We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (3 page)

His candidacy wreaked havoc on the Republican primaries. The party had become calcified with rules, protocols, etiquette. Trump descended from the air and the airwaves to talk shit. He entertained. He created the vibe that he was a billionaire you could share a hot dog and a can of Coors with, even though deep down you knew he never would. You went to Trump; he never came to you. It created a desire, a longing. And so even as Trump kept an army of fact-checkers well employed—fully 77 percent of the Trump statements that PolitiFact had investigated were rated “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire!”—the last thing his supporters cared about was the facts. They had feelings, and no one else understood them like Trump did.

One supporter told Ryan Lizza of the
New Yorker
, “The birth certificate stuff, I loved. I watched all the YouTube videos on it, and what he was saying made sense.” She added, “I’m dead set [on voting for him] unless I find out something down the line. But I’m not going to believe what the media tells me. I have to hear it from him. The media does not persuade me one bit.”
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For Trump diehards in a time of danger and disjunction, the media’s job was not to challenge, but to affirm. So when demonstrators poured into the streets to protest police killings of Blacks, the media was supposed to confirm for them that those chaos makers were actually supporting the killing of cops, that somehow the Movement for Black Lives was a Black version of the Ku Klux Klan. And some pundits—Hannity, the same O’Reilly who confronted Trump—dutifully filled this role.
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In their telling, “Black lives matter” was not a call to end state violence against Blacks—and in that way, to end state violence against all—it was evidence of hatred against whites, a premonition of racial apocalypse.

White liberal media recoiled. To them, Trump supporters were unseemly, irrational, embarrassing. They looked for an explanation and, by the end of 2015, found it in Angus Deaton and Anne Case’s scholarship on the rising rates of white suicide, drug overdose, and premature death. Deaton and Case had helped white liberal media rediscover the steeply declining white middle and working class.

It was not a little ironic that the Movement for Black Lives had opened up a fresh discussion about white mortality. When the conversation in this country is about race, all too often it leads back to whiteness. But as Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, has written, “When Black people get free, everyone gets free.”
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Inequality impacts us unequally. The truth is that we cannot address it without starting from the bottom. But fear is the enemy of truth and division the master key of demagogues. Democracy was just another hustle for Trump, one that he could play best in the scrum of the popular culture, where his skill with the levers of the media was unparalleled. Race would be his shortcut to attention and conversion, and he could figure out the details of the game later.

What Trump understood best was how banal facts could be marshaled to unleash hysterical exigency. After the breakthrough civil rights victories of the early 1960s, it was commonplace to note that each generation was the most diverse in the nation’s history. Objectively, the data projected that whites would drop below 50 percent of the national population within a generation. But to Trump voters, coastal pundits and paid experts did not understand what that really meant. Change meant erasure.

Racial apocalypse is the recurring white American narrative in which the civilizers, the chosen people meant to fulfill their destiny, are overrun by the savages, the barbarians who embody chaos and ruin. It’s in the stories told about the Alamo, General Custer, Reconstruction, the sixties. It’s even there in the fixation on the Civil War, Lincoln’s life and assassination, and the common disappearance of slavery from that story. The racial apocalypse is part of the DNA of American pop culture—Buffalo Bill Cody’s cowboys-and-Indians show, D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
—but instead of bloodshed and death, we got happy endings. The end of whiteness is one of the oldest, most common stories Americans tell to scare ourselves (even though we don’t all scare equally).

So in the Southern heat of 2009, Tea Party activists appeared under Confederate flags bearing signs that read, “Bring Back ‘We the People.’” Trump’s Birther campaign followed. And by 2015, Trump voters were flipping off everyone who argued that diversity was inevitable—the grabby minorities, their liberal-media apologists, the corrupt Republican party elite—retorting, “Not over me.”

When Black Lives Matter and DREAM activists began to demonstrate at Trump rallies, violence erupted. In Birmingham, Alabama, Trump supporters tackled, punched, and kicked a Black protester. In Las Vegas, another Black protester was dragged out of a Trump rally as supporters shouted, “Kick his ass,” “Light the motherfucker on fire,”
“Sieg Heil,”
and “He’s a Muslim guy!” Tensions climaxed in Chicago, as hundreds of demonstrators and supporters clashed in the University of Illinois arena, forcing Trump to cancel his rally at the last minute.

After two brothers in Boston attacked a homeless Latino man with a pipe and then pissed on him, shouting, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” Trump tweeted that he “would never condone violence.” But he also said, “I will say, the people that are following me are passionate. They love this country, they want this country to be great again.”
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At times, he seemed delighted by the aggressive physicality of his supporters. After demonstrators interrupted his Vegas rally, he told supporters, “We should have been doing what they’re doing for the last seven years because what’s happening to our country is a disgrace.”
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No one had any doubt about whom Trump meant when he said “we,” “they,” and “our.”

A few days later, as security at an Oklahoma City rally surrounded a young protester, Trump said, “You see, in the good old days, law enforcement acted a lot quicker than this. But today everyone is so politically correct. Our country is going to hell—we’re being politically correct.”

He concluded, “We are really becoming a frightened country, and it’s very, very sad.”

The Picture of Diversity

On an April morning before the New York primary, a group calling itself the National Diversity Coalition for Trump called media to an event at Trump Tower. They intended to demonstrate that their man had broad support from communities of color.

