I’m too tired to be outraged at Donald Trump’s racist remarks.
My lack of outrage isn’t an absence of emotion. It’s fatigue from hearing yet another reminder that the people running this country feel my family and myself are lesser. It hurts. It doesn’t hurt because I ever admired or trusted this so-called leader. It hurts because it’s the latest of a constant psychological attack by America’s white supremacy, which has only gotten more brazen and public over the past year.
Every headline-creating cause for outrage is like death by a thousand cuts. The words of racist and xenophobic “leaders” are (often successful) attempts to chip away at my humanity by denying that it exists in the first place. I remain human, but every new write-up is more ammo for other, less powerful racists to continue the work of denying basic dignity and rights to people like me.
It isn’t just the personal pain that makes the xenophobia so deplorable. It’s also the lack of self-awareness and lies pushed by Republicans. They simultaneously act like America is the greatest country in the world while complaining about how we need to be “great again.”
The old saying goes that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Trump thinks majority black and brown countries are shitholes, but has he ever looked at the United States?
As my friend and author William Anderson so aptly pointed out, American really shouldn’t be judging other countries.
We’re a country run by corrupt liars who refuse to help the average American, a country that punishes poor people and scapegoats immigrants. We’re a country that pays Sarah Huckabee Sanders $179,000 per year to lie and defend a racist rapist in the Oval Office. We’re a country where companies lie about investing in employees while laying off workers to line executive pockets. We’re a country run by male, white millionaires who defy science to take away access to birth control and a woman’s right to her own body. We’re a country where politicians game the system by suppressing votes instead of running elections fairly, so they can give their friends and themselves tax breaks.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
So, I ask again: Which place is the real shithole?