According to the Washington Post, 505 people been killed by police across the United States so far this year. African Americans — especially young Black men — are disproportionately the target of police violence.
Marc Lamont Hill talking:
that’s the disappointing, really stunning thing, is that whenever you write a book like this, it will be relevant because state violence against black bodies is something that has consistently occurred since black people have been in America. What we’ve over the last 48 hours is just a reenactment of a very, very, very common American tradition of not only killing black bodies, but also, then going out and justifying the death by criminalizing the victim, by demonizing the victim, by marginalizing the victim and by constructing narratives about how and why they deserved what they got. It’s a really stunning thing and it never stops hurting.
in the first case, the first thing we heard in media reports, the first thing I saw on social media was mentioning this guy’s criminal record. Right? Alton Sterling, we say, oh, he had a criminal record. His criminal record, even if it were legitimate, has nothing to do with what happens in that, in that, on that street with the CDs. And it wasn’t known by the police. But, even if it were, that doesn’t mean that you have a right to shoot someone.
Selling CDs is not a capital offense. Neither is having a criminal record. And so, at that moment, the only question that should be asked is, did the police behave appropriately? And based on what we saw on the video, they did not. But somehow, we justify that certain people are worth saving, certain people are worth surviving and other people are not.
– it’s often true that police officers are afraid, but it’s not of the weapon, if there is one, but of black men.
that’s part of the problem. We don’t need to always have a demon. We don’t always need a villainous cop. There are instances like in Charleston with Walter Scott where he’s running away and he gets shot in the back, that is somewhat of an outlier. The more ordinary type of state violence that we see, that is still fueled by white supremacy, is when the officer sees a black body and is afraid or a citizen like George Zimmerman sees a Trayvon Martin and is afraid.
I don’t doubt that George Zimmerman really thought that Trayvon Martin was violent and dangerous. The problem is there was no reason to. But, what happens is, when we see someone with Skittles and a hoodie and we decide that they’re dangerous, or we see someone with their hands up and we decide that they’re dangerous, or we see someone with CDs in their hand and we decide that they’re dangerous, we simply reinforce the idea that black bodies themselves are inherently dangerous, and then when we let them off as jurors, or as grand jurors, we ultimately normalize and codify irrational white supremacist fear of black people.
Mychal Denzel Smith talking:
the concept of Invisible Man: Got the Whole World Watching, these people are literally invisible to us, if we want to take that in the most literal sense, before they are shot and killed. And then we either have video or we have wall-to-wall news coverage in which they become visible to us. We have the entire world watching and dissecting their lives. And what happens is what Marc is talking about, is that the nuances and interior of their lives get dismissed. They don’t, they’re no, they’re not human to us, they are avatars for a cause, and, in a way, the justification of the killing and continued denigration of black, black people’s humanity. And I think that that’s the thing that we have to get to, is that we have to understand that their humanity has never been in question. The humanity of the people who killed them is. The idea that you can be a humane person and take the life of an innocent person in this way.
How do we shift the conversation to that? How do we shift it so that we understand that the — that these lives that are inherent with value, but we’ve designated certain people to, to bear the brunt of this violence, to uphold a system of inequality?
– dozens of protesters are gathering outside the governor’s house in Minneapolis, St. Paul, following the fatal shooting of African-American — of an African-American man named Philando Castile during a traffic stop for a broken tail light. In the car, his girlfriend and her daughter. The immediate aftermath of the shooting was broadcast live on Facebook by his girlfriend Lavish Reynolds, who’s speaking in the car next to her dying boyfriend as the police officer continues to point the gun into the car. Lavish Reynolds. She was 24 — she is 24 years old. While her phone was taken, she broadcast this live on Facebook. And that’s where the video comes from. As she was told by police to walk backwards. They handcuffed her. She is begging to see that her daughter, who’s four years old, is being taking care of who was in the car where her partner was killed by a police officer.
what’s, to me, what’s so disturbing about that particular situation is that so often what we hear is, if you listen to the police, if you follow their directives, then everything will be fine. Well here’s the man who’s actually doing that. He’s told to get his ID and his registration. He is doing that. But the perception of him as a threat, the perception of his blackness as inherently violent, means that even if — even when he is following directions, there’s the, the perception that he is going to reach for a gun, he is going to be — react violently towards this police officer, and I think that the idea then that there is something that can save us — that, that’s the problem. There is nothing that is going to prevent this from happening to us aside from a shift in policing.
