Trump’s candidacy should force white Americans to ask tough questions of themselves: Christopher Driscoll

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a rally Sunday, Feb. 28, 2016, in Madison, Ala. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

By Christopher Driscoll

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s recent non-position on former Grand Dragon of the KKK David Duke and the Klan in general and his “earpiece” excuse are, by most accounts, lies; but they have also proved effective as Trump secured Super Tuesday victories in seven of eleven state presidential primaries.

Trump’s antics, matched with his popularity, tell a sobering, complicated truth. White Americans are deathly afraid of who we will be when our president is White again.

In terms of both policy decisions, and symbolically, for many White Americans, a Black president has led the country into a wilderness experience in which we must search for a new identity that does not rely on fear of difference.

One could call this radical new possibility the death of “whiteness”. By death, I mean the possible end of race’s usefulness as a means of procuring real or perceived distance from life’s uncertainty.

The concept of “whiteness” is more than skin color, it is the comfortable belief that White Americans are in charge.

Our decision to mourn the death of “whiteness” and move past it or remain in denial of it may determine the next U.S. president.

Trump represents our collective White American ego.

His initial refusal to disavow Duke or the Klan is, as a mirror image, a reflection of the dilemma White Americans now find ourselves in: What do we do with “whiteness”? Will we let it die? Can we learn to live without it?

“Whiteness”, built over a long history filled with segregation, lynchings, enslavement, criminalization, and myths of white innocence, has never been more terminal than it is today, as we prepare for the post-Obama America.

We are in a moment of real possibility, where we might begin to heal, but doing so will require taking “whiteness” seriously.

White Americans do not have to remain reliant on a dying idea. British scholar Paul Gilroy said as much in an October 2015 interview with philosopher George Yancey. Gilroy said that “we have to see how whiteness is assembled and brought to actual and virtual life.”

Trump’s chess game of historical amnesia, a game many politicians tend to play, ensures that his non-position keeps him strategically suspended above history, able to manipulate our fears and our own willful denial of that history.

In past moments of new racial possibilities, White Americans have chosen fear above growth, unable to learn to live alongside of, not above, everyone else.

Southern Jim & Jane Crow laws were responses to increased Black leadership during the reconstruction period. This is not only Trump’s history. This is our history.

The rush to criticize Trump as a racist liar is a distancing mechanism for White Americans making us as guilty of a white lie — in the traditional sense of the phrase — as he is.

We tend to think of white lies as harmless, as trivial. Omissions, half-truths, slippery slopes, and other misdirection tactics are many politicians’ primary means of communication.

But, another kind of “white” lie is anything but harmless: the denial of our shared American history of treating some lives as more valuable than other lives.

“I have no problem disavowing groups, but I’d at least like to know who they are,” Trump told The Today Show on February 29. “It would be very unfair to disavow a group, Matt, if the group shouldn’t be disavowed.”

Trump is concealing part of our history, but in doing so, he is revealing White America’s desire to disavow that history too. In these terms, Trump looks a lot like us

It is also White America’s desire to distance ourselves from “whiteness” that causes our outrage at Trump to grow. It makes sense to have fears connected to the loss of White identity.

But how we respond to those fears defines who we will become. Trump plays on these fears, and it is why many of us want to distance ourselves from his position on Duke, or the Klan, or Muslims, or Mexicans. But “whiteness” relies on distance, on not recognizing ourselves in the behavior of others.

Trump, precisely because of his ability to manipulate the public, is a living laboratory where we can come to study our involvement in creating, sustaining, and, even, rejecting our collective “white” lies — a White identity based on denial and the de-valuing of others. He also tells us a tragic truth: “whiteness” may be dead or dying, but our inability to see ourselves in Trump will ensure it lives another day.

Christopher Driscoll is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. He is the author of the book, White Lies: Race and Uncertainty in the Twilight of American Religion (Routledge, 2015).

Originally published at www.pennlive.com.