I wrote something today on Twitter that I never thought I'd say.
This election could be cast as White Men Rise Again, one last time. The American Zombie Party.
This is the piece in the New Yorker that inspired the outburst. And the specific excerpt:
Yet Trump continued [in the debate] his self-congratulations for compelling the President to [provide his birth certificate], along with the grotesquely racist notion that it was “good for him” (i.e., for the President). It slowly dawned on the listener that this was all of a piece with the rest of Trump’s racial attitudes: he believes that, as a rich white man, he had a right to stop and frisk the President of the United States and demand that the uppity black man show him his papers. Stop-and-frisk isn’t just a form of policing for Trump; it’s a whole way of life. The idea that he had a right to force a black man to go through what Obama rightly saw as the demeaning business of producing his birth certificate showed his fundamental contempt for any normal idea of racial equality. It was of a line with his equally bizarre notion that owning a country club that doesn’t actively discriminate against black people is not a minimal requirement of law but a positive achievement of the owner. This isn’t the case of someone misarticulating an otherwise plausible position; it was just a case of someone repeating, once again, not only a specific racist lie but also the toxic underlying set of assumptions that produced it.
The world that Trump grew up in, the one that I grew up in only ten years later, was like this. Enough people remember it. First a black president, now a woman president. That's a lot of change to swallow.
As you get older you can take one of two approaches to the world.
To think that all white men are responsible for the continued dominance of white men, is to miss that as individuals we still have this choice. No one has to be committed to the first approach, they can change. When presented with such a gross caricature of white maleness as Trump, we can say no fucking way, this isn't me. I'm human, I care. My choice is to help my friends, family, other members of my species, the earth that gave us life.
The confusion over Black Lives Matter, that it doesn't in any way devalue other types of lives, is also true of the dominance of white males in politics and economics. Not being dominant doesn't mean we don't count. However it does mean that when we have a clear choice of competence vs incompetence, we can choose a woman over a man. That our loyalty is to the union of all the people, not just to gender and race.