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Nothing Will Really Change Until America Reckons With Race
By Kali Holloway
Trump is the symptom; racism is the sickness.
I know enough about this country to know that Donald Trump is not a fluke. I know that Trump is not really un-American, not if we’re talking about what America actually is as opposed to what it pretends to be. Forget about emails and Russian hacking and James Comey and the beer test, forget uselessly relitigating the election ad infinitum. Almost 63 million people voted for Donald Trump, a man who never even tried all that hard to pretend he was moral or cared about politics or held democracy in anything other than contempt. Those ballots were reimagined as tickets to a virtual time machine, and mostly cast by people desperate to quell the insecurities and self-doubts roused by having the innate supremacy of whiteness questioned. Call your senators, march a thousand miles, filibuster like it’s going out of style; by all means resist every regressive policy this regime proposes. But please never be dishonest enough to believe there will not be more Trumps — maybe many, possibly worse — until this country properly reckons with racism and white supremacy.
This president isn’t an original; he’s just the most recent proof of America doing the same thing over and over again and pretending not to want the same…
