Racial profiling is another strain of institutional racism. It is the belief that a person’s racial identity, and not their behavior, is a legitimate reason to be suspected by the police of criminal activity. Redlining is yet another example. Until the late 1960s, banks marked certain neighborhoods on the map to show where they would withhold investment. Those banks also overcharged black and brown people for services and insurance, or encouraged them to take on faulty mortgages. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed redlining, and yet the practice persists, arguably leading to the largest loss of black wealth ever in the subprime mortgage scandal that triggered an economic recession in 2007. And even though the Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed the franchise, the relentless assault on black voting rights through unprincipled and often illegal voter ID tactics complicate that right. These are institutional practices that extend racial hierarchies.
Beyond these institutional forces lie the symbolic meanings of public gestures. A pat on the back by one of the ministers gave the impression that Pettit was a victim in need of support and understanding. No such gesture was extended to the invisible sea of black students on campus, and across America, who had been antagonized by Pettit’s racist antics or very similar behavior.
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My friends, sometimes the call of white innocence is far more insistent, far more explicit, far more unapologetic. And there are occasions where you have sought to hide behind a figure who gives bigger voice to your grievances and your fragility, to your angry insistence of innocence. In such instances you outsource it to a vile political figure who echoes your most detestable private thoughts. Even before the nation got a full blast of such a phenomenon, I saw it up close.
It was the summer of 2015, and there I was, in the lobby of the NBC building in New York, confronted with the flaming orange visage that is Donald Trump. I had just finished criticizing him on a daytime talk show when our paths crossed in front of the elevator bank.
“You’ve been very tough on me,” the future president said. “But I love you.”
There’s no question that Donald Trump has “huge” charisma. He possesses a brutally appealing magnetism that, tragically, amplifies the most virulent rumblings of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia this country has reckoned with in quite some time. That is because Donald Trump is the literal face of white innocence without consciousness, white privilege without apology.
Each election, we hear that this run for the presidency says more about who we are than any other—Obama defines us, Reagan embodies us, Bush will be the ruin of us all. We’ve become inured to the get-out-the-vote sales pitch; the nation endures. And yet the 2016 election was indeed the most eventful of my lifetime, and perhaps the most important. Whiteness was at stake in a way it hadn’t been in decades.
Trump’s efficacy as an ambassador of unrepentant white innocence, and ignorance, and privilege, doesn’t depend on whether his personal racial views add up to bigotry. What he’s done in public will suffice to pass judgment. Trump’s political popularity took off when he sullied the citizenship of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. The “birther” claims were driven by unwarranted skepticism about the place of Obama’s birth and the status of his birth certificate. Trump’s recent assertion that Obama is an American still rang false and appeared as little more than an attempt to deflect responsibility for his vicious views onto his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. His admission that he said Obama was born in America to keep his campaign going was a moment of ruthless honesty that sealed the case.
It is not simply a matter of voicing disapprobation for Trump; his supporters, too, must be answered. Many are driven by rage that for eight years a black man represented a nation that once held black folk in chains and that still depends on the law to check black social and political aspirations. Barack Obama so spooked the bigoted whites of this country that we are now faced with a racist explicitness that we haven’t seen since the height of the civil rights movement.
Trump, more than anything else, signifies the undying force of the fear unleashed by Obama’s presidency. He manipulates a confused and self-pitying white public. Yes, yes, some will say—but not all Republicans are like Trump. Not all of them even like Trump. It is true that parts of the Republican establishment finally, and unconvincingly, rebelled against Trump. But it was these same “reasonable” Republicans who ignored his early impact. They refused to listen to those who insisted that his vitriol was destructive to the country. As long as it didn’t impact Republican, or white, interests, the lives Trump imperiled didn’t matter. Now that he has been elected president, many Republicans have overcome their misgivings and enthusiastically returned to the fold. The party for which he is now standard-bearer must be held accountable for his creation.
It wasn’t so long ago that Obama led millions of white Americans to believe that they were voting for a transformational figure. He would make the country permanently better. A vote for him was a vote for decency and intelligence, a vote against hate and chaos. It meant, simply, being on the right side of history.
Yet Obama’s impact has been so quickly and thoroughly eclipsed by a pervading sense of racial and national doom. What many of us didn’t see coming is that Obama’s success would also be counted as his failure. The election of the nation’s first black president tapped into a deep vein of escapist hope, that it would be a simple, painless way to heal our historic wounds. We projected onto Obama our desire to crush bigotry with enlightened democracy. Obama, a stalwart of social justice, a wonder of political rhetoric, would be the unifying force of national identity and speak redemption into our bones.
But too many of you, my friends, more than I could bear to imagine, resented Obama’s rise. What we did not fully understand, or account for, is the deep-seated, intractable anger of the white Americans who never viewed Obama as either fully American or quite human. Donald Trump has exploited these people, promised them a different transformation, one that returns the country to what they would like to believe it once was: theirs. This is the naked, unapologetic face of white innocence on steroids. We have moved backward in so many ways since the high point of Obama’s first election.
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The sort of willful innocence that Trump conjures is far more visible, and thus susceptible to opposition, than subtler visions of whiteness tied to American identity. For so many of you, what it means to be white is what it means to be American, and vice versa; your American identity is indissolubly linked to your whiteness. It is a possessive whiteness, too, one that hogs to itself the meanings of democracy.
Very little reveals the heart of innocent whiteness more than a challenge to professional football. It is a game that tests the durability, and rigidity, of American ideals of patriotism and national belonging. It is a game that also seeks, paradoxically, to cast out the very black bodies that have come to define the sport.