One silver lining in the imbroglio over NFL players daring to kneel during the national anthem is how deeply the whole affair has galvanized my understanding of white privilege and white supremacy in America — a selfish perspective, sure, but in my defense I will call upon my own white privilege one last (OK, maybe) time. The way that so many have used the alleged infraction of the players against the honor of the flag to ignore the issues the players are seeking to highlight has hit me like a ton of bricks. And once Donald Trump stepped in, you’d have to be willfully ignorant or complicit with his intentions to claim that racial animus has nothing to do with what’s going on. The story has continued through much of this last week, with the president talking about how the owners must be afraid of their players. Yes — he is talking about how the 99% white owners must be afraid of their 75% African-American players. Tired racist trope, anyone?
My understanding and ire have grown together, particularly cemented by encountering a white Facebook riot in which commenters piled on about the players’ lack of civility, privileged status, and of course contempt for the flag, anthem, and all veterans of all wars ever. The clincher was when one writer praised some players for protesting the “right” way — just not during the national anthem! — as if they had finally learned their lesson. The lack of shame in presuming to tell African-Americans exactly how they should protest was my a-ha! moment — they just needed to learn some respect, you see, that was their whole problem.
An assumption of malevolent intent on the part of the players is obviously batshit racist on its face. But I will note that the use of this assumption to essentially refuse to consider the players’ stated reasons for protest — police abuse against African-Americans and by extension racism more generally — elevates a supposedly color-blind patriotism into a weapon of white supremacy. The harder they hold to the idea that patriotism and veneration of the flag and anthem are the starting points for any further discussion of ANY issues whatsoever, the more they drive home the fact that by their own terms they are placing an abstract nationalism and unity over compassion towards living Americans — living Americans who it is no coincidence happen to be African-American. And by making the national anthem and flag all about veterans and those who have perished in war, they not coincidentally construct a clear hierarchy in which dead soldiers are more important than dead black folk any day of the week. Try to say with a straight face that this is not part of the shtick around this amazing new taboo against protesting during the national anthem.
I will be honest: this take-a-knee-or-not moment has left me profoundly disturbed at how the most naked racism is being propounded not just by the president, but by so many white Americans for whom their own racist reasoning should be obvious to them. Of course, part of what’s so illuminating about this moment is that many of these people don’t actually believe they’re being racist; they think they’re simply being right, without realizing that the reasons they think they’re right (love of country comes before love of living Americans (who happen to be black)) are actually pretty racist.
Placing abstract patriotism over the lives of African Americans is a conscious choice, whether anyone wants to admit or not. Opponents of the players’ actions are behaving as if, while the national anthem was being played, the players were alternately defecating onto the Constitution (not a copy, mind you — the original document); peeing on a Bible; masturbating to a photo of their beloved 14-year-old daughter; and taking a flamethrower to the American flag. But let’s always remember — they’re merely kneeling, which San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid has pointed out was deliberately chosen as a respectful gesture .
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In my addled and mildly despairing state, two recent pieces at Talking Points Memo have given me a bit of comfort by providing important context for our little football war. Neither article addresses this fight directly, but they’ve both got me thinking about why exactly we’re at this racial moment and about how there may be some glimmers of positive change.
The first, titled “What Is White Supremacy,” jumps into a discussion sparked in recent days by Jonathan Chait’s article at the New York Magazine site about the definition of “white supremacy.” TPM’s Josh Marshall makes the case that our current political state owes much to the fact of declining majority and lurking non-majority status for whites, along with the concomitant rise of minority populations in our country. In 1970, 89.5% of Americans were white, with 10% African-American (with Hispanics being counted as either black or white and composing another 4.5% of the population). In 2010, according to Marshall’s figures, whites were down to 72.4% of the population, with Hispanics constituting 16% of the population.
Marshall brings up these figures in making the case that what it means to be a white supremacist or to support white supremacism may be changing along with our demographics. He approvingly quotes Chait interlocutor Adam Serwer’s definition of a white supremacist as “someone who believes white people are entitled to political and cultural hegemony.” Marshall’s argument is pretty careful and nuanced, and should be read in full, but it works towards the point that as more whites become fearful that their primacy in the American heirarchy is being actively threatened, and wish to preserve this primacy, effective distinctions between “outright” white supremacists like David Duke and “sort of” white supremacists like Donald Trump become less marked; as Marshall concludes the piece, “Maybe it is that the changes in the country have made the functional difference between the two much less relevant.”
His observation seems right on, yet his final observation feels like it pulls back from exploring or stating a broader implication — that as the demographic ground shifts in our country, and they feel more overtly threatened by a loss of status, more white Americans are essentially consciously embracing not just the idea of white supremacism (as in, hey, I’m realizing what I’ve got because I'm white, and I don’t want to lose it), but also becoming more willing to embrace the mentality and tools of what we’ve more traditionally considered white supremacism — active denigration of minorities as a political goal, certainly at a rhetorical level but running the spectrum towards voter suppression, through racist policing and other forms of state violence. Looking at the dichotomy of David Duke and Donald Trump another way, we could speculate that Donald Trump is very much a reflection, if also an accelerant, of a rising white supremacism in which consciousness of wanting to stay on top segues very quickly into embracing racist leaders and strategies for doing just that.
I mentioned that I find some comfort in this piece in the context of the NFL protest issue. “Comfort” may seem perverse, but I think it does help me to understand why so many white folks are coming across as both virulently racist and newly emboldened. A rising consciousness in the face of impending loss of majority status, and the possible loss of status that could bring, certainly seem like spurs to renewed racism in our country. And channeling this fear and animus at African-Americans, who after all are not growing as a percentage of the population, just puts the cherry of stupid on top of this racist layer cake. In a time of fear, people fall back on familiar patterns, and also prey on the weak — why not attack a non-growing minority group with a weak economic position, when these very facts mean that you are likelier to get away with it all? Enter Donald Trump and the bet he has made that our country is no better than him.
The other TPM piece that caught my attention notes that Richmond, Virginia is planning a monument that will honor Nat Turner along with nine other anti-slavery figures, which Marshall finds striking given the controversy which Turner's actions have traditionally provoked. Marshall discusses the paucity of anti-slavery monuments in the United States, and suggests that more attention to slave revolts may help open up our understanding of slavery in helpful ways. The concluding paragraph gets at some of the possible sea change we may be seeing:
[S]lave revolts are inherently violent and uncompromisingly brutal. That is hard for this country, which still honors a legal continuity with a long history of slavery, to grapple with. Because coming to the terms with the brutality of slave revolts brings the brutality and violence of slavery itself to the fore in a way America has seldom publicly faced. It’s like a tight and uncompromising algebraic equation. Honoring Turner means that his actions were laudatory and merit public memorialization. But his actions involved killing families and small children in their beds. If such actions, which are normally among the worst we can imagine, merit praise and public honor, the system they were meant to fight and destroy must have been barbaric and unconscionably violent beyond imagining. Very few of us would contest this description of slavery. But bringing Turner into the discussion of public commemoration will air these issues in a new (I think very positive) and jarring way.
For all the people inspired by the president or unwilling to examine their own illiberal assumptions about their fellow Americans, there are many more who are pushing back against this tide of darkness in a million different ways. When people try to push racist beliefs into the public sphere, they should be made to shoulder all the hideous history and implications of what they're saying.
