What does the return of unvarnished racism to the center of our political culture mean?
The problem I’m highlighting is greater than former Los Angeles city councilwoman Nury Martinez’s racist comments against the city’s Black and Oaxacan communities — though they were bad enough. The tapes were leaked to hurt Martinez, not chosen by her as a political stratagem.
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For decades, the Martinez model of scandal has been the (more or less) typical response to gaffe-revealed racism in both parties. Remember the case of Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) in late 2002, when he essentially endorsed Sen. Strom Thurmond’s (R-S.C.) 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign as a GOP ideal? Later, Lott dismissed his statement as an attempt to be “lighthearted.” Few got the joke. And Lott soon resigned his Senate leadership office.
Though I supported Lott’s resignation at the time, when I was a White House staffer, I assumed that many such statements by Republicans were blunders, rooted in ignorance. Many GOP officials took a view of history that praised the Emancipation Proclamation and affirmed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while essentially skipping over white supremacists’ Redemption policy, lynching, routine police brutality and the injustice of over-incarceration. Republicans sometimes committed career-ending acts by falling into a historical memory hole. But the general goodwill of the GOP on racial issues could still be broadly assumed.
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This is among the worst errors of moral judgment I have made as a columnist. I tended to view bigotry as one of America’s defects or failures. The historical works I read often tried to defend the best elements of the American ideal as dramatically outweighing the worst moments of its application.
Michael Gerson: I’m a conservative who believes systemic racism is real
But no: The country was soiled by the sin of slavery from its birth. Many White people became wealthy by systematically stealing the wages and wealth of their Black neighbors. White Americans established a social and religious system designed to grant themselves dominance, often while trying to convince African Americans of God’s lower regard for their souls. Such systemic abuse could be found in North and South (though it was more heavy-handed in the South). Slaves were raped with impunity and murdered without consequence. And if someone in the North promulgated abolitionist ideas with too much effect, they could be targeted for bounties, beaten in the street or killed.
The conflict over constitutional protection for people with a different amount of melanin in their skin was the foundational test of American ideals. Many of the founders who supported slavery were the functional equivalent of terrorists: Maintain white superiority, they said, or we will blow up the whole system. Which they tried to do. An argument over political philosophy was settled only by a torrent of blood.
Yet it is still not fully resolved. Many in the South launched a successful campaign to secure white supremacy through states’ rights and Klannish violence. And many in the North were content with the appearance of equality as long as it did not include actual social equality. This consensus of White people in support of fallacious freedom was challenged by the civil rights movement, which asserted a comprehensive legal, political, social, educational and spiritual equality. The words of that movement — “Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood” — still echo. But the goals of that movement remain only partially fulfilled.
Jonathan Capehart: Trump’s flirtation with the n-word cannot be ignored
This is the environment into which the MAGA movement is pumping a toxic discharge of bigotry. Former president Donald Trump recently employed his own (supposedly) lighthearted treatment of racism’s cruelest epithet. “The n-word!” he told a campaign rally. “Do you know what the n-word is?” The crowd certainly did, when given permission to use it by Trump. “It’s — no, no, no. It’s the ‘nuclear’ word.” This was not a dog whistle; it was a Confederate trumpet.
During his last campaign, Trump warned suburban White women that “low-income housing would invade” their neighborhoods. Now he teases that he might run in 2024 “to take back that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white.” Even using the language and argumentation of the playground, Trump does his damage. He implies that the institutions of American government are and should be White dominated. He directly defends the segregation of housing. He encourages the idea that minorities are aggressors against Whites.
And Trump effectively gives permission to other MAGA fools. “They want crime,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said about Democrats at a recent Trump rally. “They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”
In MAGA world, the incitement of white grievance is the strategy. Such appeals are inseparable from racism. And they reopen a wound that nearly killed the patient before. It is politics at its most pernicious.
The problem I’m highlighting is greater than former Los Angeles city councilwoman Nury Martinez’s racist comments against the city’s Black and Oaxacan communities — though they were bad enough. The tapes were leaked to hurt Martinez, not chosen by her as a political stratagem.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
For decades, the Martinez model of scandal has been the (more or less) typical response to gaffe-revealed racism in both parties. Remember the case of Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) in late 2002, when he essentially endorsed Sen. Strom Thurmond’s (R-S.C.) 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign as a GOP ideal? Later, Lott dismissed his statement as an attempt to be “lighthearted.” Few got the joke. And Lott soon resigned his Senate leadership office.
Though I supported Lott’s resignation at the time, when I was a White House staffer, I assumed that many such statements by Republicans were blunders, rooted in ignorance. Many GOP officials took a view of history that praised the Emancipation Proclamation and affirmed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while essentially skipping over white supremacists’ Redemption policy, lynching, routine police brutality and the injustice of over-incarceration. Republicans sometimes committed career-ending acts by falling into a historical memory hole. But the general goodwill of the GOP on racial issues could still be broadly assumed.
Follow Michael Gerson's opinionsFollow
This is among the worst errors of moral judgment I have made as a columnist. I tended to view bigotry as one of America’s defects or failures. The historical works I read often tried to defend the best elements of the American ideal as dramatically outweighing the worst moments of its application.
Michael Gerson: I’m a conservative who believes systemic racism is real
But no: The country was soiled by the sin of slavery from its birth. Many White people became wealthy by systematically stealing the wages and wealth of their Black neighbors. White Americans established a social and religious system designed to grant themselves dominance, often while trying to convince African Americans of God’s lower regard for their souls. Such systemic abuse could be found in North and South (though it was more heavy-handed in the South). Slaves were raped with impunity and murdered without consequence. And if someone in the North promulgated abolitionist ideas with too much effect, they could be targeted for bounties, beaten in the street or killed.
The conflict over constitutional protection for people with a different amount of melanin in their skin was the foundational test of American ideals. Many of the founders who supported slavery were the functional equivalent of terrorists: Maintain white superiority, they said, or we will blow up the whole system. Which they tried to do. An argument over political philosophy was settled only by a torrent of blood.
Yet it is still not fully resolved. Many in the South launched a successful campaign to secure white supremacy through states’ rights and Klannish violence. And many in the North were content with the appearance of equality as long as it did not include actual social equality. This consensus of White people in support of fallacious freedom was challenged by the civil rights movement, which asserted a comprehensive legal, political, social, educational and spiritual equality. The words of that movement — “Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood” — still echo. But the goals of that movement remain only partially fulfilled.
Jonathan Capehart: Trump’s flirtation with the n-word cannot be ignored
This is the environment into which the MAGA movement is pumping a toxic discharge of bigotry. Former president Donald Trump recently employed his own (supposedly) lighthearted treatment of racism’s cruelest epithet. “The n-word!” he told a campaign rally. “Do you know what the n-word is?” The crowd certainly did, when given permission to use it by Trump. “It’s — no, no, no. It’s the ‘nuclear’ word.” This was not a dog whistle; it was a Confederate trumpet.
During his last campaign, Trump warned suburban White women that “low-income housing would invade” their neighborhoods. Now he teases that he might run in 2024 “to take back that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white.” Even using the language and argumentation of the playground, Trump does his damage. He implies that the institutions of American government are and should be White dominated. He directly defends the segregation of housing. He encourages the idea that minorities are aggressors against Whites.
And Trump effectively gives permission to other MAGA fools. “They want crime,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said about Democrats at a recent Trump rally. “They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”
In MAGA world, the incitement of white grievance is the strategy. Such appeals are inseparable from racism. And they reopen a wound that nearly killed the patient before. It is politics at its most pernicious.
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