Author’s Note: With the single exception of perhaps James Baldwin, no 20th or 21st century short story writer, essayist, playwright, or novelist has better and more viscerally described black America’s long and tortured sojourn in this nation-state than did Toni Morrison.
But this is not another eulogy for Sistah Toni. This is simply a reminder of her greatness, of her towering intellect, of her prodigious talent in wielding the written word, and of her unmatched, sheer force of will to make the language bend but not break.
It is also a reminder of how much we have lost.
In November of 2016, just two weeks after Donald Trump won the presidency, Sistah Toni penned one of her last published essays, analyzing how and why Trump was “elected.” That piece may be found in the link below. The following is a heretofore unpublished analysis of Toni Morrison’s take on both Donald Trump and all who support him.
In less than 650 words, Nobel Laureate, author Toni Morrison provides the clearest and most incisive analysis as to precisely why the great majority of self-described white Americans support Donald Trump. Her piece appears in The New Yorker and is entitled ”Mourning For Whiteness.”
As any great writer does, Morrison begins by stating the obvious but in a novel way:
“Unlike any nation in Europe,” she writes, “the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force.
Here, for many people, “the definition of ‘Americanness’ is color.” Morrison’s European comparison is inspired, especially in light of Trump’s steady drumbeat against “illegal” immigrants. White Americans understand intuitively, of course, that Trump is not talking about their Irish, Italian, Scandinavian, or Hungarian cousins, but rather about all “people of color,” whose ever-growing numbers threaten soon to not just loosen, but upset and overturn entirely their long-held vice-tight grip on power and privilege.
As any number of others have written, the very idea, let alone the actual reality, of Barack Hussein Obama’s “black” presidency scared the hell out of millions upon millions of people who, as Baldwin liked to put it, “think that they are white.”
And so, for them, Trump represents white supremacy’s “last stand,” a last-ditch, last desperate gasp and grasp, to at least hold onto (if they are no longer allowed to grow) all of their ill-gotten, unearned gains accrued over the last 500 years through rape, robbery, murder, genocide, colonialism, slavery, imperialism, capitalism, neo-colonialism, and as of late, ”neo-liberalism,” “austerity” and “structural adjustment programs.”
Or…as Rob Reiner put it, Trump supporters are “fighting the last battle of the Civil War.”
Sistah Toni refuses to accept Trump’s electoral college-only victory as an expression of “white economic anxiety” or even of “white anger.” No. Trump’s domination of the white imaginary is the absolute purest exemplar of raw, unadulterated white terror.
White people, as a group, are terrified of losing their preferred group status and preferential treatment, she says.
But Sistah Toni does not go far enough.
It is not only, or even principally, the loss of preferential treatment that has white folks circling the wagons — again... this time around Trump. Their fear, their terror, of the foreseeable non-white majority is deeply rooted in their gut-wrenching fear that once “people of color” have the numbers to force their will upon the body politic, they — blacks especially, but all people “of color” — will treat this newly minted white minority in the same horrific ways that they have always treated each and every group who is not “white.”
It’s called…Retribution. Vengeance. Payback.
With the single exception of their Native American victims, whom they at first feared and then — over time — came thisclose to totally exterminating, white people have always most feared black retribution, and, alternately, on a conscious or visceral, unspoken, even subconscious level.
Again, Sistah Toni Morrison is part psychologist and part surgeon. She wields her pen like a scalpel, deftly slicing through the faux “economic” angst and anger rationalizations of both highly educated and Trump’s “poorly educated” white folks. Trump and his supporters are, at bottom, cowards, she declares:
[White people] have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice.
Sistah Toni offers as Exhibits A through Z, recent white-hate “news” events. She explains why these stories do not particularly bother most white people:
Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.
There is more…much more in the far too soon gone Sistah Toni Morrison’s diagnosis. Though she offers no specific prescription for the virulent disease that white supremacy has manifested and metastasized since at least 1492, the implication is that we all must simply wait and watch.
Sistah Toni’s final message is that unless white people first destroy themselves, us and/or the planet (things for which they have shown a strong proclivity), time and demographics will will out soon enough.
Written by Herbert Dyer, Jr. For more essays by Herb, go to: medium.com/...