He begins his New York Times column, titled (and not by Blow) A Rebel, a Warrior and a Race Fiend, like this:
Donald Trump is operating the White House as a terror cell of racial grievance in America’s broader culture wars.
He has made his allegiances clear: He’s on the side of white supremacists, white nationalists, ethno-racists, Islamophobes and anti-Semites. He is simpatico with that cesspool.
And nothing gets his goat quite like racial minorities who stand up for themselves or stand up to him.
And he has not even really started.
(side note — Blow himself does not use the expression “race fiend” in the piece itself — that it is part of the title may represent an editorial judgment by folks at The Times._
Yes, the occasion of this is Trump’s tweet about Steph Curry and the SF Warriors and his remarks last Friday in Alabama, and the subsequent brouhaha.
I will not recapitulate that portion of the column. At least not most of it.
But it is worthwhile to do what Blow did in quoting Colin Kaepernick’s explanation of his flag protest:
At the time he explained his rationale to NFL Media, saying: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” He continued, “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
And in the paragraph that follows immediately, Blow tells us about the author of the anthem that
the anthem was authored by a white supremacist, Francis Scott Key, who was a proponent of African colonization — exporting free blacks back to Africa — and an opponent of the anti-slavery movement.
After quoting the horrible third verse of the anthem, which most Americans have neither heard nor read, Blow reminds (or informs) us about that verse
This is thought by some to be an excoriation of the Colonial Marines, a mostly black unit composed primarily of runaway slaves who fought for the British during the War of 1812, on the promise of attaining their freedom. The unit humiliated Key’s own unit in battle.
Blow then quotes frequent MS-NBC contributor Jason Johnson of The Root and Morgan State:
“With a few exceptions,” Key “was about as pro-slavery, anti-black and anti-abolitionist as you could get at the time.”
There is more, much more.
Yes, Blow has been on a rampage about Trump. Some wonder if he has already made all the worthwhile points, or if people might be turning him off and tuning him out. To that I would respond that the depredations to our polity by the current occupant of the Oval Office continue unabated, that his clear white supremacist and racist attitude continue to give license to those who should stay under the rocks to which at least for a while we had contained them.
I cannot quote what remains in its entirety — I would be well outside fair use.
But you will get a sense when you start with this paragraph:
The exploitation of black bodies and the spilling of black blood are an indelible part of the American story, and how we deal with that says everything about where we are as a nation and who we are.
And I will offer parts of what is left in the column:
Blow also tells us this is about far more than football:
This is also about the response to minority advances and the coming minority-to-majority demographic conversion.
This is about the honest appraisal of what America was, is, and should be.
Trump is not a proper leader for any moment or any conversation, let alone this moment and this conversation.
Of Trump himself he says
His venality and vulgarity seeks only to exploit white racial anxiety and hostility, in the most vulgar of terms, to maximum political gain.
And his final sentence is absolutely spot on:
Trumpism is becoming ever more synonymous with racism.
Except ever it was — from the discrimination in Federal housing programs, to the Central Park Five even after they were cleared, to birtherism, to Mexican immigrants as rapists, to the attack on Judge Curiel, to calling the Alt-Right at Charlottesville “good people” and blaming both sides, and including the hiring of the likes of Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon and most of all Jeff Sessions.
If the journalistic world is finally reaching the point of taking responsibility for Trump’s nomination and then election, which it should given its distorted coverage in 2015 and 2016 which gave Trump billions in free air time and which almost totally ignored the real issues affecting the American people, then this column would be evidence of how strongly Charles M. Blow deserves the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
Go read the entire column.
Save it.
Pass it on.