Jamelle Bouie: "Us" Versus "Them"

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Last edited Wed Sep 27, 2017, 08:04 AM - Edit history (1)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/09/trump_s_obsession_with_the_nfl_protests.html


Sept. 25 2017 9:11 PM
“Us” Versus “Them”
Trump’s obsession with the NFL protests above all else shows just whose president he is.
By Jamelle Bouie

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These events have at least one obvious takeaway: They underscore the vital role of racist grievance in President Trump’s message and rhetoric. His attacks on black athletes are of a piece with the “birtherism” that jump-started his political career. His belief that the protesting players are ungrateful—that they were given their success (“privilege”) and have no place to complain—recalls his demand for Barack Obama’s college transcripts and his view that the president was an unqualified product of affirmative action. As Jelani Cobb argued for the New Yorker, this language is euphemism for an old charge against prosperous blacks who dared speak against unfair treatment: uppity.

But embedded in Trump’s rhetoric is an even older idea, one that goes beyond questions of social standing to the fundamentals of belonging and citizenship. Look again at the way Trump talked about the protests. He introduces the subject by defining an “us.”

Luther and I and everyone in this arena tonight are unified by the same great American values. We’re proud of our country. We respect our flag.

He then defines a them, the “somebody” who “disrespects our flag.” He continues on these lines. “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage, that’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for.”

He says this before an almost entirely white audience, in a state known for its rigid racial polarization, about a group of black players whose strongest support is found within black communities. In that context, Trump’s repeated use of “our”—our flag, our heritage, our country—takes on a racial tint. It ceases to be the inclusive “our” of most presidential rhetoric and begins to sound like an exclusive one, where the flag, and the nation’s heritage, belongs to white Americans alone. He attempts to turn a protest against police violence into a protest against this version of America itself. If you consider it alongside his response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia—when he defended monuments to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson by analogizing them to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—or next to his larger policy agenda of exclusion and harassment toward Hispanic immigrants and Muslim Americans, then “our flag” takes on an unmistakable tone.

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At this moment, Puerto Rico is in the midst of catastrophe. The latest hurricane to plow through the Atlantic Ocean, Maria, has left the island and its 3.4 million residents in desperate straits. Clean water is increasingly scarce, the power grid is nearly completely devastated, and the storm destroyed most connections, even phone and internet, to the outside world. Absent major intervention, many people will die. And yet Trump is silent, more concerned with blasting the NFL than marshaling Congress to assist American citizens caught in one of the worst disasters since Katrina.

Perhaps this is just an oversight. But then look at who is suffering in Puerto Rico. Spanish speakers. Brown-skinned people. The kinds of Americans who have been on the receiving end of the president’s most harsh, disdainful rhetoric. If Trump’s disdain for Colin Kaepernick (and Barack Obama, for that matter) are informed by his racist vision of citizenship, then why should his neglect of Puerto Rico be any different?