an investment firm, and her dog. But her
performance provided an extraordinary demonstration of the way the myth of
white female fragility is used against black men.
Later that day, in
Minneapolis, there was a harrowing demonstration of black fragility, which is
all too real and has been magnified by the Covid-19 pandemic. The ‘crime’ that
cost George Floyd his life was (reportedly) buying a pack of cigarettes with a
counterfeit $20 bill. (No wonder if he did: he was one of the forty million
Americans who have lost their jobs since the pandemic began.) Derek Chauvin,
the white police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46
seconds as he complained he couldn’t breathe and called for his dead mother,
had faced at least 17 previous misconduct complaints, and take part in three
police shootings, one of them fatal. His three fellow officers also applied
pressure to Floyd’s neck and protected Chauvin while he stared defiantly at a
woman filming the incident. Police officers in Minneapolis are seven times as
likely to use force against blacks as against whites; while the city’s
population is only 20 percent black, they represent 60 percent of those
subjected to physical force on the part of the police.
In his letter from Harlem
in 1960, ‘Fifth Avenue, Uptown’, James Baldwin writes that the police officer
moves through the inner city
like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile
country; which is precisely what, and where, he is, and is the reason he walks
in twos and threes ... He can retreat from his
uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes
second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile,
the situation grows tenser, and the police force is increased. One day, to
everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything
blows up.
The killing of George Floyd
falls into the gruesome pattern Baldwin described, but it’s also different; and
the difference helps explain why the explosion has spread to three hundred
cities and developed into a near insurrection. The Black Lives Matter movement,
which emerged during the Obama presidency, succeeded in drawing attention to
police violence against black people, but the protests against the killings of
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were mostly confined to the
cities in which the deaths had occurred. Obama was seen as sympathetic to BLM’s concerns, even if he offered little more than
memorable speeches. Floyd’s death not only follows the killings of Breonna
Taylor, an emergency medic shot dead while asleep in bed in her home in
Kentucky by police officers looking for drug dealers operating out of a
different house, and Ahmaud Arbery, a jogger murdered by a group of men
who claimed to be making a ‘citizen’s arrest’ (a term that harks back to
slavery, when any white person could arrest any black person). It took place
under a president who has made white supremacy a pillar of his administration’s
domestic and international outlook. White nationalism has found expression not
merely in Trump’s defense of the Charlottesville white nationalists as ‘very
fine’ people, or in the building of the wall against migrants from Mexico and
Central America, but in his attack on ‘shithole countries’ and his decision to
remove the US from the World Health Organisation in the middle of
the pandemic – ‘white flight’ translated into foreign policy.
And then there’s the
pandemic itself. Floyd’s murder came just as the US death toll
exceeded a hundred thousand. An alarming number of those who have died have
been people of color, especially black people, many of whom suffer from pre-existing
health conditions and don’t have access to adequate healthcare. Covid-19 has
made clear how little black lives matter in the US, even as it has
underscored the country’s dependence on black and brown ‘essential’ workers,
who provide care, deliver packages and prepare food – all lines of work that
have exposed them to the virus. The growing awareness that Covid-19 is a ‘black
plague’, as the Princeton academic Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has called it, has
inspired a call to action among civil rights activists. But many whites,
especially in red states, have responded with demands to end the shutdown.
Trump cheered on the armed and unmasked white protesters in Michigan who seized
the state capitol and advocated ‘liberation’ from the shelter-in-place order
issued to limit the spread of the virus. When Georgia (governed by Brian Kemp,
a right-wing Republican who won the election from the Democrat Stacey Abrams
through brazen voter suppression) reopened, the New York
Times ran a front-page photograph of a black woman in a white
mask, serving coffee to a white man without a mask at a lunch counter, a
reminder that Jim Crow hasn’t so much died as been reconfigured. The message of
such scenes was that whites had no reason to concern themselves with a ‘black plague’,
except to make sure the help was taking precautions.
The method of Floyd’s
killing is no less significant. It almost doesn’t matter whether Chauvin
intended to kill him; he didn’t care whether he lived or died. Trump did not
kill Floyd, but he has fanned the politics of white supremacy and sanctioned
the humiliation of black Americans. It is this assault, on Floyd’s dignity as
well as his person, which has provoked the most serious challenge yet to Trump’s
presidency.
Trump ran in part on his
opposition to costly overseas engagements, but he’s no pacifist and has always
looked at domestic politics as a theatre of combat. Opponents are to be
bullied, and if they can’t be bullied, crushed. Nothing has infuriated him as
much as challenges from people of color: it was, after all, Obama’s mockery of
him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011 that made him decide to
run. Some on the left drew a strange consolation from Trump’s hostility to
foreign wars, as if it meant he could be a tactical ally against American
imperialism. They failed to see that he wanted to wage war at home: his furious
inauguration speech with its talk of ‘American carnage’ was a declaration of
war on urban racial liberalism, especially as represented by New York, the city
that had rejected him.
