America’s Tradition of White Supremacy Fuels Trump’s Attacks on Kamala Harris

By Jared Yates Sexton  |  August 2, 2024 | 12:10pm
Photo by Chris duMond/Getty Images
State Of The Nation White Supremacy
America’s Tradition of White Supremacy Fuels Trump’s Attacks on Kamala Harris

The moment Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, there was no doubting where things would go. I, like many others, assumed Donald Trump and the Republicans would resort to racist and sexist smears, but I also expected they would at least be mixed with moments of exaggerating her positions to an apocalyptic extreme. Of course, we’ve seen Elon Musk infer she would usher in extinction, doofus Tim Pool claimed she was worse than Adolf Hitler, and poor Ted Cruz could only muster a defense of his beloved cheeseburgers, but the pure focus on Harris’s race and sex has been even more repulsive than I think most would have suspected.

Trump has an incredible ability to communicate and embody the worst impulses and prejudices of the American body, and his appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention only served as a reminder of how low this cretin can go. Visibly uncomfortable with having a discussion with any woman of color, Trump went full racist and removed his hood. His attack focused on Harris’s identity, or, rather, a baseless accusation that she has shifted her race depending on when it serves her best.

Coverage has been predictable. Many major outlets have tripped over themselves to hide the blatant racism that beats within the American heart and finds its most concentrated expression through the Right. Vague and avoidant language is deployed because, quite frankly, our newspapers and networks do not want to wrestle with the ramifications of actual racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, classicism, or anything that might lead to deeper critique. Instead, we get some of the most awkward phrasing imaginable that attempts to simultaneously assure audiences the source understands it’s wrong while maintaining the illusion of impartiality.

There is a reason for all this. Why Trump and his fellow authoritarians traffic in this poison, and why so much of our media is so unwilling to engage with it all.

White supremacy itself, which is an ideology that very often partners with patriarchal misogyny, rabid nationalism, and other hierarchical worldviews, is a means to an end. There are obviously deep-rooted prejudices that are communicated and installed through paternal, familial, and communal sources, and then watered and nurtured by inherent biases in the larger culture. This creates a broader narrative that places the white race (or, more specifically, white men) at the top of the hierarchy and, as a result, grants them additional rights and privileges. Our “history,” or rather our conventional history, is a mythology that, depending on the speaker and the intent, either hints at white patriarchal supremacy or lionizes it unabashedly.

The very concept of “Western Civilization” is built on this white male-centric mythology and, with Trump and the blatantly white supremacist authoritarian movement he represents gifting us unvarnished racism on the daily, we must look deeper than the headlines.

Before liberal democracy and capitalism deposed feudalism, white supremacy and Christianity as a mythology supplied what was known as “the Great Chain of Being” that served to place every member of the world in a strict and unapproachable hierarchy. Depending on where you landed on the chain, you were either gifted power, wealth and comfort or damned to exploitation, violence, fear, instability, enslavement and genocide.

Capitalism and liberalism promised to break the hold of theological and feudal domination, but what Enlightenment figures like our Founding Fathers actually delivered was a new system that hid oppression and discrimination behind the veil of “impartial forces.” Meanwhile, theological ideologies were used as secondary reinforcements, white supremacy was an understood component and frame, and enslavement and genocide were fundamental necessities to build the burgeoning capitalist system.

Since the eradication of (most) American slavery, our mythologies have shifted. Liberalism proclaims, and does so without even a sense of irony, that all of these evils have been neutralized. In fact, the very system that fed upon and utilized its victims was the supposed benevolent deliverer of these wonders. It is an insult to the struggles and hardships of democratic movements, populated by people willing to die to wrestle even the most basic rights out of this ugly machine, as their efforts are downplayed or outright erased in this liberal moral fantasy. What we forget is that our leaders and our system harassed these people, violated their rights, partnered with white supremacists, murdered and assassinated these freedom fighters, and restlessly created a world populated with useful fascists and dictators.

Trump makes a convenient scapegoat in all of this. What he offers is a gleeful and disgusting expression of what many leaders and the powerful actually think. Only, they have learned to couch their beliefs in rhetoric, gestures, and coded language. They understand it is unacceptable to say the quiet part loud. Trump’s ascendence to power has represented an uncouth and uncomfortable shift.

Trump and Republicans are refusing to address Harris as a politician because they fundamentally do not believe she deserves to be treated as an equal, as our culture has taught. This should remind us of what happened with Barack Obama, whose campaign was also met with Birtherism attacks, accusations that he was a puppet for the New World Order or Satan or both, and a wealth of conspiracy theories, which are often conduits for rationalizing white patriarchal supremacist views.

What Trump is doing is shocking. Disgusting. And entirely in line with both our history and our present. The lack of filter or decorum is what turns off many in our elite, not the substance of his worldview. To fully articulate what he is doing would mean facing the true nature of America and capitalism at large, and how it obtained its power. It would mean cracking open our mythologies and convenient fairytales and beginning to actually understand why we have arrived at this place and, eventually, addressing the material conditions these putrid ideologies support and feed.

This is why it is treated as a faux pas or something that is even debatable. Because the entire house of cards rests, and has always rested, on these shaky white supremacist foundations. Learning to hide them, to paint them with pleasing stories and convenient fictions, has been the norm for so long that it is imperative to continue the active strategy to ignore or obscure them. To do anything else would mean a full-scale introspection that would, eventually, strike at capitalism’s heart on a level that is unacceptable to the wealthy or their enablers in the media and political class.

And truly, that is the entire ballgame.

 
Join the discussion...