– In fact, Marc Lamont Hill, the reason the police officer knew he had a gun is he told the police officer, when he said he wanted his license, that he had a gun. He wanted to warn him.
Which is exactly what you’re supposed to do. When you look at the data, when you talk, anecdotally, to police officers, and I’ve done both, people who have licenses to carry very rarely use that weapon in the service of a crime, a violent crime, and certainly not a police shootout. So, there’s no, sort of, inherent inclination, you would think, to think that this man was going to engage in a shootout. He also told the officer, I’m going to reach for my license. According to the witness, that’s what the officer told him to do. We have no other reason to think otherwise. This man has no violent criminal history. All accounts say that he was a good guy. Not that you have to be a good guy — not that you have to be a good guy — not that you have to be a good guy to not get murdered.
If you have a criminal profile they say, well he was a bad guy. If you have a good — if you’re a “good guy,” it still doesn’t matter. If you, if you stand still like Eric Garner, you get killed. If you run like Freddy Grey, you get killed. If your pants are down, like Trayvon, you die. If your pants are up, like Walter Scott, you die. It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the problem isn’t people being killed, it’s the people who were rendered invisible at first, and then when they get seen and become legible they’re still nobody. That’s the problem.
Marc Lamont Hill talking:
We need fundamental changes in society. Fundamentally, we have to, first of all, deal with the issue of white supremacy. This isn’t a issue of racism, this is issue — an issue of white supremacy. We live in a world where we simply believe that white lives are worth more, and that black lives aren’t worth much. And because of that, even the most well-meaning cop looks at a black body and still may have a bias. And it’s not just white cops. It’s also black cops. There’s a study out of Stanford that says that police officers tend to look at black children as older and more guilty than they are. Which means that you see that 13-year-old boy, or 12-year-old Tamir Rice and you think he’s 21, as they did, and you shoot him like he’s 21 having a real gun instead of, instead of a play gun because that’s what happens all the time, even though white kids do it all the time with no consequence.
So, we need to redress this issue of white supremacy. We also need to deal with this question of policing. We need to ask what role do we really want police officers to have? Do we want them to be an occupying force in our community, or do we want them to have a different role? The whole idea of broken windows policing, the idea of getting an Eric Garner off the corner for selling loosey cigarettes, the idea of chasing down a guy for selling CDs when the store owners don’t care, that, itself is part of a particular understanding of understanding of policing that we ultimately have to change.
Mychal Denzel Smith talking:
my first reaction to noting that this was happening on social media and knowing that there was another video with Alton Sterling was, I can’t watch another lynching. And then that’s what it feels like. That’s what it feels like, that’s what if feels like we’re living through now. But, even in that, even if I construct it that way, I’m not sure where the empathy comes from. I don’t know that watching these videos time and time again is engendering any empathy towards the victims. I think that what — the problem is that people get retrenched into their already preconceived notions around blackness, right? They bring their script to these videos, and they will offer justification. And even though, even the people that would be more sympathetic, I think that what it does sometimes is reaffirm their own distance from this type of violence, right? So, what they’re witnessing is the thing that keeps happening to black people, and not a thing that is happening to us as a community, the thing that’s happening to us as a society, not a thing that’s being done in their name, it’s just the thing that keeps happening to black people. And don’t know — I mean, I think that there is value in us seeing it for documentation purposes. I don’t know how much it’s doing in terms of shifting people’s attitudes around the reasons that these, that these interactions are happening. I mean, when you talk about Alton Sterling, talk about Eric Garner, these are men pushed into an informal economy on the basis of — for, for survival. For providing for their families. And then what we do is we criminalize those activities and we put them in contact with police every single day. And now we have — we’ve given police license to kill, license to use violence, the latitude to get off when they do. And, so what happens? What happens to them, and not even when they’re being killed, but the fear they walk through everyday life with?
