NEWS ANALYSIS
WASHINGTON—With yet another explosive book exposing more ugly details of the administration of Donald J. Trump, the twice-impeached, one-term former president is still the undisputed leader of the Republican Party, and he’s still pushing around, both Republicans and Democrats like a bully on a schoolyard.
A little street talk may help describe this next new age—the “American Malaise” I call it. In the modern world of international affairs, the U.S. leadership seems dazed, they’ve taken a switchblade knife into the world arena, only to discover, they’re in a hatchet fight.
Furthermore, either of two so-called “moderate” Democratic Senators—Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Krysten Sinema (D-Ariz.)—can singlehandedly torpedo their party’s ambitious rescue agenda, while the take-no-prisoners Senate Republicans, swing their weight around like they’re in charge. Now they are threatening to refuse to support an increase in the national debt limit, for the first time forcing the nation into default, while House Republicans are making plans to win back the majority in the 2022 elections.
You see, the hurricanes, the massive wildfires, the biblical floods, on top of a humiliating military defeat, even as the world wrestles with an invisible plague, a global pandemic, have left the American psyche wounded, stumbling.
Enter Mr. Trump, the angry White male hero, and his posse who are now prepared to take the law into their own hands, including unlawful or even violent means to protect and maintain absolute White supremacy. They are supporting just another lost cause.
Mr. Trump peeled away the scab of White hate which has resided among White Americans for centuries—warmongering and slaughter that defines the White American mindset, which spawned the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war and revealed a lawless tribe whose goal is to perpetuate apartheid rule, White race superiority above all.
Then some of them say: “This is not who we Americans are.” But in truth, the atrocities today are just like before, only now they are being filmed and exposed, revealing among the young, the old, the males, the females, this is exactly who White Americans are.
At 50 years old this year, the Congressional Black Caucus—once an important voice in government affairs—is virtually powerless against this foe, having been reduced to a cheering section for President Joe Biden’s every move, even though the social contract which governs Black participation in White American affairs with Democrats like Mr. Biden has been permanently altered from the social contract to which the Civil Rights movement’s leadership thought they had agreed seven decades ago.
That was at the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and Communist giants Russia and China, and there was hysteria in Washington and on Wall Street about the Soviet Union and the Soviets backing African and Caribbean liberation movements, but the Soviet Union disappeared decades ago. But the Black leadership hung on to that compromise, not recognizing that even in U.S. law, if the conditions that led to a contract have disappeared or disintegrated, the contract should be renegotiated.
“Part of our problem, as I’ve said a million times, is that we accepted a compromise in the 1950s, whereby we would receive these anti-Jim Crow concessions in return for dialing back our international agenda. It seemed to work for a while,” Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston told The Final Call.
For example, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) who gave a raised fist salute to insurrectionists gathered on the U.S. Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 before their attack does not fit the profile of your typical bigot.
Mr. Hawley is young—just 41 years old—and he hails from a Midwest state. He graduated from prestigious Stanford University and Yale Law School, and yet, like the party’s threat to let the government default on its debts, he stood alone and threatened Senate Democrats: “I will not consent to the nomination of any nominee for the Department of Defense or for the Department of State until Secretary Austin and Secretary Blinken and Jake Sullivan resign,” Mr. Hawley vowed on the floor of the Senate recently, aiming at Mr. Biden’s proposed National Security Adviser’s confirmation.
Outside of government circles, the White extremists—the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, QAnon—want to foment a race war, a slaughter of Black people as a trigger for a revolution that would usher in their desired White apartheid state.
But it’s not just the radicals, conservatives of all stripes and persuasions, including Log Cabin (homosexuals) Republicans support Mr. Trump’s White tribalist agenda. Recently, the Log Cabin group honored former First Lady Melania Trump at an affair held at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida resort.
Black integration leaders entered into the social contract 70 years ago. There’s been scant progress since then. The reality of two “separate” Americas was reaffirmed officially in a government report after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the resultant uprisings in hundreds of cities in 1968. According to the report of the Kerner Commission, the United States was socially and economically divided. The commission warned: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
But the world balance of power shifted. “The Soviet Union disappeared decades ago,” said Dr. Horne. “But we’re still hanging on to that compromise, not recognizing that even in U.S. law, if the conditions that led to a contract have disappeared or disintegrated, the contract (should be) renegotiated.”
Even the Congressional Black Caucus, which has grown in the last 50 years from 13 members to 56 members—including two Senators, well above the proportion of Blacks in the U.S. population—has proven to be virtually powerless against the White conservatives. Blacks in the political and even corporate arenas want “equity” with White people in terms of family wealth and opportunities, so they are obliged to accept Whites at the word when they make promises of fairness, despite painfully little, or no progress at all in improving race relations.
“I’ve just kind of thrown my hands up in the air,” Dr. Ray Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University and a board member of the National Committee of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) said in an interview. “My last effort to deal with Congress has been H.R.-40, and I thought we were really winning something back in April, June when this thing passed out of the committee. But as usual when anything happens, when White America or a Democratic administration gets messed up, and Biden administration right now is messed up with this evacuation of Afghanistan as well as this Covid resurgence and so forth, Black issues, they’re the first to go.
“Impotent. We’re just about impotent,” Dr. Winbush said about the failure of Black leaders to enforce the social contract they negotiated with White America.
This betrayal and breakdown in support for issues vital to Black folks attaining Freedom Justice and Equality is no surprise to the Nation of Islam leadership. “What we are experiencing now is the chaotic disorder of the breaking down of a world that will give birth to the order of the new world,” the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan states in the book “Closing the Gap,” written by Brother Jabril Muhammad. “So, this chaos is absolutely and vitally necessary to create motion towards order.”
But most Black leadership clings to the old, dysfunctional grand bargain on civil rights. “Black people feel that our future, our direction, our agenda must include White people,” said Dr. Winbush. “We’re the only people on earth… Palestinians don’t feel that their future has to include Israelis. Israelis don’t feel that their future is tied to Palestinians. They set their agenda and then they execute it. Black people set an agenda and it’s almost like we go out and say, ‘Okay, we’ve got to get some white people involved with this.’
“And it’s a lose-lose situation that history is part of. People always say Lincoln freed the slaves and all that. Look, the Underground Railroad was started by a Black person, the revolts that occurred during that period, the escapes, all of that. We can set our own agenda, but we’re afraid to.
“Somehow we just feel White people have to be in the mix. And it’s a fundamental mistake. It’s a fundamental flaw. That’s what’s going on right now with the reparations struggle. It is going on in how we still see ourselves as a weak and dependent people. And it’s frustrating,” said Dr. Winbush.
The White response when unspeakable crimes occur, when police get away with murdering Black people, again and again, they say: “This is not who we are.”
But the evidence is beyond being simply convincing if Black people would but pay attention. There’s no doubt about it, there are Two Americas, which make up the True America, “…one Black, one White. Separate and unequal.”
Once again, like in 1861 in the name of Whiteness, this country is on the verge of disintegration. “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls,” 17th Century poet John Donne wrote of the British funeral tradition. Paraphrasing today, it’s easy to see: United States of America, “It tolls for thee.”
