Donald Trump appears in the courtroom with his attorney Alina Habba for the third day of his civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court on October 4, 2023, in New York City. | Source: Spencer Platt / Getty
White conservatives spend far too much time propagandizing non-whitewashed Black history and denying the existence of systemic racism in America to be invoking the names of Black civil rights leaders who fought against systemic racism throughout Black history. It’s just tiring as hell when anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-diversity, anti-affirmative action, anti-critical race theory and anti-woke white people start gaslighting Black people by shouting out Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Frederick Douglass and others at their convenience knowing they would have attacked those civil rights icons if they were still alive today and still calling America the racist country that it demonstrably is.
And to add insult to all of that caucasified injury, MAGA whites have the nerve to compare Black civil rights leaders to Donald Trump.
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During a recent interview, Trump attorney Alina Habba explained why she chose to represent Trump in his legal troubles by comparing her white nationalist MAGA messiah to MLK, Mandela, Parks and Jesus Christ. (She must have been talking about Black Jesus because, clearly, she was going for a certain theme.)
“We can’t be scared…that’s what they want; that’s the machine…to create fear. If you create fear, you will shut down, you will become oppressed, you will become censored, and you will conform,” Habba said as if her white billionaire pseudo-revolutionary hadn’t based his entire campaign around fearmongering. “The great people in the history of this country were the ones in this exact situation — that were the victims of this and spoke up. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela — people who had voices when they weren’t supposed to. Rosa Parks — I mean, I can go on and on. People persecuted and prosecuted. Jesus.”
Setting aside the fact that Mandela, who Trump has compared himself to multiple times, was a South African revolutionary, not one of the civil rights leaders “in the history of this country,” Habba is taking Black American icons and using their names to prop up a man who stands against everything they stood for.
Actually, I’ve already written about this before:
Trump was speaking at the Black Conservative Federation Gala in South Carolina, where the guy who spearheaded the propaganda-reliant attack on critical race theory—an academic framework to examine systemic racism in America—said Black voters will align with him because he too has faced injustice at the hands of our legal system.
“I got indicted for nothing, for something that is nothing,” Trump said Friday. “And a lot of people said that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against. It’s been pretty amazing but possibly, maybe, there’s something there.”
White people stereotyping non-white people is just garden-variety American racism that Black people are so used to that we barely wince at it anymore. But this right here is a particularly manipulative form of racism that should be likened to a slave master gaslighting slaves by pretending to share in their lack of freedom. Again, Trump is the orangey-white nationalist who made CRT-bashing popular with Republicans and white conservatives. He also issued an executive order banning diversity training in the workplace during his presidency, and even now, he’s promising to end all DEI programs across America if he’s elected again. So, out of one side of his neck, Trump is pretending to find common ground with Black people because we “have been hurt so badly and discriminated against,” and out of the other side, he’s promising to put an end to every effort to correct racial discrimination, which he has always denied or downplayed the existence of until now when it benefits his campaign.
It’s not an accident that Habba exclusively used Black historical figures to compare Trump to, especially considering Trump has been desperately trying to win over Black people, particularly Black men, who some polls have indicated he is gaining ground with. But it’s an insulting, condescending, cheap, tone-deaf and insufferably Caucasian way of going about it.
Habba doesn’t likely believe that an anti-apartheid leader like Mandela would have backed a presidential candidate who has openly spread hate speech against entire ethnic groups, namely Haitian migrants. She doesn’t actually believe King, who famously fought for Black people’s right to vote, would back a candidate who, during his first presidency, exclusively targeted predominately Black and Latino voting districts with his election fraud lie. And she’s not the only one playing around in Black people’s faces this way.
When Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in June, Newsmax host Greg Kelly sat at his desk in front of a camera and, with a straight face, compared the verdict to the brutal lynching of Emmett Till. White conservatives across the country trot out their fictional version of MLK whenever they feel the urge to lecture Black people about how to behave, and when they’re being held accountable for their own behavior, they start comparing themselves to Parks.
Meanwhile, Republican legislators across America are trying to ban into oblivion any form of Black history that centers the very American racism King and Parks fought against. Again, King, Parks, Mandela — all of these people are only people we know because of their public fights against the systemic racism Trump and the rest of right-wing America claim doesn’t exist.
This is an insidious and manipulative form of racism, and if Trump is elected back into the White House, we can expect to see more of it for at least the next four years.
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