Marc Lamont Hill talking:
prior to video, we had witnesses. We’ve always had witnesses. Very, you know, very often we have black people standing there watching these happen as we saw today. Black witness doesn’t count, because if you’re rendered nobody or invisible then you literally don’t matter, your voice doesn’t matter, in the case of Rodney King, we had lots of video, right? Eric Garner as well. The logic of white supremacy suggests that what you saw isn’t enough. That, if we hadn’t beaten Rodney King for all that time, he would have run through the community.
Mychal Denzel Smith talking:
what black male life in America is is that constant anticipation of your death, the idea that, you know, what the — the violence, the quotidian violence that we face is such that nothing is guaranteed to you in the way that it feels like it is for your white peers, that every day they are talking about what they’re gonna do when they go to college, like what they’re gonna do when they get married and have children and what job they’re going to have and things like that, and for me, that — I never really got wrapped up in that because there was never the sense that, passed 17, I could have a life like that, passed eight, passed 19, I could have that life, passed 25, that I could even be sitting here. So, so, preparing for it didn’t make sense. Preparing, though, to face that death, and living in the fear of it, did make sense. So the anxiety and depression that, that accompanies that, that fear was persistent and consistent every single day of my life. So, and I think that so many of us as young black men just walk through that every day, and not knowing how to handle it, and not knowing how to express that, not knowing where to go and what is your survival script. How do you deal with it? And when you are allowed to survive, when you do get passed that point that you didn’t think you were going to make it, where’s the, where’s the idea of what it means to create yourself in that environment? And that’s what the book is trying to work through, is how do you reckon with the — reckon with living a life that you weren’t anticipating and create yourself in the context of that.
there’s a whole chapter in the book about mental illness, and like, dealing with mental health within the black community. And the book is about black male life, and I think that, if we were to take mental illness and concerns for mental seriously, we would reframe black male life in so many ways. So, we’re talking about police violence today, and I think the common retort is to always talk about, like, well, what about black on black violence, right? What about that? Why aren’t you concerned about that? And I think that, if we were to take mental illness seriously in the context of that conversation and respond to it, say, yes, let’s take it seriously, let’s talk about the post traumatic stress disorder of so many people that, when they witness this violence everyday, let’s talk about people walking through with anxiety and depression and paranoia. let’s talk about how they’re retaliatory violence is often, could be read as suicidal, because they don’t —- do not believe that they have anything else to live for why would they put thereselv—- why would they put their lives on the line? I think that — and you’re walking through that in response to all of the systems bearing down on you in the first place. We’re talking about systems of white supremacy, we’re talking about poverty, we’re talking about lack of educational resources, we’re talking about lack of recreation and health care. And so, when you’re — when that’s the cocktail, what your — what your response to that is going to be a lot of depression, a lot of PTSD, a lot of mental illnesses that go undiagnosed because these resources don’t exist in our communities, and we don’t fight for them because the stigma that’s attached to them, that — the idea that we need them. And so that spirit of resilience can backfire in some ways. And so with reframing black male life in the context of taking mental illness seriously, what we would do is to fight for access to these things that are life saving.
Marc Lamont Hill talking:
we have to think about mental health as an American crisis. All of us are struggling with this stuff. You can’t live in a world that is this shot through with inequality and injustice and violence, and not all have, at some point in life, wrestle with these fundamental issues. Right? So, that’s an, that’s an everything question. One of the things I talk about in my book is how, again access to —- how mental health plays into all this systemic and structural violence. Right? To Mychal’s point, you can’t grow up around violence all the time and not see it. There’s a four-year-old that sat in the back of a car – in Minnesota yesterday that had to witness an execution by the police.
That’s going to affect her life. There’s a little boy who lost a father, yesterday, who we saw in tears. Now, that’s a normal kind of response, but, what happens tomorrow when the cameras go away, and a week later when the cameras go away? When Mike Brown laid on that ground in Canfield for four hours, he was surrounded by a community of people who watched him lay there as if he belonged to nobody. They watched him die. The spectacle of the lynching of the 19th and the 20th century wasn’t just to kill a body, you could kill a body in private, but the public disciplining of the body, as Foucault talks about historically, right, the public disciplining of the body is about what it does to other people. So the entire community has to watch him lay there, just like people used to watch them hang like strange fruit. And when you do that that has a traumatic impact.
