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| Trump's front page endorsement in the official newspaper of the KuKluxKlan. |
Robin
Darling Young, a native of Hampton, Virginia, writes in Commonweal magazine
about the frightening possibility that Trump has rekindled the spirit of white
nationalism and race hatred that she knew so well in her youth.
“To
comprehend fully the anarchic spectacle of Donald Trump—a show unhindered by
the guiding political and religious institutions of the United States—it helps
to have been a young white woman growing up a half century ago, as I did,
inside the border of the Old Confederacy.
“In
my Tidewater hometown of Hampton, Virginia, democratic hopes were abundant. The
twenty years after World War II had seen American progressivism pry open the
old Southern social order and force it to admit black Americans.
“Southern
integrationists expected that another generation or two would banish Jim Crow
forever, more or less as the scourge of polio had yielded to Salk’s vaccine.
Such things were inevitable, after all, like the ever-rising prosperity
guaranteed by American industry and empire.
“What
the progressives of my girlhood did not foresee was the postindustrial
impoverishment of the working class; furthermore, even as the Republicans’
Southern Strategy captured the Old South, those same progressives failed to
reckon with the lasting wages of America’s original sin.
“In
time these two phenomena combined with ominous ramification. The crash of 2008
underscored the insecurity of the white working and middle classes, and in the
context of this abiding insecurity, Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great
Again” now clearly signals its real meaning: bring back white jobs, and with it
white male power, to quell the threat of dark-skinned immigrants and the menace
of black urban neighborhoods.
“Like
the witch of Endor, Trump has the power to summon America’s undead, in the form
of the white nationalists now relabeled the “alt-right.” Seizing the legacy of
the new Southern Republicanism rooted in Richard Nixon’s cynical appeal to
Dixiecrats, he has reanimated the race-hatred of the Old South.
“The
success of Trump’s dog-whistle appeal to race comes as no surprise to someone
who observed firsthand the satisfactions that white Southerners took in
segregation.
“In
my 1950s childhood, Confederate statues and flags sanctified the landscape
throughout the South. My nursery-school class marched, battle-flags clutched in
our hands, to commemorate Confederate Memorial Day.
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| Burned out black church in Mississippi |
“At
the time Virginia was fighting in vain to hold the line against miscegenation,
its bitter defeat inscribed in the Supreme Court’s 1967 landmark ruling in
Loving v. Virginia.
“Four
decades after the last lynching in the state in 1926—which occurred after a
white woman gave birth to a “mixed” baby and named a black man as the
father—racial lines remained clear, and white women and black men knew all too
well that they must not touch in public. Yet everyone also knew that the paler,
blue-eyed blacks among us had come from precisely such unions….
“Though
Donald Trump’s path to victory appears increasingly narrow as the election
approaches, his ascendancy to the Republican nomination—boosted by his coded
segregationist rhetoric—has left a mark on American politics.
“Even
if he loses, he’s emboldened the dormant monster of white supremacy, in part by
nurturing a pernicious lie that played to white resentment at the election of a
black president.
“Assessing
the significance of Trump’s appeal, John Cassidy, writing in The New Yorker,
warned of a “long-term Trumpian movement —a nationalist, nativist,
protectionist, and authoritarian movement that will forever be associated with
him, but which also has the capacity to survive beyond him.”
“While
Trump himself might lack the discipline of a serious candidate, Cassidy
reasoned, another leader could arise in four or eight years to lead a movement
like the Know Nothings of the 1840s or the America First Committee of the
1930s.”
We
have been warned.