White Supremacy in the White House

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Two prominent themes of racial and ethnic antagonism have found their way into official government policies under the Trump administration. One is the longstanding belief that nonwhites are mentally inferior to whites, a stereotype dating from slavery. The other, generated more recently, is the notion that whites are the real victims, suffering discrimination under the banner of racial preferences.

            President Trump has displayed both assumptions in personal remarks and symbolic acts, and his aides have incorporated them into federal funding and programming. Not since the years of legal segregation, before the civil rights movement, has government been so dominated by the ideology of white supremacy. Not in the decades of work toward a more open society have its leaders repudiated the progress so venomously.

            Trump has demonstrated skill at tapping into the ugliest attitudes in his country, giving them voice, and cementing them in policy. Before any investigation of the fatal midair collision of an army helicopter and a passenger jet near Washington’s National Airport, he speculated that “it could have been” caused by diversity in the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA’s DEI program, Trump claimed in an executive order, “penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”

His executive orders ending DEI—the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have opened broad opportunities to minorities—ride on one of the most durable stereotypes in American culture: the insidious belief that people of color, Blacks in particular, are inherently less capable than whites. That age-old image, which has fostered racial bias in hiring and promotions, now finds a comfortable home in the White House.

Since victims of racial prejudice have been favored, it seems, some whites have been competing for that victim badge, seeing themselves as deprived of the level playing field so loudly advocated by liberals fighting discrimination. A bitter grievance is nursed by some whites in or near poverty when they hear about the “white privilege” that frees the majority race of the burdens of prejudice. The resentment took on a sharp edge as whites fell into economic hardship during the Great Depression of 2008. They might have made common cause with Blacks who suffered similarly, but racial divides overcome class affinities in America.

 Trump is clever at exploiting the theme of white victimization. It’s part of what got him elected. And now it has been elevated to diplomacy based on fantasy. In recent days, he has used the Oval Office to dramatize the hallucination that whites in South Africa are victims of genocide at the hands of Blacks. He even showed a video of a ranting Black racist politician to South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, the distinguished lead negotiator of the end of apartheid.

The show followed Trump’s theatrical grant of refugee status to whites from South Africa after denying it to Afghans and others who face danger, some for helping the US military.

            At the same time, he was making American Blacks more vulnerable. His Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced its abandonment of an effective tool in rectifying police misconduct: lawsuits producing judge-approved consent decrees that reduced racial profiling and brutality. Police violence against Blacks has been a chronic American problem, a source of riots in the 1960s, and a feature of misery in many impoverished communities. Without federal monitoring and intervention, it is now likely to worsen.

One dropped case involves Minneapolis, which is about to mark the fifth anniversary of its police murder of George Floyd. Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck sparked protests across the country and around the world, Black Lives Matter demonstrations that Trump and his cohorts detested.

            Adding to the flurry of assaults on racial justice this week, the head of the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, launched an investigation of the city of Chicago for possible hiring violations. Why? Mayor Brandon Johnson told a church congregation proudly that unprecedented diversity had been achieved by increasing the number of Black officials in senior positions.

The concepts of “diversity,” along with “equity” and “inclusion,” (DEI) might have once sounded noble, but have been tagged as sinful and illegal by the Trump administration’s speech police. Use of the words alone trigger retribution. Rough threats and punishments from Washington have cowed some private universities, corporations, and foundations into deleting or masking their efforts to open their ranks to minorities.

The Trumpist goal is to invert civil rights enforcement from its longstanding protection of groups that have suffered discrimination to a novel defense of the white majority. Instead of targeted enforcement where a white might have been rejected because of race (and it does happen), the effort is a broad assault on proven remedies for the country’s historic ailment of pro-white bias.

As an executor of the project, Harmeet Dhillon is a paradoxical figure. Born in India, she would not obviously benefit from the white supremacist system that her policies are supporting. Yet in 1988, she published and defended antisemitic satires of Dartmouth College’s Jewish president, James O. Freedman, when she was editor-in-chief of the conservative student newspaper, The Dartmouth Review. It was a scandalous event that drew national attention and condemnations from the Anti-Defamation League, the Board of Trustees, and faculty members.

A column in one issue of the paper, and a drawing in the next, likened Freedman to Hitler, using a Hitler quote to portray the Dartmouth president as an dictator bent on a “ ‘Final Solution’ of the Conservative Problem,” a “holocaust” in which campus conservatives were “deported in cattle cars in the night.”

Dhillon saw nothing antisemitic in the column or the caricture. She called it a comment on “liberal fascism” and blamed critics for “trying to twist the issue to their own ends.” She told The New York Times that she was “very surprised” by the reaction. Given her blind spot, at least then, she might have trouble detecting the antisemitism that the Trump administration is citing as a pretext for investigating and defunding universities (although not Dartmouth so far). If time were conflated, she would have to investigate herself.

Of course, antisemitism is a feature of the right-wing white nationalism that has mustered support for Trump. That wing of American society also finds harmony with Trump’s vilification of swarthy immigrants as bringing violence and “poisoning the blood of our country.”  He and Vice President J.D. Vance have stereotyped them as primitive. During the campaign, they repeatedly endorsed a fabricated slander that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were eating pet dogs and cats.

Vance struck the same theme a few days ago, in different terms, asserting that immigrant communities are rife with “pre-modern brutality.” In a podcast with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, he also claimed that they undermine America’s virtuous cohesion:

“I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly, and so that’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.”

So, preserving “something” in his own country does not mean celebrating its remarkable array of cultures, races, religions, and ethnicities. It’s too bad Douthat didn’t ask him how he reconciled that with the background of his wife, Usha, born in the US of Indian immigrants. Well, perhaps they came here slowly.