Another week, another racist rant from a Trump supporter going viral.
This time it’s the white woman at the Michaels crafts store in Chicago, who, after she was apparently asked to buy a $1 bag for her bigger items, proceeded to berate black employees, with an onlooker capturing the incident on video. The ranting woman repeatedly claimed she’d been “discriminated against” because of her race and presidential preference (“I voted for Trump—so there”) while attacking the “black women” workers and calling one “an animal.”Important also to remember the White Anxiety angle when we're talking about Repressed thinking.
This was only the latest of the viral videos showing white Trump supporters going off in public places—most notably, a racist ranter at a Starbucks in Coral Gables, Florida, and a sexist Trumpeter on a Delta flight. There’s been widespread agreement about what these videos mean: “more evidence that Trump supporters are emboldened by his victory,” as the website Mic called the Chicago ordeal. And on the surface, they do look (and sound!) like the fulfillment of countless campaign predictions about Trump normalizing bigotry, evidence of the “trickle-down racism” that Mitt Romney, of all people, warned us about. “Trump victory would embolden the bigots,” CNN warned on November 7, summing up the long-running meme.
There’s unquestionably some truth to that. But what the viral videos of Trump supporters gone wild reveal is actually more complicated—and fascinating. The closer you look, the more you listen, the clearer it is that these bigoted ranters aren’t so much empowered as they are fragile and pathetic. And what’s gone largely unnoticed is the reactions that the other people in the videos have to their bigoted ravings—reactions that hint at something to be kinda, sorta hopeful about—that non-racist whites have also been woken up by the Trumpian surge of white nationalism.
If religion it is to be worth holding on to, it should be the place where the marginalized feel the most visible, where the hurting receive the most tender care, where the outsiders find the safest refuge.
It should be the place where diversity is fiercely pursued and equality loudly championed; where all of humanity finds a permanent home and where justice runs the show.
That is not what this thing is. This is FoxNews and red cup protests and persecution complexes. It’s opulent, big box megachurches and coddled, untouchable celebrity pastors. It’s pop culture boycotts and manufactured outrage. It’s just wars and justified shootings. It’s all manner of bullying and intolerance in the name of Jesus.
Feeling estrangement from these things is a good thing.I split with religion a long time ago, and only recently turned myself loose from the last bits of the Magical Thinking part of "Spirituality" (whatever the hell that word's supposed to mean), even tho' I still indulge myself in the use of the language and some of the ritual.
You know you're going to try this pic.twitter.com/dHu58AeCek— Theater of SciFi (@theaterofscifi) December 2, 2016
"I just wish that I had not voted."— Trump supporter despondent over Mnuchin, who's bank foreclosed on her home: https://t.co/WZASUp9D5Z pic.twitter.com/k720708Y6h— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 2, 2016
Poor Donald Trump hates pics of his double chin, so the Internet decided to help - https://t.co/a8SgrCs5u7 pic.twitter.com/dyWlhQepuX— Dangerous Minds (@DangerMindsBlog) December 1, 2016
Conservatives say the problem is Christianity ain't taught in schools. The real problem is Christianity ain't taught in church.— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) April 18, 2015
“We will survive Trump,” I keep hearing people say, often followed by a reference to how “we” survived Bush, or Reagan, or Nixon, or so many other historic calamities.
At worst, I’ve seen this sentiment expressed by people whose safety and well-being are all but guaranteed, mostly to dismiss or silence outpourings of fear, anger and grief from the vulnerable and justifiably petrified. At best, I’ve heard it from folks who stand to lose the most in the coming years — whose erasure, exclusion or expulsion were voted for by people eager to make this country exclusively theirs again — in an effort to turn resignation into reassurance, to transform a history of needless suffering into a warped kind of relief that what we’re facing is just more of the awful same.--and--
That "we" excludes more than 650,000 Americans — overwhelmingly LGBTQ men and poor people of color — who ultimately didn’t survive Reagan’s indifference to the AIDS crisis, an epidemic the president didn’t dedicate a speech to until the American death toll hit 21,000. As many as 200,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians and thousands of American soldiers didn’t survive Bush and Obama’s wars. The Obama administration's deportation of more than 2.4 million immigrants—a total that nearly rivals the previous two administrations combined—has left countless families broken and barely surviving. The misguided war on drugs launched by President Nixon and exponentially expanded by President Clinton has wasted $1 trillion, led to mass incarceration of black and brown citizens, devastated countless communities and families, and exacerbated police violence and abuse in communities that have long suffered state-sanctioned terror.
