The Rot You Smell Is a Racist Potus

[sl8]

From https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/opinion/trump-racist-baltimore.html

The Rot You Smell Is a Racist Potus
Trump and his views are the real infestations in America.

By Charles M. Blow
Opinion Columnist

July 28, 2019

It seems maddeningly repetitive to have to return time and again to the fact that Donald Trump is a racist, but it must be done. It must be done because it is a foundational character issue, one that supersedes and informs many others, in much the same way that his sexism and xenophobia does.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Representative Elijah Cummings’s district “is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” a “very dangerous & filthy place” and “No human being would want to live there.” Cummings is black, as are most people in his district.

This talk of infestation is telling, because he only seems to apply it to issues concerning black and brown people. He has sniped about the “Ebola infested areas of Africa.” He has called Congressman John Lewis’s Atlanta district “crime infested” as well as telling him to focus on “the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S.” He has called sanctuary cities a “crime infested & breeding concept.” He has talked about how “illegal immigrants” will “pour into and infest our Country.” He has called the presence of the MS-13 gang members “in certain parts of our country” an “infestation.”

None of this is about crime as a discrete phenomenon, but rather about inextricably linking criminality to blackness. White supremacy isn’t necessarily about rendering white people as superhuman; it is just as often about rendering nonwhite people as subhuman. Either way the hierarchy is established, with whiteness assuming the superior position.

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More at link.

[dalton99a]

1. "In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide."

Furthermore, there is nothing benign in Trump’s language. Infestations justify exterminations. There is a reason that Martin Luther King Jr. said, “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.” The mouth that demeans may not always be attached to the hand that destroys, but they are most assuredly connected in spirit and in spite.

It would be easy to prosecute a case against Trump on policy, but policies are not at the center of the creature. White supremacy, white nationalism and white patriarchy are.

The core of this man is racist in a way that is so fused to his sense of the world that he is incapable of seeing it as racist. It is instinctual for him to attack people of color. It is instinctual for him to denigrate the places they live and the countries to which they trace their heritage.

He has so bought into the white supremacist narrative that his ideology no longer requires, in his own thinking, a label. For him, this lie of it is just the truth of it, and what is “right” can’t be racist.

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Remarkable quote from Rev. King

Absolutely true.

[onetexan]

3. agree, the language used is so virulently dangerous, not just to people of color, but to whites

as well, because hate breeds more hate. I've resorted to not watching the news since his election so i can try to shut out the hate and the nonsense this mentally unwell man is normalizing. Going into 3 years already now that we've had to suffer his horrendous language and abuse of the country as a whole.