So the FBI has become the private police force for the president. In spite of numerous pictures of Donald Trump and Jeffery Epstein together, the Epstein files will be investigated by MAGA loyalists not objective investigators.
Frustration is probably inevitable to any who are still awake, but, a major problem with focusing too much anger on Donald Trump is that he would not be getting away with these crimes if they weren’t “legal” in the sense of being loopholes for certain dominant groups since the founding of this nation.
MAGA white supremacist tropes should feel very familiar to those of us raised on the bleached white version of American history that began, not with the experiences of the Indigenous people who already lived here, but with a European who is said to have “discovered” America even though the continent was already occupied with millions of people.
The bleached version of American history is centered on the experiences of white men and so all other voices must be muted. The MAGA movement boasts of free speech but such free speech does not include the freedom of a Black teacher to tell a truthful version of racial oppression in this land. Such truth could make children raised in a white supremacist narrative uncomfortable and so that kind of truth is now censored by those calling themselves free speech advocates.
White supremacy does not necessarily mean that a white person hates a Person of Color. Whenever we celebrate Columbus Day, or tell our myths about “conquering the West,” we are reinforcing the structures of white supremacy. Every time white people say, “We the People,” but think of a room full of landed white male founders, they reinforce misogyny and racism whether they mean to or not.
On playgrounds, children sometimes say, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” The insight, I think, is to not get so focused on individual bullying that we we cannot discern the structures of power they are hiding behind.
It is good advice to look at the evils of racism and sexism, not just as the isolated traits of Donald Trump, but also as systems of unshared power woven into the fabric of this land. We have to deal with both individuals and systems, but when we get lost in calling people names we can also get lost in a political melodrama and lose our capacity to objectively discern the structural dynamics also in play.
I believe discernment is going to be very important in the years ahead. Feelings of animosity toward people who harm others is understandable. Perhaps it is even sometimes inevitable. But, when the evil we abhor is actually woven into the structures of the culture itself, we must do something much more difficult than calling individual people names. We must learn to step out of those very systems of oppression and begin to deconstruct them.
Obviously, oppression isn’t a game, but I think the playground saying has some wisdom for us. In our current political crisis we must learn to stop being triggered by the individual players long enough to identify and deconstruct the immoral “games” people of privilege have been playing in this nation since our founding.