Trump. Photo: Gage Skidmore–Flickr
The current president of the United States is the most openly racist leader of the country in the last one hundred years. He may even be the most openly racist president since the country was founded.
The founding fathers took racism for granted with Slavery being legal and had no particular need to denigrate Blacks or Indigenous Americans except to justify landgrabbing and the continuation of forced labor. The clergy often spoke of enslaved Africans being faithful to their masters but never advocated violence against those who were obedient and accepted their place in society.
President Lincoln wasn’t in love with enslaved Africans but had no need to continuously attack them verbally. President Andrew Jackson had his own very clear ideas about whose country this was but again was not constantly talking about non-white people. He just wanted them to be move far away from White communities by any means necessary.
President Eisenhower was furious with the Warren court for approving school desegregation but he was sophisticated enough to know that with the Cold War, America had to wear a face that was acceptable to the newly Emerging World and the Afro-Asian block in the United Nations so he kept his criticism of the decision private.
Today the leader of the so-called free world has no need to respect or even pay attention to world opinion or even the citizens of his own country. Donald Trump’s rhetoric has caused violence against non-white people since the beginning of his campaign for office and the situation is becoming worse day by day.
He is even arguing with athletes over their exercise of free speech in public because of their ethnicity and their concerns about what is happening in the land of their birth.
There must be a way to create a country better than Trump’s America.