When you’re in Chicago and you see violence every single day, or Atlanta, or Philadelphia, you are subject to a certain kind of trauma. I work with kids in — from Gaza, I work with kids in the West Bank. When they see everyday trauma they have PTSD. When you come back from war you have PTSD. When you live in a state like this you have PTSD. So we have to think of our lives as dealing with untreated trauma. Sometimes it’s direct. Sometimes it’s vicarious, like when Mychal sees Trayvon Martin die. That’s a vicarious kind of trauma we have to wrestle with. So, we need to get at that.
We also need to think about how the criminal justice system doesn’t deal with trauma. Sandra Bland goes into a jail cell in Texas, and the first problem is that she shouldn’t have been there, right, in terms of how the officer responded to her. The second problem is, when she got there, she should have been able to get out on bail. But, because she didn’t have $5,000 cash, or $500 bond, she couldn’t get out. The whole point of the bail system is to get you to return to jail — I mean to return to court, not to punish you for being poor. So, she didn’t have the money to exchange for freedom, so she’s stuck there despite the fact that she had reported mental health issues, and she was taking a drug enhanced suicidal tendencies.
But, we didn’t take mental health seriously, and often time, with black women, we particularly don’t take mental health seriously, we just talk about how resilient they are, and how strong they are, and how tough they are, like Zora Neale Hurston says, you know, they’ve become the mules of the world that have to carry so much, and so we don’t give them the proper treatment. And then, when you add to that stigma around mental health, shaming around mental health, you know, marginalization of people around mental health, religious narratives that say, oh, well, you know, you need to take this to Jesus, you don’t take this to your psychiatrist, as if Jesus don’t want you to see a psychiatrist too.
You know, when all this stuff happens you end up in a very bad spot. Then when you talk about actual access to mental health resources in our communities, and then culturally responsive mental health resources, having somebody who understands you, your condition, your issue, your background, if you don’t have that, you get jacked up, and then by the time you get to the point of criminality — because 20 percent of people in state prisons right now are dealing with a mental health issue. When you get to that point there’s nothing there but more trauma, more violence. Then you get out, you still have the mental health issue, and you have a criminal record. So, when you have all that going on, you really get in an almost inescapable cycle. So, we have to address mental health, we have to address race, we have to address class.
If you were to take Sandra Bland, and Mike Brown, and Oscar Grant, and Catherine Johnson, if you were — if they all lived in a town, it would probably look something like Flint. Right? It — people can escape state violence at the direct level. But, there’s another way that state violence operates where, even if you don’t get shot by the gun, you’re still denied access to housing, health care, etcetera. Here, these people were collectively punished for the crime of being black, poor, and politically disempowered. So, when you — so, it’s not just about state violence at the level of the gun, it’s also at the level of the water resources, and this happens because of what? Privatization, emergency management, all these fancy words that really speak to the way in which we have bowed before the alter of the market. And we’ve made poor people disposable as a consequence of that. For, uh — what happened in Flint is just the most profound example of civic evil we’ve seen in this 21st century in America. But, there are many more examples ’cause there’s a Cleveland, there’s a Philadelphia, and there are many other cities where the same thing is happening where they’re poisoning the water and they’re killing us, and there’s no response to it because we don’t matter.
There’s no way you’re in Grosse Pointe and the water gets poisoned for a year. There’s no way you’re in [indiscernible] and that happens. It only happens in a place like Flint because we’re rendered disposable. We’re rendered to be nobody, and that’s what we have to get at. We can fix this police thing, but, we also have to fix the structural thing, and we can’t do that until we really begin to repair the damage that’s been done by late capitalism.
