The Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 18, 2024. | Source: Anadolu / Getty
The most obnoxious thing about white conservatives is the way they pretend we’re calling them racist for no reason—and they do so often while demonstrating obvious and intentional racism.
On the first night of the Republican National Convention (RNC), Donald Trump and his Trumpire paraded around their “Black friends” for what seemed like the sole purpose of serving as the Black voices willing to say Trump and the GOP are not racist and are, instead, our only hope.
MORE: RNC Racism: Recapping All The Anti-Blackness At Republicans’ Convention In Milwaukee
Fast forward to the final night of the Convention for Lies and Klan-ish Things, and the RNC is playing footage from a pro-Palestinian protest on the campus of the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, during which a white frat bro went viral from making monkey noises at a Black woman.
While the footage played, the RNC commentator gleefully praised the display of blatant racism and said it should be celebrated for “giving us some hope there that not all college students have gone woke.”
God, I rue the day white people discovered the word “woke.” Ironically, though, white conservatives expose themselves through racist language they think they’re hiding behind. Similarly to the way they prove “DEI hire” is their new n-word by using the term against Black people in power who factually did not obtain their positions through DEI programs, they prove the thing they call “wokeness” is really just the opposite of bigotry by calling a white man’s racism, in and of itself, a show of non-wokeness.
For example, back in March, billionaire Trump-humper and Twitter-eXecutioner (see what I did there?) Elon Musk called the Oscars a “woke contest” because he thought too many non-white people were winning. When it was pointed out to him that white actors and directors dominated all the major awards—which they have almost every single year since the inception of the Academy—he immediately backpedaled and admitted that he was “wrong.” Suddenly, everything was right in his white world, because, in his mind, “woke” is the opposite of whiteness not dominating everything.
These are the same people who would have us believe that Black people only think Trump, Republicans and white America in general are racist because Democrats and the media are brainwashing us into believing it. But Black people have minds of our own, and, in truth, we have never taken our cues from media outlets or politicians. Every anti-racism movement in U.S. history has started in the Black community. Every narrative on racism in America has started with us. It’s Democrats and non-Black media that typically come tardy to the party after Black people put in the work to draw their attention.
We don’t think Trump is racist because CNN or MSNBC told us he’s racist. We know he’s racist because he told Black and brown congresswomen to “go back where they came from”, despite them all being born and/or raised in America. We know it because he once said “Laziness is a trait in Blacks.” We know it because he spearheaded the propaganda-reliant attack on critical race theory, issued an executive order banning diversity training in the workplace during his presidency, and is now promising to end all DEI programs across America if he’s elected again. He whined about the renaming of military forts named for Confederate generals. He called for the execution of the Central Park Five and he stuck to his guns even after they became The Exonerated Five. During his legal proceedings, he repeatedly called every Black prosecutor—and only the black prosecutors—racist without offering any explanation for what makes them racist other than the fact that they’re Black. He thinks his mugshot and felony convictions made him more popular with Black people because he associates the Black masses with criminality and every other racist stereotype that has been attached to us. The Department of Justice’s lawsuit against him over anti-Black housing discrimination in the ’70s. He generalized Mexican migrants as rapists and drug dealers, compared South American migrants to Hannibal Lecter, called migrants “animals” who are “not human” and wished the U.S. received more white immigrants from “nice” European countries.
We think Trump is racist because Trump is racist.
Similarly, we don’t think the GOP is racist because that’s what their Democratic rivals have been drilling into our heads. We know they’re racist because they’re systematically redistricting their states’ congressional maps in an intentional effort to dilute Black voting power. Republican state legislatures and boards of education across the country are actively whitewashing Black history to placate white fragility. They have blindly gone to war against critical race theory and the ubiquitous “woke” without even demonstrating the ability to define CRT or “wokeness.” They’re vehemently anti-diversity, equity and inclusion. They share the same ideologies as white nationalist organizations, including the Great Replacement Theory. They also rely on racist stereotypes to attract Black voters.
We know the GOP is racist because of all the demonstrable racism the party performed at the RNC.
Neither the media nor Democrats needed to paint the perception of MAGA World racism. All they had to do was point a camera at it.
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