"Why does everything on this show have to be always be about race?" the white middle-aged male Donald Trump apologist complained to CNN's Don Lemon on his evening show early this week.
Lemon, a black man from Louisiana, along with the two other guests on the panel - Van Jones, a prominent black political activist, Patti Solis Doyle, a Latina who led campaigns for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and Javier Palomarez, the president of the American Hispanic Chamber of Commerce - could only smirk and shake their heads at the audacity of such a question.
Whites have made everything about race in America for blacks and Hispanics since long before the Declaration of Independence. Now, with the shoe clearly on the other foot, the frustrated white guy wanted nothing to do with a conversation that connected race with Trump's decision to drop the limited legal protection Obama had introduced for the children of illegal immigrants living in the United States.
"If it was Swedish models facing deportation, we wouldn't be having this conversation," Jones quipped.
Lemon, ever the gracious host, addressed the question head on, agreeing with his anxious white panelist that there are other contributing factors around trying to stem illegal immigration into the U.S. but then asked how race has to be part of the discussion when Trump makes this decision 10 days after pardoning an Arizona sheriff convicted for the American equivalent of contempt of court for refusing to stop specifically targeting Hispanics in his district when ordered to do so by a judge.
Whites, not just in America but also here in Canada, remain largely unable to speak about race.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in a devastating essay in The Atlantic magazine, many white pundits (myself included) put far too much stock in the narrative that it was the white working class, a bunch of uneducated redneck hillbillies, that got Trump elected.
Coates points out that whites across the country, regardless of income or education, cast more votes for Trump than Clinton last November. If only whites had voted, Trump would have won in a landslide.
Coates wants the white liberal elite in academia and the media to get off their high horse about Trump and stop either throwing the white working class under the bus as somehow different from them or stop defending them as the victims in a rapidly evolving global economy. Blacks have been hit just as hard by the collapse of good paying manufacturing jobs as white folk, he argues, and using the economy as an excuse for white people to back overtly racist politicians is an excuse to dates back before the American Civil War.
In his final analysis, Coates paints Trump as American's first white president. What he means is that no president before Obama had to define himself either by gender or race because the American presidency was the exclusive domain of white men. Trump, on the other hand, has made it his mission to roll back every decision Obama made, to whitewash eight years of a black presidency.
This is how white America defines itself, a point that Coates and other black intellectuals have been stressing since the 19th century.
In his recent book Tears We Cannot Stop, Michael Eric Dyson argues that whiteness as a identity doesn't exist because it only is what it is not - to be white is not to be black or brown.
Hence Trump is literally the anti-Obama, an old, rich white supremacist with no political experience able to use his privilege to not only walk scot free away from words and actions that would have put any American man of colour in jail but to claim the highest office in the land.
This should be an uncomfortable point for white Canadians, as we also define themselves primarily by what they are not, as in not American but also non-indigenous. It should also be a starting point for a long overdue analysis of our own systemic racism.
Late last month, American teacher Laurie Calvert wrote a fascinating blog with the startling title "I was a racist teacher and I didn't even know it." In it, she bravely admits that her efforts at political correctness gave her a false sense of knowledge - that she actually understood what it means to be a visible minority - and a false sense of superiority - that she was better than the other white people who didn't share her commitment to racial equality.
"I see with new eyes the huge advantage I've been given by being born white, how it has opened doors for me, but I harbor some irrational fears that if people of color win, I will somehow lose," she writes.
"One strategy that has helped is noticing when I feel like this, when a racial issue makes me feel angry or defensive. That is often a sign that I am protecting my own white power at the expense of someone else and I need to reflect and pray."
In other words, being anti-racist is not tripping a mental switch after a single moment of enlightenment. Instead, it is a continuing commitment to reflection and engagement, however uncomfortable that responsibility may be.
Not every issue is exclusively about race but white folks, in the United States but also in Canada and right here in Prince George, must learn to see past our privilege and entitlement, so we can both talk - and more importantly listen - to others with honesty and humility about race.
-- Editor-in-Chief Neil Godbout