It struck me when I went down to Flint, I was actually coving it for BET News at the time and then CNN, and I talked to — I bumped into a woman named Kesha. She was — she lived in Canfield, she lived in his housing — his housing area, and she said it to me. She said he lay there on the ground for four hours, she said, like he ain’t belong to nobody. And she was referring to the fact that, as he lay there, there was no immediate response, there was no government response, there was no medical response, there was no state response. But, even before he lay there he was in Canfield, where public housing had been destroyed, where public housing had been destroyed, not just in Ferguson, but in St. Louis. You — he was — they normally — the school district has been so far below the standard that it also rendered him nobody. You couldn’t get quality — access to a quality education. So, if you don’t have access to housing, and you don’t have access to education, you’re vulnerable to the state, so you’re always going to jail, which then denies you access to a job. Are you a citizen?
That nobodyness isn’t just at the level of the gun. That nobodyness happens even before you encounter a Darren Wilson. He had already been nobody. Freddy Gray had been nobody by lead poisoning long before he was running from the police. You know, everyone in Baltimore is nobody in a certain kind of way because of the rise of prosecutorial power that really denies people access to a fair trial or allow the truth or justice to matter. You know, the entire nation-state is just — is nobody at the level of the militarization of police when we see what happens in a place like Ferguson. Right? After the — after the shooting, where suddenly the town that didn’t have dashboard cameras had helicopters and grenade launchers. I mean, suddenly there’s this way in which everybody becomes vulnerable. If you’re not part of the one percent, you just might be nobody or you’re well on your way, given this economy.
Mychal Denzel Smith talking:
– “Their eyes were watching God,” a novel by Zora Neale Hurston
the title is so profound for me, and just the idea of, uh, that we have nothing else, that we are invisible, that we are nobody, and the only thing that we can turn to in certain instances is that, that spiritual resonance that something else has to keep us going. Something else. That we have to turn our eyes toward the sky because, here on earth we’re catching so much hell that there’s no escape. And that’s — it’s so devastating and depressing to me to think — I mean we’re talking about Flint. How evil is that? Right? We’re talking about water. We’re not talking about, like, we’re not even talking about school where we’re talking about outdated textbooks. We’re not talking about, a, you know, jail cell. We’re talking about water. We’re talking about the fundamental building block for life. And it’s being poisoned in our communities. Like how — how evil of a system do we have to exist in to deny people that. How invisible, and how much of a nobody do you have to think people are to kill them that way, to deny them humanity in that respect. And, yes, there’s no other, there’s no other else to turn in some instances, there’s no where else to go, because, if our eyes are watching the world around us, we would all just — there’s just no way to want to keep going. So, sometimes you have to turn towards something else that you don’t even know whether it exists or not. But, that belief, that faith will keep you going.
we’re talking about Jesse Williams’ speech, and I think one of the most crucial things that he said very early on in that speech was talking about the ways in which black men, particularly have failed black women, and we shoud — we have to do better by them. And that’s been missed quite a bit is that he folded into this narrative around police violence black women’s stories that often get left out because we don’t have a script for that really. We have a script to follow for the ways in which black men experience state violence. Unfortunately, we need one for black women, but, we don’t have it, in part, because the centrality of black manhood, in terms of what we understand racial justice to be, is that we’re fighting for is the return of black men to the head of household in a way. That patriarchal notions of liberation are somehow liberatory for everyone. But, if we were to readjust that sense of what manhood looks like, one, we don’t write out those who are not cis-gender and heterosexual black men. I think that those people get rendered invisible often, if you are trans or gender nonconforming, or you are gay or bisexual, like so many of those people get written out of the narrative, but, then the way in which it happens to black women is that they feel like they’re up against, not just the state, but black men in there own community who would try to justify their violence somehow, justify, not just the violence from the state, but, violence within the community that reinforces patriarchal notions of domination and violence and coercion. And so, what we have to do is envision liberation, not just for ourselves in a selfish politics, what we have to do is note all of the intersections of these different forms of oppression and violence that we can divest ourselves from.
