Having White Skin in Trump's America
A reflection on pigmentation, inherited values, and the cost of lies in a fractured America.
More than once in the last decade has a MAGA supporter asserted how the Left wants to make white people feel guilty and ashamed about their whiteness.
It is a cruel irony that their misguided belief led them to support a man, and a regime, who genuinely does give cause for exactly those feelings.
More ironic still is how, after fully a decade of insisting that the Left makes everything about race, did their President do EXACTLY the same thing… except he made everything racist.
As defined by the Trump regime, whiteness is a sick combination of sadism, bastardization, and mediocrity. They seem to insist, even as they prioritize whiteness in nearly every policy they make, rob the country blind, and betray the country’s allies and their own voters, that white people are still the biggest victims… as long as you agree with everything they say.
In making themselves both sides of the conversation, they shut everyone else out of their own little world. The vast majority of Americans simply don’t have a federal government anymore. We’re not even part of the conversation.
While they weave fairy tales of restoring American values and ridding the world of “woke,” they spend their time blatantly basking in the seven deadly sins, before our eyes, on a daily basis. They insist anyone bold enough to identify their hypocrisy, out loud with their mouth, is an enemy of the regime (and sometimes the country).
Trump and his second administration have made whiteness feel gross. They stand as the American representation of what they want whiteness to be, and what have they shown us?
Entitlement. Corruption. Delusion.
Chaos.
The bottom ninety percent [90%] of our country suffers what they must so the top 0.001% can fund a life so far removed from normal human experience, they no longer feel themselves even to be part of humanity.
My anger comes from the stupidity of it all.
“When a society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies, it loses the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.”
- Hannah Arendt
I’m a regular white person in America. My eyes are blue; My hair went from blonde to light brown over the years, but this skin has bubbled and blistered many times from the sheer lack of melanin.
I can trace six generations in this country, at least. Ancestry.com is trippy, that’s for sure, but it’s the best glimpse I’ll ever get into my family history because (frankly) families in poverty don’t keep great records, in my experience.
My blood is Scottish, Irish, and Choctaw. I’m a sovereign member of an indigenous nation that outdates this country… but besides that, the vast and overwhelming majority of my bloodline had white skin, and so do I.
None of them were ever able to build up wealth. None of them passed on especially rich traditions. Many of the men died in wars, many of the children died young.
My family is huge.
My Nana and Papa, on one side of my family, both have 10 siblings each. I have more cousins than I can name…. But what I can testify to is what I saw with my own eyes; The lifestyle, history, and testimony of my own family members, up through my great-grandparents… all of them American, all of them white.
They instilled beautiful values in me. They were honest and hardworking. They believed in freedom, chivalry, fair-dealings and helping one’s neighbor. Family was everything, and they never raised their noses to a soul around them.
They were also deeply uneducated. Their parenting knowledge was outdated, and often harmful. They struggled with addiction, emotional unintelligence, and a lifelong lack of resources.
Abuse has been present in some branch of every single generation of every single side of my family, from verbal to emotional, physical to sexual, neglect to adultery and beyond.
All of them American. All of them white.
And still, despite all that, I was never ashamed of my whiteness. Because I **ALSO** watched my Papa hitch a chain to the tail of his truck to pull a brown man’s car to the gas station so he wouldn’t have to push it there, neither one of them speaking the other’s language. And because despite their upbringings, nobody in my extended family ever discouraged me (or seemed bothered one bit) from my having a black best friend; If anything, they applauded it.
They always taught me to define myself by how I treat other people, and how well I keep my word.
They may have had biases they didn’t examine in time. They may have allowed themselves to be manipulated into voting for policies they will come to regret.
But they were the people who raised me to believe that we are all created equal.
I am angry with my family for not believing me. I will never understand why I was their first phone call for building their resumé, or writing an important letter, but so immediately dismissed when I spoke of politics. Even as they gushed with pride about how smart I was, cheered with pride at my college graduation and gushed about how I wrote so well and was such a nerd… Still, I felt them grow more and more unaccepting of any views outside of their own. I could not convince them to lend the same consideration to my knowledge that they gave to the influencers and commentators on their screens.
And when the time finally came, when I told them this country could truly be in danger… even them… they could not, or would not, hear me.
They will learn soon enough (if they haven’t already) that nothing about this jives with their values. But what I’m describing is a relational wound, not a political one; I’m hurt that my loved ones didn’t trust me with this topic, or even give it the time of day, the same way they trust me with others… But I’m not angry with people who voted for Donald Trump, as a whole.
Normal Americans are so stunningly and remarkably outmatched by the sheer resources of powerful entities who want to manipulate our minds:
Algorithms that reward divisive content
Elimination of shared reality
Fox still being allowed to call itself “news”
Manipulation of video traffic to slow the spread of certain ideas
Shadow banning
Ad-driven model allowing the rich to buy influence normal people can’t afford
Citizens United making political donations dark and muddier
I cannot find anger in my heart for people who were fooled by incredibly powerful entities who wanted to fool them. In a teeny, tiny way, they are victims themselves. As people of color have been screaming from the rooftops for decades, white supremacy ultimately hurts white people too.
It convinces the white people who are easily fooled, narcissistic, or lacking in resources and education to direct their (otherwise justified) anger at a distraction, rather than at the people who could actually affect real change in their lives.
Racism was invented.
It’s a great way to trick people into believing that, at the very least, they have it better than some other people. It’s an easier enemy than the societal structures keeping us boxed in this way of life that has us sick, depressed, overworked, dying earlier, and falling behind other developed countries.
I know damn well there was, is, and will be racist views somewhere in my family line, maybe forever. But my own little story is the exception; My parents made damn sure I got an education, and that was my ticket out… and I also had a black best friend growing up, and tons of black and brown friends in general. I’ve come to understand that my views on race are rare within white communities.
But many, many, MANY branches of my extended family continued the traditions that stem back as far as I’ve been able to see on ancestry.com. More addiction. More poverty and food stamps, unfinished schooling and early pregnancies. Boatloads of abuse and neglect, speckled with divorces and deaths.
I say all this to ask… what about whiteness should I be proud of?
My soul is trying to accept that the USA has entered an era of surplus suffering because a huge swath of white people (and American society, as a whole) must once again answer that question laid before us some 165 years ago; It’s a question we forced ourselves to answer with blood, and war, and broken families and massive economic cost the first time around, so I can’t help but express some disappointment that we face the debate yet again…
Are We The People all created equal?
It is not a question for me. I will never be able to convince myself of something I don’t know to be true, never mind that my whiteness does not protect me in a world where powerful figures deny our equality.
I have lived in these United States with my white skin for 35 years. I was raised by white people, taught by white people and I have a lot of white friends.
But I’ve also been blessed my whole life with rich friendships with people who don’t look like me. I don’t like texting them more frequently because I’m worried about their safety. I don’t appreciate that they might be made to feel like they’re less than, when they’re absolutely not.
It wouldn’t feel like America, to me, without them.
If future society expects white Americans to give up their freedom and values in exchange for a lie that they’re better than people with more melanin, the least they could do is give whiteness some decent qualities.
Because this regime’s definition of whiteness is nothing to be proud of. All bluster and ego, flexing power over the weak and cowering to the strong, hypocritical, selfish and entitled and betraying their own beliefs, making stupid-ass, embarrassing careless mistakes and sinning bigly all the while… and utterly childish when confronted with fact or truth.
Whiteness is ugly in Trump’s America, and it’s not rational to take pride in being ugly.