Anti-Trump paranoia – it’s not just for the New York Times’ news pages. The front of the Sunday by Carol Anderson, professor of African-American studies at Emory University, “The Politics of White Resentment” and author of the surely fair and unbiased book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. The story’s text box on Trump: “He doesn’t want to make things better. He wants to stoke racial fears.” Other Sunday articles included a feminist, anti-Trump defense of Bridezillas, and a writer using fear of a Trump-ruled land to justify being rude to people.
White resentment put Donald Trump in the White House. And there is every indication that it will keep him there, especially as he continues to transform that seething, irrational fear about an increasingly diverse America into policies that feed his supporters’ worst racial anxieties.
Trump’s supporters are guided solely by “white rage.”
The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage -- that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different -- and, to them, inspiring.
Like on Christmas morning, every day brings his supporters presents: travel bans against Muslims, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Hispanic communities and brutal, family-gutting deportations, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, an Election Integrity Commission stacked with notorious vote suppressors, announcements of a ban on transgender personnel in the military, approval of police brutality against “thugs”....et cetera and so forth.
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Similarly, the intensified war on immigrants comes, not coincidentally, at the moment when Latinos have gained visible political power, asserted their place in American society and achieved greater access to schools and colleges. The ICE raids have terrorized these communities, led to attendance drop-offs in schools and silenced many from even seeking their legal rights when abused.
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Affirmative action is no different. It, too, requires a narrative of white legitimate grievance, a sense of being wronged by the presence of blacks, Latinos and Asians in positions that had once been whites only. Lawsuit after lawsuit, most recently Abigail Fisher’s suit against the University of Texas, feed the myth of unqualified minorities taking a valuable resource -- a college education -- away from deserving whites.
Notice Anderson doesn’t even try to make a statistical argument, merely insults the intellectual fitness of the former college student:
In order to make that plausible, Ms. Fisher and her lawyers had to ignore the large number of whites who were admitted to the university with scores lower than hers. And they had to ignore the sizable number of blacks and Latinos who were denied admission although their SAT scores and grade point averages were higher than hers. They also had to ignore Texas’ unsavory racial history and its impact. The Brown decision came down in 1954, yet the Dallas public school system remained under a federal desegregation order from 1971 to 2003.
Also appearing in the Sunday Review was “A Feminist Defense of Bridezillas” by free-lancer Kelsey McKinney, wherein a writer in the liberal Times fiercely defends post-capitalist conspicuous consumption, as long as it is done in the name of modern feminism. That’s after the Trump attack, apropos of nothing:
Just as a competent, civil presidential candidate was called a “nasty woman” and little girls who show leadership skills are scolded for being “bossy,” “bridezilla” is specifically designed to condemn a woman who puts any energy and authority toward trying to achieve entirely reasonable goals. It’s efficient shorthand to remind her, “Hey, the world actually likes you a lot better without opinions.” You might ask: But how is she supposed to communicate, let alone meet ever-loftier wedding day expectations, without expressing those opinions? It’s impossible.
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This event, if not the most important event of a person’s life, is often among the most expensive. Last year, according to a survey by the wedding website The Knot, the final bill now typically hovers around $35,329. Turning that budget into a multipart, multihour experience is a job not unlike being the C.E.O. of a small company....
The Times’ often holds its liberal bona fides cheap when it comes to hyping conspicuous consumption to appeal to its wealthy liberal readership. Ezra Dyer reviewed the 2012 Ferrari FF car under the June 3, 2012 headline, "Family Travel at the $300,000 Price Point." The lead: "Imagine you are heading to your ski house in Aspen with a couple of friends and a weekend’s worth of luggage. The forecast calls for snow. Do you grab the keys to your practical family vehicle or climb into your Ferrari?" Real man-on-the-people stuff there.
Also in the Sunday magazine, “Blending In” by Laila Lalami came out against demands to “assimilate,” while interrogating what the word really means (hint: racism).
....In Michigan, an Indian-American emergency-room doctor who belongs to the Dawoodi Bohra community, a Shiite Muslim sect, was charged with performing female genital mutilation on several young girls. In Minnesota, a black police officer, the first Somali-American cop in his precinct, shot an unarmed Australian woman. Both incidents were immediately seized upon by the far right as examples of the inability -- or refusal -- of Muslims to assimilate. So far this year, American police officers have killed more than 500 people, but for the commentator Ann Coulter, the shooting in Minnesota would never have happened in Australia because ‘‘they have fewer than 10k Somalis. We have >100k.’’....
A few pages over, Maya Binyam penned a ponderous essay, “Ghosting,” ostensibly about the way-we-live-now situation of ending a personal relationship by disappearing abruptly and without any further explanation. The actual point of the essay is vague, but perhaps involves Binyam justifying her own rude behavior by her irrational fear of living in America while Donald Trump is in office.
Because I fear my father’s absence, I mimic his behavior and hope he might not be forgotten. I often close the channels of communication that I am expected to sustain, texting people I love only when I feel like it and answering the phone only when the caller is unknown. In November, the morning after the presidential election, a childhood friend sent me a text: ‘‘Sup?’’ I told him I was scared for my family. When he wrote back later that day to let me know that he, too, was scared -- about his LSATs -- I stopped responding; we haven’t spoken since. At a coffee shop, an Australian asked me what I was reading. I said, ‘‘ ‘Great Expectations,’ a terrible novel.’’ He told me he had gotten his Ph.D. studying apartheid and then wondered aloud which was more depressing: apartheid or the work of Charles Dickens. When he asked if I wanted to get a drink later that week to continue the conversation, I said, ‘‘O.K.’’ but never showed up.