Trump’s outlook was formed
during the bitter racial conflicts of New York City in the Koch and Giuliani
years, when blue-collar whites – joined by many ‘liberal’ members of the white
middle class – embraced ‘tough’ policing measures such as stop and search,
which were aimed almost entirely at black and Latino men. One of those men, a
Haitian immigrant called Abner Louima, who in 1997 was sodomized with a stick
in a Brooklyn police station, claimed that one of his torturers said: ‘It’s Giuliani
time.’ Although Louima later retracted this, ‘Giuliani time’ is what Trump
wants to institute on a national scale with his calls for state governors and
law enforcement officers to ‘dominate’ the protests and his denunciation of
domestic ‘terrorists’. (Trump has promised to classify ‘Antifa’, the network of
antifascist groups, as a terrorist organization, though US law grants him no such power.) He has styled
himself as a war commander, talking tough to Democratic governors and mayors,
deploying the National Guard, surrounding the Lincoln Memorial with soldiers
and promising to use the military’s ‘unlimited power’ against American citizens
if state governors fail to do the job. The protesters in Lafayette Park,
outside the White House, were dispersed with tear gas and rubber bullets so
that Trump could strut across to St John’s Church, flanked by an entirely white
group of officials, and pose for a photograph holding a Bible.
Once again, Trump has shown
a flair for evoking some of the most hideous periods in American history. ‘When
the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ he wrote in one tweet, a phrase
coined in 1967 by the Miami police chief Walter Headley, who also said: ‘We
don’t mind being accused of police brutality.’ Trump claimed not to know the
source of the quote, but his advisers did. And no one with even a rudimentary
knowledge of American history could have failed to spot the implication of his
threat to set ‘vicious dogs’ on the protesters outside the White House. Slave
owners used Cuban bloodhounds to hunt down escaped slaves; Eugene ‘Bull’
Connor, the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, attacked
civil rights protesters with snarling dogs. Trump also said that in his effort
to restore ‘law and order’, he would protect not only property but ‘your Second
Amendment rights’ – a message to reassure his white supporters that they need
not hesitate to use armed ‘self-defense’, a practice legalized in recent years
by ‘stand your ground’ laws (walking or driving in some white neighborhoods
has become an increasingly dangerous activity for black people). He has stoked
divisions and released his followers from any inhibitions. ‘Maga [Make America
Great Again] loves the black people,’ Trump says, and the ‘the’ tells you
everything you need to know about his ‘love’.
In the early days of the protests, as
Trump fulminated against Antifa and the ‘spilling of innocent blood’, and
police sirens and helicopters were an almost constant soundtrack in my Brooklyn neighborhood, it was easy to slip into fatalism. New York’s profoundly disappointing
mayor, Bill de Blasio, who often boasts about his biracial children (his daughter was arrested at a protest), offered shameful excuses when a police car
rammed into a group of protesters. Then came the curfew. ‘I lived under a
dictatorship for more than twenty years,’ a Syrian friend wrote to me, ‘and I
know how it usually starts: link the media to outside actors, call journalists
“fabricators” and publicly shame them so they get scared, cast doubt to create
rumors and conspiracy theories.’ A journalist in Sacramento sent me a
photograph of armored personnel carriers in the street: he’d been followed
home from a protest by National Guardsmen with rifles.
There’s no denying the
authoritarian aspirations behind Trump’s response. But he is finding it increasingly
hard to pass himself off as a latter-day Nixon, come to rescue America’s cities
from chaos, as Nixon claimed he would do in 1968. For one thing, he’s the
incumbent – the explosion occurred on his watch. As Jamelle Bouie has argued in
the New York Times, a president who thrives on permanent
disruption can hardly present himself as an agent of stability, let alone a
leader whose gross mishandling of Covid-19 has brought about real ‘American
carnage’. (And Nixon’s ranting wasn’t broadcast on Twitter.) Trump has also
conspicuously failed to steer the conversation away from police brutality to
rioting and looting. The American press has been supplying the kind of context
it has usually ignored when covering urban uprisings; the space for radical
criticism, even with regard to attacks on private property, has noticeably
expanded. Although some police departments have doubled down in their attacks
on protesters – especially in Washington DC – others have
shown solidarity by kneeling, a gesture popularised by the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who in 2016 began
kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against racism and police
brutality. The following year Trump said teams should fire players for
kneeling: Kaepernick hasn’t been offered a new contract since his protests, but
the NFL, oblivious to the irony, has issued a statement
condemning the murders of Floyd, Taylor, and Arbery.
