Trump’s ‘stand down and stand by’ comment reveals the entrenchment of white supremacy in American public discourse
President Donald Trump participates in the first presidential debate against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden at the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University on Sept. 29, 2020 in Cleveland. Source: Win McNamee/Getty Images.
When asked directly in the first presidential debate, President Trump refused to condemn the violence of white supremacist paramilitary organizations in the United States. Instead, he brought up violence coming from the “left wing.” His refusal to condemn white supremacy on a global stage falls in-line with his past remarks in support of these organizations. Headlines from news organizations focused predominantly on Trump individually and his inability to condemn white supremacy. But his remarks last Tuesday should come as no surprise to American voters. White supremacy is not new to Trump or the last four years of his Presidency. However, Trump’s initial refusal to condemn white supremacy outright is indicative of broader societal problems in the United States, specifically the fraying moral fabric underpinning public life.
The reality of our situation is that the United States has reached an impasse. The President of this country can’t denounce white supremacy when asked, because his political future could be on the line. Trump refusing to condemn white supremacy was not an individual racist remark, but a serious consideration for his goal of reelection in November. During the 2016 election, identity became a salient concern for voting and partisanship. The Trump campaign took advantage of racism and xenophobia to encourage support for his election. While white supremacy has always existed in this country, Trump made a blatant appeal to that base. Now, going into his reelection, he can’t afford to lose that support. No matter how noxious it is, this dirty laundry is now a publicly held American idea.
White supremacy is not a new issue in this country. For centuries, the United States imposed a racialized hierarchy that supported white people over all other races. But racism in this country doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is in all parts of our government and political system. Whether through past legacies of poll taxing, red lining or removing indigenous people from land, policy decisions in this country have often served to uphold white supremacy. White supremacy is so built into our political system that these policies are passed at nearly all levels of government. In 2016, the North Carolina General Assembly was found guilty of racial gerrymandering. Just last year UNC gave $2.5 million to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a white supremacist organization to obtain the rights to the Silent Sam statue that was torn down by anti-racist activists in 2018. When white supremacy is built into every level of government, and our education systems, there is a serious problem. It’s an even bigger problem when the conversation about white supremacy is treated as a political issue, and not what it is-- a human rights issue. Leveraging white supremacy as some kind of political strategy and framing it as a two-sided issue is vehemently incorrect and immoral. Yet here we are.
That our President is not firmly standing against white supremacy should be a watershed moment for this country. The fact that there are enough people who buy into white supremacy and enough people willing to ignore it reveals that there is something fundamentally wrong with the people and political system of this country. Yet amid the profound confusion of the Trump presidency, it passed the news cycle as just another aberration. Seeing our political system as a perpetuation of racist policies and ideologies is not new, but the debate last Tuesday was just another stark reminder that there is a lot of work left to be done in this country.