U.S. racism sanctioned at highest office

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/06/2020 (1623 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WATCHING Joaquin Phoenix’s disturbing portrayal of Arthur Fleck in 2019’s The Joker was a bit too on-the-nose Monday night. I knew the film was violent, but it was the depiction of Gotham City as a fundamentally broken society that really resonated, with riots against the one per cent egged on by billionaire mayoral candidate Thomas Wayne.

I watched the movie while U.S. President Donald Trump used police and National Guard troops to push back protesters outside the White House on Monday evening. The president and his entourage walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where he posed awkwardly with a Bible surrounded by white members of his administration. Only moments before, police had cleared largely peaceful demonstrators from the area, using tear gas and beating some with batons and shields, including at least one news photographer.

These protests follow the death of George Floyd last week in Minneapolis after police arrested him. Videos made public show one police officer kneeling on his neck while Floyd screams: “I can’t breathe.” Derek Chauvin was charged with second-degree murder and three other officers on scene during his killing were charged with aiding and abetting.

There are various opinions on whether 2020 has surpassed 1968 as a high-water mark for poor race relations in the U.S. But for many of us watching what’s happening from afar, we can be excused for thinking that, like Gotham City, the U.S. right now is a fundamentally broken society and its problems are being exacerbated by its current president.

If you go back to his inaugural speech as president, Trump talked about making the White House and his administration one for the people: “… this moment is your moment. It belongs to you. It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country. Because what truly matters is not what truly controls our government but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”

But since 2017, Trump’s promises to bring back America for the people, all people, has been an utter failure. The well-documented “Trump effect,” first determined by Griffin Edwards and Stephen Andrews, concludes that Trump’s “election was associated with a statistically significant surge in reported hate crimes across the United States.” The researchers determined that “it was not just Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric throughout the political campaign that caused hate crimes to increase. Rather, we argue that it was Trump’s subsequent election as president of the United States that may have validated this rhetoric in the eyes of perpetrators and fuelled the hate crime surge.”

Now, as his presidency nears the end of its first term, the protests occurring across the U.S. are further evidence of this.

African-Americans, already at a higher risk of being killed by police (it’s estimated that they are 2.5 times more likely to be killed than white people), are frustrated by the lack of policy accountability and the failure of the president to step up to promise action.

But, there’s more evidence of the Trump effect at play. Numerous media organizations have reported the infiltration of the protests by so-called “accelerationists” wanting to promote violence to speed up the collapse of society. This includes neo-Nazis. During Trump’s presidency, there has been a marked rise in the number of neo-Nazi organizations, with the Southern Poverty Law Centre suggesting that these groups have been emboldened by the fact that this is a “country where racism is sanctioned by the highest office, immigrants are given the boot and Muslims banned.”

There’s much more that can be written about what’s going on in the U.S. that goes beyond Trump and the Trump effect — systemic racism, poverty, the rise of the police militia, media framing of the protests — but this is just one column and there will be many more commentators writing about this over the next few days and months who can bring the discussion into the forefront.

But, when election day comes for the U.S. in November, I hope my friends in the U.S. can remember the sight of a darkened White House on Friday night as their president hid in a bunker rather than stand up and use the media to attempt to calm his broken nation. I hope they’ll remember that. Or remember Trump, a broken Thomas Wayne, now morphed into the Joker rather than Arthur Fleck, dancing metaphorically with a Bible.

Shannon Sampert is a retired political scientist who works as a media consultant.

www.mediadiva.ca.

shannon@mediadiva.ca

Twitter: @CdnMediadiva