I don’t think the election of Trump runs straight along the lines of White racism alone. It reflects racism, sexism and self-hate that includes Black, Brown and Women that voted for Trump.
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Trump’s being crowned King in the last election reflects a weakness in democratic systems. Fascism is right below the surface when the economy reaches a crisis point. We see corporate giants like Trump or Elon Musk being pulled into politics for state rule which opens the door for fascism. The law of motion of capitalism leads to one giant corporation and authoritarian rule.
The 2024 vote is not easy to explain away. It reflects a defeatist state of mind that invites in a simplistic ideology of a supreme leader that promised to make real a lost dream that is more like an American nightmare.
Historic memory can be erased when subjects of past oppression forget their identity, and the system implements the banning of books that educate us on the importance of diversity. How have we forgotten our identity and voted against our own class? Why did our great Civil Rights Movement not create permanent change away from racial discrimination?
I don’t think the election of Trump runs straight along the lines of White racism alone. It reflects racism, sexism and self-hate that includes Black, Brown and Women that voted for Trump. Kamala Harris, a woman of color who has the image of “two strikes” against her as a second-class citizen regardless of her class status, could not pass the litmus test that represents America.
I think what was new in this election was the attack upon thought which the Right-wing MAGA bottom feeders clearly aimed at. The “identity” politics of the liberal Left has failed. Many Latinos voted against Latino immigration. Many women voted against reproductive Choice. Many workers voted for corporate interests. Many Blacks this time voted against their own race and class and voted “America First”, meaning the image of a “White Christian America and all Others can get out”
I think Trump’s greatest victory is that he gave “us” the idea that we have the power to assimilate or that we are Americans First and Blacks or people of color second.
A nationalist government where the most oppressed think they can assimilate into a White world of acceptance is a lie. A Clarence Thomas world is a lie. Thomas benefited from Affirmative Action but sees it, like Reagan did, as reverse discrimination, as does Trump who was on social media asking for “reparations” for White people.
As a Black worker I find a kinship to Frantz Fanon. His ideas can help us break the mental chains that confine us in self-hatred and destruction. As Fanon writers, the need is to transcend the oppressive “Boss-Black’ relationships that make us subservient, and not to buy into those relationships and hope to become the new bosses.
We must build upon ideas of human emancipation and not retrogress. Read, discuss, organize. In the words of Frantz Fanon: “To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.” (Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 1967, p. 222).
Eugene R.