so the title is a Mos Def lyric. Invisible man, got the whole world watching, and in the song what he does is chart the, the existence of black men through labor and commerce and music and lands in the, you know, in 1999, in that moment with the globalization of hip hop, the biggest cultural export from the US at this time. And the way in which we’re positioned, the men deemed invisible by Ralph Ellison. Right? Taking that concept of being invisible to the world, that people do not care about the interior of your life and your humanity, your existence unless you are being used in certain ways, or you’re being, like we’re re-establishing hierarchies — to take those people and then to put them on a stage in which everyone has access to them now, and their stories and what they’re saying to the world. And, and that — the title again speaks to the literal invisibility of folks like Trayvon Martin. Before February 26, 2012, we do not — we — most of us don’t know who he is. Right? He’s not known outside of the Miami and Sanford communities that he comes from. But, then George Zimmerman kills him and now we have like cameras there. We wanna see Trayvon. We wanna know who he was, what he was interested in. We want to know him as a person. But, for some people they wanted to project all of their ideas about who black men are onto him to reaffirm the idea of his, of his being dangerous and a threat. And so, what I was trying to do with the book is, is to discuss the nuances of black male life, because, Trayvon Martin didn’t get a chance to do that. That opportunity was robbed from him to really know himself, to create himself in this world to know what his position was, to know how he would interact with the world around him. George Zimmerman took that opportunity away from him. And so many black boys get that opportunity get that opportunity taken away from them. So, what does it look like to, to be invisible, and then to come in to your own and try to shape a self.
George Zimmerman is such a disease to me, But, I mean, he’s a product of these systems and this culture that devalue black life, that he thinks that he can get away with it. I think that that’s my problem, is that he thinks and knows that there will be a reaction to him no matter what he says, that — and he can be this vile because of, because Trayvon is a nobody to us, because Trayvon is such a symbol for so many of us that he’ll rile up our, our, this fervor in us once again, but, also for the — for folks who see Trayvon as an emblem of all of the things that they know about black men — to be thugs, to be underserving of life and humanity — he knows that they will be on his side and he knows that he’ll create this conversation around himself, that, that speaks to something deeper in our culture that devalues black life, that we continue to chase after that.
Marc Lamont Hill talking:
August 28, 1955 Emmet Till was killed. He wasn’t the first person that was killed. He wasn’t the first person that week, that month, or even lynched. But, there was something about that moment where people said they had enough, and it led to August 28, ’63 when you have the “I have a dream” speech where you have a kind of mobilization of, at least, bourgeois liberal civil rights activism. I think August 9, 2014 may have been our generation’s moment. People have been killed before. Oscar Grant had been killed before. Sean Bell had been killed before. But, there was something about that moment in Ferguson that seemed to be a tipping point. It led to the creation of organizations, movements, and, really, the most long-standing resistance movement against state violence that we’ve ever seen in American life. So, I believe that the resistance has been mobilized since the death of Mike Brown. And because of that, we’re able to put a spotlight on a Renisha McBride, on a Rekia Boyd, on a Sandra Bland, etcetera, and we can do it today. So, the next step is, as we vote for, not just our president, you know, but also state government, as we begin to think about who’s gonna be in our police departments, as we begin to think about what policy looks like, because we begin to change the public narratives around policing, and dislodge ourselves from the default position that police are always right and that people are always wrong with or without videotape. As we begin to make those changes, I believe we’re at, I believe, the tipping point is here. And I believe we’re making change. And I’m committed to the belief. I have to, because, As Mychal said, if I didn’t believe this, my eyes weren’t looking elsewhere, I would just be ready to go every day. But, because I believe in us, I believe in the people, and I believe in the possibility of radical revolutionary change, I think we’re here. I think the time is now, and I think we’re gonna see a radical change in this world.
Mychal Denzel Smith talking:
I think it’s important to note the dates that Marc said. Right? Nineteen fifty five to 1963. We have to understand that doesn’t happen immediately. Right? We have to know that, even when we experience something that feels like a tipping point, that white supremacy does everything that it can to protect itself, and that systems of oppression will do everything that they can to perpetuate themselves, and we are in for a long fight. And, and really, what we have to also be willing to accept is that we may not be the beneficiaries of that fight. Right?