Still more significant are
the criticisms of Trump by the military establishment. ‘It sickened me
yesterday to see security personnel – including members of the National Guard –
forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the
president’s visit outside St John’s Church,’ Mike Mullen, the former chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in the Atlantic, under the
title ‘I cannot remain silent.’ Mullen criticized Trump’s ‘overly aggressive
use of our military’ and said he was ‘deeply worried that as they execute their
orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes’.
American cities, he added, ‘are not “battle spaces” to be dominated, and must
never become so’. He was echoed the next day by James Mattis, Trump’s former
secretary of defense, who explicitly compared Trump’s divide-and-rule tactics
to those of the Nazis. Mattis’s replacement, Mark Esper, who had accompanied
Trump on his walk to St John’s Church, also spoke out against deploying troops,
contradicting his boss. In his January 2017 speech at CIA headquarters, Trump boasted that he and the
military were ‘on the same wavelength’. As it turns out, they aren’t – at least
not all of them. And if he succeeds in sending troops to the states, over the
heads of America’s governors and mayors, he will upset some of his strongest
supporters, who, after all, are advocates of states’ rights.
Mullen’s article has
reassured many that there are institutional obstacles to Trump’s naked
assertion of force. The deep state, once an object of suspicion among liberal
Americans have turned into an object of longing under Trump; Mullen has won
much praise – and no little gratitude – for his article (finally, the military
is coming to the rescue!). But even if America’s cities don’t become ‘battle
spaces’ in Trump’s war against the protesters, they will remain the scene of a
lower-grade battle between increasingly militarized police forces and black
people for whom equal protection under the law remains an illusion. That
conflict has its origins in the American colonies. The first slave patrols,
created in South Carolina in the early 18th century, tracked
down runaway slaves, prevented slave revolts through the strategic use of
terror, and imposed labor discipline. Black slaves were described in legal
terms as ‘unfree persons’ and for all the ‘progress’ that black people are told
America has helped them to make since then, their freedom remains conditional
and precarious – especially in the hands of the police. A twisted road leads
from slavery to Jim Crow, and from Jim Crow to the age of mass incarceration.
Those ensnared by today’s carceral state are citizens, but in the eyes of the
state, they remain marked by their blackness.
It is this older war over
police brutality and mass incarceration that has brought protesters onto the
streets across the country. At the demonstration, I attended in Brooklyn on 1
June there was no mention of Trump. The demonstrators understand that he’s
merely a symptom of an old American disease – and that a victory for Joe Biden
is hardly a cure. They chanted ‘no justice, no peace’ and the names of Breonna Taylor,
Eric Garner, George Floyd, and others. The slogans I saw included: ‘I can’t
breathe’ (Eric Garner’s last words, and now Floyd’s); ‘I’m not Black, but I
will fight for you’; ‘Prayer to God to stop the virus of racism in America’;
‘White silence equals death’; and, of course, ‘Black lives matter.’
The protesters are mostly
young, multiracial, the generation that came of age in the aftermath of the financial crisis, found themselves saddled with student debt and have spent the
last two and a half months stewing indoors, prisoners of a pandemic that has
eviscerated the economy. The uprisings in Watts, Detroit, and Newark in the
196os broke out when overall unemployment was at a historic low, in communities
that felt they’d been denied their share of the American dream; today’s
protesters don’t even believe in the dream. They’ve been ridiculed for their
sense of entitlement by those who’ve enjoyed far more prosperity and, for all
the mainstream criticism of identity politics, they understand far better than previous
generations that racism is a system, rather than a matter of individual hatred,
prejudice or ‘ignorance’; they know that it’s embedded in institutions and
that unless it’s rooted out, American democracy will remain an unequal and
unsafe space for black and brown people. They’re the children of what Matthew
Yglesias has called the ‘great awakening’, which seems to have had a stronger
effect on young whites than their black counterparts. This ‘awakening’ has
absorbed Baldwin’s lessons, though not his eloquence or redemptive humanism;
its invocation of ‘intersectionality’ evokes the seminar rather than the
church; its characterization of white supporters as ‘allies’, rather than
‘comrades’ or, as Martin Luther King put it, ‘brothers and sisters’, gives the impression that distrust between black and white activists is not being fought
against but institutionalized. On 1 June I saw a group of young people ritually
renounce their white privilege in a ceremony led by a black activist. They
seemed unaware that such gestures amount to little: it is oppressive conditions
that produce racism, rather than the reverse. As Barbara Jeanne Fields has
written, ‘People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are
already seen as oppressed.’ The cleansing of white souls doesn’t mean much
without radical change to America’s political and economic structures.
