Welcome to the MAGA era of white grievance under Trump, a
desire to return to the good old days and keep
control away from melanated people. The times
in which we find ourselves remind me of the
iconic 1961
photo of a white hotel owner in St. Augustine, Florida who
poured acid into the hotel swimming pool after
Black protesters jumped in to desegregate it.
The moral of the story is that if the white
supremacists who would uphold the status quo
of America’s racial hierarchy can’t have this
whole thing to themselves, nobody can have it.
This is why white people privatized and closed
public facilities such as pools, and opened
segregation academies rather than allow access
to Black people when the courts banged on the
door with their desegregation orders in the
1960s.
Similarly, I’m reminded of the scene from the 1997 film Rosewood, which depicted the 1923 racial massacre of a thriving
Black community in Florida by a white lynch
mob. when a member of the white lynch mob
complained that he did not own a piano, but a
n****r, a Black man in the thriving Black
community owned a piano. “Ya know he’s got a
piano? A n***a with a goddamn piano. I’ve been
workin’ all my life, I ain’t got a piano,” the
aggrieved white man said in the film. It mattered little that the man was unable to play a
piano. The fact of the matter was that a Black
man owned something the white man did not
have. So burn down the town and kill all the
Black folks.
In the Jim Crow era, the white lynch mob destroyed Black
power, progress and prosperity through racial
massacres, terrorism and political
disenfranchisement. The mob lynched Black
women, men and children, assassinated Black
lawmakers, staged coups against
Black-controlled state legislatures and
replaced these lawmakers with themselves. It’s
the American way - stealing, raping, pillaging
and murdering, that is.
In the era of Trump, white Christian nationalists will
destroy the government, the agencies, the
programs and services - and by extension, the
nation - because they hate Black and Brown
people, and Black people are benefitting from
government. This has been a long time coming,
and it is the natural and inevitable
conclusion of the project known as the modern
Republican Party. Since the GOP’s Southern
Strategy of the 1960s, the Republican Party
has capitalized on white resentment of civil
rights for Black people by equating government
with Black people, and promoting opposition to
government programs because Black people might
benefit. Republican strategist Lee Atwater
summed up the Southern Strategy:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.”
By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you,
backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced
busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff,
and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re
talking about cutting taxes, and all these
things you’re talking about are totally
economic things and a byproduct of them is,
blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want
to cut this,” is much more abstract than even
the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more
abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
It mattered little or nothing that white people also
benefit, even benefit more from these
government programs. This is why America can’t
have nice things such as universal
healthcare. So now, white people will pour acid into the pool - that
pool being the whole entire U.S. - because
they don’t want Black folks in it to dirty up
the water.