We’re not going to all see the end of these systems in our lifetime. And we have to be OK with that. But, we have to know that the fight is worth it, because, because it’s just, because it’s right, but, because we, we’re looking out for future generations and we’re not making it about ourselves. We know that the fight is long and it’s hard, but, it’s worth it every single day.
Marc Lamont Hill talking:
I think we all retreat to simplistic arguments about Donald Trump, you know, that he is just a charismatic leader who people like because our obsession with celebrity is partly true, that he has a voting base that’s made up of people who are just uneducated and be— and, and racist, is partly true, but, there’s something else at play here. Donald Trump emerges at a moment where an entire kind of group of Americans, particularly white Americans, have been sort of marginalized by the American economy, by late capitalism. At the very same moment, they’re looking for opportunities. They’re looking for a way to explain themselves. In the same way that we construct these narratives of radicalization in the Middle East and we talk about people who are economically depressed an vulnerable and then suddenly someone comes with a plan, someone comes with an agenda, someone comes with a movement. That’s Donald Trump. Donald Trump has, essentially, radicalized white men in the South, and, and, and then now, often times, in the North who were economically vulnerable, to convince them that the problem is Obama, that the problem is Mexicans, that the problem are Arabs, that the problem is Muslims, and, as a result, they’re able to kind of enter a space that they otherwise would not. And the fact that we’re able to have these conversations with a straight face, right? It, it, it’s July of 2016. We’re a few months away from presidential election. Donald Trump is still hanging in there, because there are people who are invested in this.
We have a deeper problem here. Part of it is white supremacy and racism. Donald Trump is able to articulate that. In some sense they’re ventriloquating him, right? These white supremacists are able to look on TV and see him saying and doing things that they’ve always wanted to say and do. But, there’s a deeper question here, which is, what does it mean for people who are looking to be made whole economically, socially, culturally, to look to a Donald Trump. That’s a dark moment. Donald Trump is exactly what the Republican Party deserves. This is what they’ve been playing to. They’ve been playing to the cheap seats for eight years. They’ve been playing, longer than that, really, when you talk about the kind of anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican sentiment, when you talk about this obsession with the free market and unchecked free market. All of these things create the kind of narrative for a Donald Trump to emerge. And Donald Trump is now giving them exactly what they want, to their own terror in some ways. So, I’m sort of happy to see that. But, I’m more excited to see a real left-wing movement emerge. I happen to be a supporter of Jill Stein and a Green Party advocate, because I want to see another world. I want to see another set of possibilities. And I think the Donald Trump moment may be so far to the other end that we finally snap back, take hold of our democracy again, re-imagine what freedom and justice look like, organize and mobilize and galvanize in such a way that we can actually have a bigger more robust freedom dream.
Mychal Denzel Smith talking:
The idea of white supremacy in naming it in, in the most visceral form that we can, that we can have doesn’t surprise me, because, as limited as an Obama presidency is, I think the response to him is inevitable and, and, and that was that, that Donald Trump was an inevitable rise. Right? The social movements that rise up during the Obama presidency. We talk about Occupy, we talk about the Dreamers, we talk about Black Lives Matter. When people then perceive those movements as trying to take something away from them, particularly, agrieved white men who believe America to be their birthright, believe that something is being taken away from them because other people are rising up demanding their right, they’re going to turn to the person that’s speaking to their issues. Right? And Donald Trump embodies the backlash. He is a billionaire using white nationalist language and talking about building a wall along Mexico. Right? So, embodies everything that they would like to see happen to this country because they feel it’s slipping away — slipping out of their grasp. And like, the avatar of Barack Obama is just the thing that tipped them over, is that the highest office in the land was taken over by Barack Hussein Obama. Right? A man who wasn’t even born here. That radical Muslim socialist is, is taking away my country. And so, it’s not surprising, if you look at the long arc of American history, to note that, when there is progress, there’s inevitably a backlash. There’s the way in which the aggrieved white male class rallies to protect, again, what they perceive to be their birth right.
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Mychal Denzel Smith
contributing writer for The Nation magazine. Author of “Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education”.
Marc Lamont Hill
African American Studies professor at Morehouse College. Author of “Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond.”
— source democracynow.org