It is easy to mock such
spectacles of white contrition, which appear naive to the point of
narcissism (a ‘guilty eroticism’, in Baldwin’s words), or to regret the
absence of a cohesive political ideology and program. The protesters offer an inchoate mix of Marxism, anti-colonialism, Black Power rhetoric, intersectional
feminism, radical self-care, and (this is America, after all) appeals to Jesus
and other prophets. But this is a time of action, and the protesters are
working out their ideas, and their plans, on the streets and without
charismatic leaders of the sort who shaped the civil rights struggles of The 1950s and 1960s (an initial strength that could, as in the Arab revolts, turn
into a liability). They deserve credit for grasping something that eluded their
elders, especially the liberal advocates of ‘humanitarian’ interventions in the
Middle East: that America’s human rights agenda should begin at home, and that
efforts to export democratic principles scarcely observed in our own cities
amount to moral evasion. It is in large part thanks to their persistence that
Derek Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder (he was initially
charged with third-degree murder), and that his three fellow officers were also
finally charged, on 2 June. Their actions even compelled the ever reticent
Barack Obama to respond, in a speech that was striking for its lack of
eloquence – or urgency. His cheerful praise for the demonstrators and moderate
calls for police reform felt obsolete, the voice of a well-meaning father whose
children have long since grown up.
What we’re seeing isn’t
so much a movement as a wave of protest. Its concerns are those of earlier
black freedom struggles, although its structure and spontaneity are more
reminiscent of the Occupy movement, or even the gilets Jaunes than the civil
rights era. Some protesters called for prison reform and the demilitarisation of
the police; others for the abolition of prisons and an end to police funding.
Some want to transform the system, others to smash it. (Some people are there
simply because they’re fed up with being indoors and there’s a party in the
streets.) In contrast with the almost entirely black urban revolts of the late 1960s, they’re willing to take their protests to white neighborhoods. Malcolm
X said that the
long, hot summer of 1964 ... has given
an idea of what could happen, and that’s all, only an idea. For all those riots
were kept contained within where the Negroes lived. You let any of these
bitter, seething ghettos all over America receive the right igniting incident,
and become really inflamed, and explode, and burst out of their boundaries into
where whites live!
This is exactly what has
happened.
The biggest reason for this
shifting geography of protest, as the urban historian Thomas Sugrue points out,
is that commercial spaces – in sharp contrast with schools – are America’s most
successfully desegregated, even if the problem of ‘shopping while black’
persists. Numerous sites of class and racial privilege, from CNN’s corporate headquarters to Macy’s, have been targeted,
sometimes violently. Some of the more serious incidents of looting and property
destruction appear to have been fomented not by black people but by whites in
strange groupuscules – themselves obscure reflections of the nihilistic
universe that is Trumpworld. (As Jeremiah Ellison, a city councilman in
Minneapolis, pointed out, no one in a black community would torch a
barbershop.) Impassioned criticisms of these manifestations have come from
black people defending their communities, notably the rapper Killer Mike, who
gave a moving speech in Atlanta, and Terrence Floyd, George Floyd’s brother.
Some older progressives have recoiled from the violence of the demonstrations,
partly out of fear that it will play into Trump’s hands in November, but it
scarcely measures up to the violence committed by the police with their tasers,
mace, tear gas, and rubber bullets. In any case, the protesters have more
pressing concerns than an election six months away. Militant but overwhelmingly
non-violent, they have succeeded in achieving their first, but hardly their
final, objective: Floyd’s killers have been charged and his name won’t be
forgotten.
Floyd has rapidly achieved
the status of an international martyr, a symbol of racial injustice like the
Scottsboro Boys, wrongfully imprisoned for raping a white woman, or Emmett
Till the 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after allegedly whistling
at a white woman. After 9/11, Le Monde declared:
‘Nous sommes tous américains.’ The headline is unimaginable today – who would
want to be American now? – but America’s decline has only made Floyd’s killing
reverberate more strongly. Holding posters of George Floyd, twenty thousand
people marched against police brutality in Paris. Floyd’s image has been
displayed in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine – countries that have experienced
first-hand the ruthlessness of American power. ‘We are the Muthafuckin world,’
someone posted on Instagram. This remarkable demonstration of American soft
power, which looked as if it had evaporated under Trump, belongs almost
entirely to black America.
Trump couldn’t care less
about the international outcry. He wants to divorce the rest of the world and
retreat to his fantasy of an armed white America as conjured on Fox Television.
But the United States now faces a serious challenge to its international
legitimacy – as serious as the one it faced during the Jim Crow era. The
demonstrators have put not just the police but the nation on trial. As much as
structural change, they’re fighting for what Martin Luther King, in his 1967
Riverside Church's speech against the Vietnam War, called a ‘revolution in
values’. They may not look on each other as ‘lovers’, as Baldwin urged the
‘relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks’ to do
in The Fire Next Time, but they are trying, in their own
fashion, and in their own language, to ‘achieve our country and change the
history of the world’. For the moment, they are all that stands between us and
the ghosts of our ugly past.
5
June
