By Chris Satullo
A quartet of thoughts for these frightening, promising times:
1. None of this should be any surprise
In 2016, one of America’s smartest, fairest-minded journalists, James Fallows, provided a lasting public service.
Writing for The Atlantic, Fallows churned out a chronicle called The Daily Trump: A Time Capsule. Beginning in May of that election year, and virtually each day, he detailed a fresh piece of public evidence that, by temperament, judgment, knowledge, you name it, Donald Trump was utterly unfit to be President of the United States.
His purpose, he said, was “to catalogue some of the things Donald Trump says and does that no real president would do.” Catalogue Fallows did, hundreds of examples of DJT showing, long before Americans went to the polls, who he really was, always had been and always would be:
- Always a racist and xenophobe.
- Always a malignant narcissist, devoid of empathy, swift to blame, loath to share credit, allergic to accountability.
- Always a reckless, shameless peddler of lies.
- Always stuck in his peculiar, wrong-headed view of how international trade works.
- Always clueless about our nation’s Constitution and system of government.
- Always a would-be tyrant who delights in instigating violence.
- Always a bully and a coward.
It’s all been right in front of us, from the jump.There’s never been a scintilla of an iota of a soupcon of a chance that this flaming lump of awfulness would ever evolve or “grow into the job.” Being surprised that he hasn’t is like being stunned that a mosquito bites or that a snake slithers.
There is no excuse – never was, never will be – for anyone, ever, to say, “How was I to know?”
But if a fellow voter tries that alibi out on you, do be kind. Don’t berate or shame; that just leads most people to double down on error. Instead, lead them to the light.
Just gently suggest he/she/they click on the Fallows link above and read for, oh, 10 minutes. That should lead any sane person who in 2016 somehow chose to vote for chaos, incompetence and wreckage to feel razor-edged regret. Then make it clear the guilt can be expiated only one way: by doing the right thing on Nov. 3.
By contrast, have no patience with any politician who, clutching a scary poll and scrambling to save his or her precious neck, trots out that line before Election Day.
Those enablers are already ticketed for Dante’s ninth circle of hell – the one reserved for traitors. No mercy offered for deathbed conversions.
2. The fragile logic of White Fragility
By all means, dip into Robin DiAngelo’s having-its-moment best-seller, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism.
To make the most of this fertile, challenging moment in America’s long, bloody saga of race, it’s important for all of us to do an examination of conscience, to assess our blind spots, rationalizations and chronic flaws. This book apparently helps some people do that, so that’s good.
But it’s also important not to get sucked in by counterproductive claptrap. So I’d urge you to prep for reading the book by taking in one or more of the withering critiques of DiAngelo’s message and argumentation that are now cropping up.
Two I highly recommend are pieces by Black intellectuals that appeared recently on theAtlantic.com (man, is that site crushing it these days, on pandemic, police reform, polling, race, everything):
John McWhorter says about White Fragility: “The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.”
Sociologist Saida Grundy says, about the general category of anti-racism self-help books, not specifically DiAngelo’s: “Anti-racism efforts that are watered down by ‘listening’ and “learning” treat justice as though it can be acquired through the awakening of people’s hearts and minds—instead of through a clear-cut democratic process.”
And if you seek the raw, full-howl version of DiAngelo doubt, you can get from it from gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi.
About a decade ago, I was privileged to be part of the founding of a Philadelphia initiative called NewCORE (the New Conversation on Race and Equity). Led today by the Rev. Steven Lawrence of White Rock Baptist Church in West Philly, one of the wisest men I know, NewCORE stays strong and useful.
In working with NewCORE, I experienced an approach to fighting racism very different from DiAngelo’s, one favoring story over lecture, empathy over guilt, the building of alliances for action over the castigating of those deemed resistant or in error.
I agree with McWhorter and Grundy in rejecting DiAngelo’s seeming call for endless navel-gazing and self-flagellation about one’s inner racism in favor of the building of multiracial coalitions to do something real, now, to dismantle – and undo the effects of – systemic racism. That system was built over centuries by legislatures and courts; to dismantle it will also take the hard, patient work of elections, lawsuits and law-making – not just Twitter screeds about corporate logos or statues in parks.
3. Who’s got the killing needles?
Who indeed? Know much about the French Revolution? Might be time to brush up.
The knowledge might be helpful in slowing the pell-mell rush in some progressive quarters to emulate the Jacobins, the ruthless faction that used high-sounding words to justify the cruelty and mass violence of the revolution’s Reign of Terror. (May it please the court, I enter into evidence the name of one leading online publication of the modern American left … Jacobin.)
The French Revolution (to simplify a complex, chaotic time) began with the marvelous cry of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité and the soaring Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. It soon proceeded, though, to thousands of people trundling in the tumbrel to the guillotine, mass murders in prisons and the brutal massacres in the Vendée.
It became commonplace for the person who outed, denounced and demanded the heads of political enemies one month to feel the blade on their own neck the next (e.g. Robespierre). And it all ended not in Eden, but with the rise of a megalomaniacal, blood-soaked dictator named Napoleon.
Now, true, in America we don’t have a guillotine, yet, only Twitter and faculty meetings. And we don’t yet assassinate the people we denounce. We merely cost them their livelihoods and frighten their families.
But, I have to say, when looking for historical calamities that provide a cautionary tale about the present, Hitler’s Germany is not the only one that comes to my mind.
4. Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people
There are false prophets (a.k.a. evangelical pastors in thrall to Donald Trump) who have advised their flocks that Jesus doesn’t want them to wear a mask, that he wouldn’t have put one on his holy face, no sir.
Some people are prone to brandishing the Bible without apparently having understood a single word of the Gospels. Do you really think a man who willingly submitted to a slow, agonizing, lonely death on the Cross to redeem all of us sinful yahoos would refuse to wear a simple cloth on his face for a couple of hours a day to save some of us yahoos from a slow, agonizing, lonely death on a ventilator?
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.