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The resurrection of Jim Crow

By Dickson Igwe, Contributor

United States President Donald Trump’s dog whistles to Nazis and white nationalists is symptomatic of America’s longest lasting national evil: racism.

Today, Trump is the living vehicle for America’s racists and bigots, allowing racists to continue a genocidal type narrative that began with slavery.

And the present US racist subset exists across the North Atlantic in the UK, and elsewhere.

UKIP, Nigel Farage, Brexit, and European populism sit on top a similar racist and xenophobic sub-culture. Racial hatred is on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic, spurned on by xenophobia and demagoguery.

Now, Historian Mike Stewart describes in a recent article, how in 1992, Writer Derrick Bell wrote in “Faces at the Bottom of the Well’’ that racism was an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of US society.

Charlottesville and the recent race battles, and the American president’s equivocation and ambiguity – in essence, Donald Trump’s support for the Nazis and Bigots at the center of the violence and death at the recent racial confrontation – attests to systemic racism in the USA.

The intractability of race in the USA has been further stated by Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times, who has written that racism is not a passing phase, but a permanent feature of American life.

Racism is hell for the racially oppressed. It is the suppression of the American black’s humanity, dignity, and life chances.

In a note of total despair, Bell has stated that, despite the change over the years, blacks are worse off today “than at any time since slavery”.

Bell further asserts that “the only difference now is the more effective means of domination”.

Black advancement in the USA has been more symbolic than substantive. There have been breakthroughs such as Civil Rights in 1964, and Barack Obama’s election in 2008.

However, for every civil rights gain, there have been decades of policies that chip away at fair housing, and equitable hiring, and equal opportunity college admission practices.

Stewart writes that the African American Experience is more than just the physical fear. It is the apocalyptic despair of blacks from racist whites, raping, maiming, and killing blacks.

It is an experience of the body, mind, and spirit.

There is a terrible narrative. The faith in the American Dream for too many blacks is simply delusional. Will America ever change?

America today appears committed to a racial and gendered caste system. Will a nation built on racial suppression turn the corner?

Then there is the Alt Right. These are the intellectual inheritors of America’s racist and bigoted history.

Guardian Commentator Paul Mason has described the Alt Right as supporters of extreme right wing ideologies. These include White Nationalism, White Supremacism, and Anti-Semitism. The Alt Right is totally opposed to egalitarianism, universalism, and multiculturalism.

And Donald Trump has given millions of racists and bigots permission to express their racism and to declare cultural war on Liberals and Progressives.

And make no mistake: racism is hideous and insidious. Police see a black face in a white neighborhood as reason to stop and search.

Black men are shot and killed frequently for no justification by white police officers. Young blacks have been criminalized in the USA. Segregation remains ubiquitous across America

However, for every action there is a reaction. There is evidence that racist America has overplayed its hand. The Trump Presidency may indeed be the Swan Song of American bigotry.

There are three reasons why the preceding is the case.

First, demographic changes which include intermarriage – the browning of America, and the growth in the Latina population – the main reason for Trump’s Mexican Wall, will in 20 years make minorities – nonwhites – the majority population.

Second, the Trump Presidency has been a wakeup call. The forces of progressivism and globalism are lining up to fight a cultural war against bigotry.

Racism, and not Radical Islam, is the new enemy. That may be good news for Moslem Bigots and terrorists who are no longer public enemy number 1 for Liberals, despite the murderous culture of Islamic Terrorism.

And Trump’s numbers in terms of approval from voters has flat lined since Trump was elected. Trump’s approval numbers have declined precipitously post Charlottesville.

The US Left sees Trump’s attacks on their core values such as fairness and equality as existential.

Moveon.org is mobilizing grassroots support for the 2018 congressional elections aggressively.

However the Democrats face an uphill battle.

Republicans control The House, The Senate and the White House. Republicans control state legislatures and governor’s mansions in the vast majority of US states.

In other words the Republican Party, the natural home for racists and bigots, controls the American political infrastructure.

But the greatest foe of US bigotry and racism remains globalism. The men and women, who own the corporations that make up the Fortune 500, do not care much for walls, protectionism, and trade war.

Their businesses depend on open markets – access to nonwhite professionals, labour, and markets; and free trade.
The opening shots in the battle between Trump’s protectionist instincts and an open world are seen in the angst Trump has against Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon.

Bezos is the Poster Boy for a globalism that has made him – if not for a few days – the world’s richest man.
These are the forces that will put a stop to Donald Trump’s Racist Revisionism.

The Republican Establishment is already abandoning Trump. In fact there is evidence that the more Liberal forces in the Republican Party are more in tune with Democrats than the racist and toxic White House.

On August 18, 2017, Steve Bannon, Trumps ideological adviser was sacked: an ominous sign for racists and anti-Semites in Washington.

Paradoxically, Trump’s racist and bigoted orientation has ensured Barack Obama’s legacy. Trump has seriously damaged Republicans and the Republican brand.

The Republican Party is in a conundrum. Senior Republicans admit that Trump is costing them big on getting their legislative agenda through congress and the senate. There may be the start of a massive jumping off of the trump wagon.

OK. Black despair is real. After more than two hundred years of history the USA remains a racist and socially segregated nation.

But America stands to lose as a nation with its rendition to racism and intolerance. The country has clearly lost its global moral leadership. It is increasingly viewed as a pariah nation.

The moral baton has been passed on. France’s Emmanuel Macron, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Germany’s Angela Merkel, and paradoxically Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn are today’s leaders of a free world created by Post World War 2 USA

For American blacks, there is light at the end of the tunnel, notwithstanding the present evil of Donald Trump.

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