The Hot Screen highly recommends this recent article by Jamie Bouelle over at Slate. Addressing the killing of two men by a white supremacist in Portland, he fits this horror into a longer string of recent racist attacks and killings. He points out that President Trump’s own rhetoric as a candidate and as a president has helped unleash such violence, by sending a message of its acceptability.

But Bouelle’s broader concern in this piece is how our current moment is a manifestation of a broader historical pattern in which racism espoused by politicians is paralleled by acts of violence in the real world. He writes:

Key to all of this is the interplay between racism in culture, in politics, and in public life. Each reinforced the other, creating an atmosphere of hostility and violence that wasn’t otherwise inevitable, even as it had its antecedents. Put differently, racist violence isn’t spontaneous; it creeps up from fertile ground, feeding on hate and intolerance in the public sphere [. . .] Today, the rising pace of hate crimes is tied to a political style that has harnessed and weaponized white resentment by way of an ethno-nationalist movement that sees America in narrow, racially exclusionary terms.

The Age of Trump has its own particulars, but we are experiencing a new iteration of a very old American dynamic. When we recognize the racist elements of Trump’s appeals, we are reminded that a fight against Trump is also a fight against the darkest strains of our history, and of our present. When we see the recrudescence of an ancient violence, we must all rise to the challenge of answering it with solidarity, non-violence, and a clear-eyed understanding of the stakes.