It was in late June 2015. I was on vacation, visiting my son Andrew in New York City. The news had been filled for days with the horrific events in Charleston, South Carolina, where a racist teenager named Dylann Roof had walked into Emanuel AME Church and gunned down nine Black parishioners in cold blood.
We decided to drive out to Montauk for a few days to try and change the vacation narrative. The first night, we went to watch an indie film being screened in a local park. It was a perfect summer evening and a small crowd was spread about on blankets and folding chairs, waiting for the film to begin, chatting, staring at their phones. I was one of the latter, scrolling idly, when a tweet with a video of President Obama caught my attention. It was the moment when the president broke into “Amazing Grace” at the funeral for Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Obama began singing alone, then a few parishioners joined in, and then the sound swelled like a great wave cresting, as everyone in the congregation lifted their voices. As I watched, I felt tears flooding my cheeks. The president had somehow tapped into the unspeakable pain of that moment and transformed it into hope, into love, into catharsis. I will never forget it.
Just 10 days earlier, the man who would become Obama’s successor had ridden an elevator down to the basement of Trump Tower and announced his intention to run for president. His first words into the cameras were a lie: “Wow,” he said. “That is some group of people. Thousands!” Puzzled reporters looked around, noting the several dozen spectators, some of whom, it was later discovered, had been paid $50 to attend and wave signs. Trump then went off on one of his now-familiar verbal rambles, concluding by saying of Mexico: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. They’re not sending their best.”
Trump didn’t invent the stubbornly embedded strain of American racism that still plagues this country, emerging and receding through the centuries like a blood tide. But Trump was the first president to give permission to the white people who are decidedly not “America’s best” to voice the angry, suppressed, evil part out loud — and act on it. In a few short years, the specter of white supremacy has gone from anonymous, ignorant men burning crosses in the Southern woods to the mainstream of the Republican Party — and into the brains of who-knows-how-many disturbed young men with easy access to high-powered weapons.
The latest rallying cry is the “white replacement theory” — the belief that people of color are going to somehow pour across the border by the millions, register to vote (even though they wouldn’t be citizens), and take over the electorate, thereby making white people a minority. It’s a fiendishly clever plot, no? Laughable or not, it’s now the principal topic on Tucker Carlson’s racist fever-fest on Fox News. And mainstream Republicans have taken the cue, openly espousing the theory, even using it in their ads. The message isn’t subtle: Poor, dirty, non-English-speaking brown and Black people are going to “replace” you noble white people and take all your stuff. And the Democrats are behind it all!
The 18-year-old who murdered 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, last weekend wrote 180 pages of drivel citing the replacement theory as justification. It’s just the latest iteration of the American white supremacist horror show, which also includes the murders of worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the killings of Hispanics at a mall in El Paso, and the deadly “Jews will not replace us” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. All were committed by white men citing the replacement theory bullshit.
Trump began his campaign with a racist trope, and he continued to stoke racism at every turn for five years, including after the nazi march at Charlottesville, where he notably cited “good people on both sides.”
That whirlwind has hit the barn. We live in a country where baseless fear-mongering and racism spark mass murder, a country where it’s easier for a teenager to obtain weapons of war than a beer, a country gravely in need of healing, and yes, maybe even a hymn. We are an Amazing Disgrace.