Op-Ed: MAGA Should STFU About Black People
Op-Ed: As A Black Man, I Really Just Want MAGA To STFU About Black People: Here’s Why…
As President Donald Trump continues his latest propaganda-reliant agenda of weaponizing military forces against Black communities under the guise of ending out-of-control crime, he and his loyal sycophants have repeatedly insisted that Black people, by and large, favor the deployment of National Guard troops in our cities because we’re so sick of being terrorized by criminals.
Trump has said repeatedly that unidentified Black women, including “a force of Black women” he saw on TV, are practically begging him to send troops to Chicago, as he has threatened to do persistently despite the city’s leadership and most of its citizens saying repeatedly that they are not needed or wanted there.
Then, this week, Jesse Watters, the white nationalist Fox News host who replaced former white nationalist Fox News host Tucker Carlson, claimed with no statistical evidence whatsoever that “Blacks are begging for the Guard in Chicago.” Watters appeared to be basing his assertion on his network cherry-picking the few Black Chicago residents it could find to claim they welcomed the National Guard, which means a so-called journalist is out here blatantly leaning on confirmation bias to sell a point. Meanwhile, what’s actually happening in Chicago is that community organizers are preparing for an invasion of guard troops in a way that suggests they feel less safe under the threat of their deployment. Even Watters appeared to acknowledge this, albeit in a mocking fashion.
Speaking of Fox News, the network recently published an article claiming “Trump’s DC crime crackdown overwhelmingly benefits Black people as homicides hit zero,” which is just a white conservative’s passive-aggressive way of resurrecting a tired “Black-on-Black crime” narrative, this time, by pretending Trump’s weaponization of National Guard troops in D.C., which only began a month ago, has succeeded in ending all violent crime, as if the district has never gone short stretches of time without a single murder before.
Speaking of D.C. — which, like Chicago, was already experiencing a steep and mostly consistent decline in violent crime long before Trump involved himself — last month, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller accused D.C. protesters of trying to speak for Black people, wrongly insisting that the protesters are all “elderly white hippies” while “most of the citizens who live in Washington, D.C., are Black.” In other words, Miller went out of his way to invoke Black people while speaking about “white hippies” who did not specifically mention Black people themselves — and accusing them of trying to speak for us. There might not be a greater example of white and fragile projection than that.
Here’s the thing: Why can’t these people just STFU about Black people?
White conservatives don’t care about what happens in Black neighborhoods until what they perceive to be going on in our communities becomes a convenient issue for them to score political points off of. It’s a false, self-serving concern for Black people’s betterment that instantly disappears once the subject at hand swings back to DEI, Black history, systemic racism, racial profiling, police brutality, reparations, how bad slavery was, whether the Confederacy should be celebrated, whether Juneteenth is a real holiday, or Black lives mattering.
They only care about Black people’s needs when they’re clamoring for the Black vote, and even then, they only care about our interests so long as they don’t directly conflict with their own interests, which is virtually always.
In fact, last year, while he was still campaigning, Trump was speaking at the Black Conservative Federation Gala in South Carolina, where the guy who spearheaded the attack on critical race theory said Black voters will align with him because he, too, has faced injustice at the hands of our legal system.
“I got indicted for nothing, for something that is nothing,” Trump said. “And a lot of people said that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against. It’s been pretty amazing but possibly, maybe, there’s something there.”
Here’s what I wrote about that previously:
Now, to be fair, this time Trump wasn’t citing a stereotype, he’s citing an actual thing Black people have been talking about, protesting against and suffering for generations—and it’s arguably more offensive than when he was citing stereotypes.
White people stereotyping non-white people is just garden-variety American racism that Black people are so used to that we barely wince at it anymore. But this right here is a particularly manipulative form of racism that should be likened to a slave master gaslighting slaves by pretending to share in their lack of freedom. Again, Trump is the orangey-white nationalist who made CRT-bashing popular with Republicans and white conservatives. He also issued an executive order banning diversity training in the workplace during his presidency, and even now, he’s promising to end all DEI programs across America if he’s elected again. So, out of one side of his neck, Trump is pretending to find common ground with Black people because we “have been hurt so badly and discriminated against,” and out of the other side, he’s promising to put an end to every effort to correct racial discrimination, which he has always denied or downplayed the existence of until now when it benefits his campaign.
Mind you, that conference came after Trump, Watters and other MAGA cultists were gleefully claiming that Trump’s mugshot from his RICO indictment in Georgia would attract Black support because Black people love things associated with criminality.
It’s like — we’re just somewhere minding our own business and racist white people on public platforms just start talking about us like we’re not in the room. Just leave us TF alone!
Last week, while continuing his campaign of justifying his use of National Guard troops in Black cities where crime is declining, Trump made a speech that appeared to heavily imply that Black men are predisposed to criminality, just as he once claimed Black and Latino migrants had “bad genes” that predisposed them to commit violent crimes.
“They’re hardcore. They’re not going to be good in 10, in 20 years, in two years. They’re going to be criminals — they were born to be criminals, frankly,” the 34-time felon who has been found liable for sexual assault proclaimed.
This is the perfect time to note that, earlier this year, when Trump was boasting about his due process-denying mass deportation execution, he declared that “the homegrowns are next,” and if you didn’t already know that by “homegrowns,” he was dog whistling about Black people, you simply haven’t been paying attention.
White conservatives treat Black people like disposable political pawns, and Black issues like they only exist to be manipulated to bolster white politics.
Whenever we bring up race in any context, they accuse us of “race-baiting,” but when they “play the race card,” it’s either to deny and dismiss systemic racism, or to feign solidarity in the most superficial, self-serving way possible.
And we’re tired.
SEE ALSO:
‘What Up, My Nazi’: Fox News Hosts Mock ‘The Blacks’ By Reclaiming The ‘Nazi’ Pejorative
Trump Booed At US Open, As The Least Popular President Continues To Receive The Same Hate He Spreads
Op-Ed: As A Black Man, I Really Just Want MAGA To STFU About Black People: Here’s Why… was originally published on newsone.com
