Did we see the “whitelash” coming?
We certainly should have.
At the end of the Clinton era was the 2000 Republican National Convention and the official nomination of George W. Bush the party’s nominee. One of the highlights of that year’s convention was an inspiring speech by Gen. Colin Powell.
He implored his party — the party of Lincoln — to treat the new millennium as a true watershed moment for the GOP; to not merely pay lip service to Blacks and other PoC, but genuinely reach out to them for the sake of the party’s future. One of the most prominent and respected (by both parties) Black men in the United States told a room full of White people how they too could successfully extend a hand to their Black neighbors.
They didn’t do that. But still, we couldn’t have seen this.
But maybe we should have in 2009. The election of Barack Obama seemed to signal a new era of tolerance in the United States; so much so that the media created the hyperbolic term “post-racial America” to describe this new land of sunshine, rainbows, and everyone singing “We Are the World”.\
Newsweek told a different story. Less than three months after Obama’s inauguration, the magazine ran this report:
The nation’s first Black president hadn’t even held his job for half-a-year and White America responded by planting the poisonous seeds that would one grow equally poisonous fruit.
But the GOP knew better, right? They knew that embracing hateful fringe groups was against the core ethics they’d been promoting for decades, didn’t they? Wasn’t that the whole point of that whole “GOP autopsy” after Romney lost — to reach out to the very people (PoC, women, LGBTQ+, immigrants) who felt the party turned its back on them?
I mean, after all that hoopla, they couldn’t possibly respond by nominating a racist failed businessman who thinks climate change is false, thinks “conversion therapy” works on Gays, and openly brags about sexually assaulting women… could they?
Well… they did. And we all watched it happen like a slow-motion car wreck with none of us wearing our seatbelts.
And yet, not one of us can say we’re surprised. The GOP has finally delayed the inevitable and embraced the bile that simmered around them since Lincoln tried to convince his racist constituency that slaves were actual human beings. They found a candidate who will say out in the open what Romney would only say behind closed doors to his fellow blue bloods. They’ve found someone who is all the terrible things Black people imagine when someone White follows us around a store. Or in the street. Or in our homes. They’ve finally found the true Republican, and now we’re all stuck with him.
I hope you’re proud of yourselves, GOP.
Strike that: I hope you’re proud of yourselves, WHITE AMERICA.
