President of the Racists

After the president’s ugly tweets over the weekend, I felt a new kind of heartsick; an actual anxious nausea as I contemplated the consequences of those words, the meaning behind a claim that American women of color serving in the Congress should “go back” to some other place.  It is ignorant and venal; ugly and mean.  But most of all, it is racist, the sort of ugly racism that none of us can casually ignore.

For starters, to reject another point of view as American is both ignorant and a threat to liberty.  We do not live in a perfect nation and responsible citizens must feel free to criticize their government in an effort to make things better for themselves, for their families and the people they love, for the benefit of all of us; for our nation.  Without criticism, intentional and serious criticism, we won’t get better.  When abolitionists opposed slavery, they were being critical of their country.  When the women of Seneca Falls issued a Declaration of Sentiments critical of the men in America, they were dissenting from the status quo and asking for their rights.  

I could go on and on.  Criticism is built into the American fabric and we must value it if we are to sustain our liberty.  Dissent and criticism has a long and proud history in this nation and because of it, we are a better people.  A better nation.  I am an adherent of the views of James Baldwin.  When he says, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually” he is expressing an idea that must be the cornerstone of responsible patriotism.  

To believe that criticism makes a person less of a patriot is to be ignorant and stupid.  Had Donald Trump left it at that, it would have been just another in a long line of dumb things he's said.  But he doubled down with a racist trope that cast four members of Congress, not coincidentally four outspoken women of color, as people who must be cast out because they disagree with him; because they are not white like him.  That is racism.  Trump is racist.  There is no other way to understand what he said.