The event did not go well. Organizers—including
The Apprentice
star Omarosa Manigault, a gaggle of Black pastors, as well as members of Arab Americans for Trump, Muslim Americans for Trump, and Hispanic Patriots for Trump—did not know when Trump would speak. When he did arrive, he talked for less than five minutes, never addressed his campaign’s diversity efforts, then disappeared back into the elevator. “What was billed as a press conference seemed more of a photo op and dash,” NBC News’s Ali Vitali wrote.
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The Diversity Coalition stood around wondering if the meeting they hoped to have with Trump was still happening.

This tale of Trump’s sad little Coalition tells us as much about the story of diversity now as Trump’s race-baiting and countenancing of violence do. It’s about the ways diversity has been exploited and rendered meaningless in a time when change is thought of in terms of numbers, appraisals, and images.

In early 2000, the University of Wisconsin began preparing its admissions application to send out to prospective undergrads. The proposed cover featured a photo of its student body at a home football game cheering on their team. There was only one problem, which the African American vice chancellor quickly pointed out to the admissions director: the photo featured only white students.

The staff spent the summer looking for photos that might show happy students in Badger red being diverse together. (At the time, the university was 90 percent white.) They could not find one they deemed suitable. Instead the staff found a photo of a broadly smiling Black male student, and cut-and-pasted his head into the picture behind two exuberant white women. Over 100,000 applications were printed and sent out.
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One day, that Black student walked into the admissions office. His name was Diallo Shabazz and he was known on campus as an excellent scholar who worked under the vice chancellor to tutor inner-city teens of color in precollege summer programs. An admissions counselor stopped him to tell him he was on the cover of the application. Shabazz stared at the photo. He had never been to a football game.

Soon the story had become a minor national controversy. Some argued that the doctored photo represented the “intellectual dishonesty of racial-preference programs,” as if the floating signifier of Shabazz’s digitized head were somehow a threat to American meritocracy. But many more wondered about the university’s institutional goals. Whom was the image meant to attract? Students of color, who had long been underrepresented at the University of Wisconsin? Or white students and parents who could be assured that the campus was indeed elite and non-racist? Was diversity for everybody, for people of color, or just for white people?

In the coming decade, urban neighborhoods would be marketed for their “diversity,” corporations and colleges would appoint chief diversity officers and increase their holdings of assets directed at “diverse demographics,” while pushing ads—sometimes also doctored—that featured happy, diverse consumers. The college-admissions industrial complex began using diversity in its rankings criteria, even as the courts continued to chip away at and voters dismantled the affirmative action programs that many whites disliked.

During the 1980s, campuses like the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan tied together notions of diversity and excellence. At the time the link was startling for some. But by the turn of the millennium, diversity and excellence—or perhaps, more specifically, the appearance of each—were bound together. The appearance of diversity signaled excellence, and the appearance of excellence signaled diversity.

The scholar Nancy Leong named this new arrangement “racial capitalism.” She argued that white individuals and predominantly white institutions derived “social or economic value from associating with individuals with nonwhite racial identities.” She wrote that “in a society preoccupied with diversity, nonwhiteness is a valued commodity. And where that society is founded on capitalism, it is unsurprising that the commodity of nonwhiteness is exploited for its market value.”
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Remember the strange case of Rachel Dolezal, the woman who was born white, sued Howard University for discriminating against her in part because she was white, but then went on to lead the Spokane NAACP as a “Black-identifying” woman?
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Or perhaps the story of Michael Derrick Hudson, a white poet who wrote under the name of a high school classmate, Yi-Fen Chou, in an attempt to have his writing recognized by diversity-minded judges? Both seemed extreme examples of racial capitalism—whites who valued diversity so much that they decided to fake it.

Anna Holmes writes that the value of diversity extends to “moral credibility,” an idea that captures individualized dimensions of white fragility and points directly to the ethics of white agency. In Dolezal’s case, what began as fakery developed into an ultimately failed act of passing, with its complicated, combustible brew of identification, appropriation, and displacement. Hudson, for his part, believed that masking himself in diversity might confer on him relevance and gravitas. If Dolezal felt responsibility for her adopted siblings and her biracial children, Hudson understood that diversity could really be just about optics. These were stories—to borrow the title of Eric Lott’s famous book on blackface minstrelsy—of love and theft.

When Shabazz and other Black students at the University of Wisconsin learned of the Photoshop fiasco, they were bemused and befuddled. “The admissions department that we’ve been talking about, I believe, was on the fourth floor, and the multicultural center was on the second floor of the same building,” Shabazz recalled later to National Public Radio. “So you didn’t need to create false diversity in the picture—all you really needed to do was go downstairs.”
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Or upstairs. The Black Student Union’s president, Jana Thompson, told reporters that their office was one floor up from the admissions department, and that she could have given them photos if they had asked.

The original photo of Shabazz featured him sitting among a crowd of white students. He was the focus of the photo, and all the white faces in the frame were turned away or cut off. It makes one wonder: Couldn’t university administrators have deployed this picture in their application materials? Or did they think it more suitable to paste a Black face into a photo in which whites were centered? What was the minimum threshold of color necessary for an acceptable presentation of diversity? The University of Wisconsin remained an institution whose student body was only 2 percent Black. Diversity imparted value, and it was still a much lower standard than equity.

Diallo Shabazz sued the University of Wisconsin. Not for an apology, but for what he called a “budgetary apology”—reparations, if you will. And he won. The university earmarked $10 million for the recruitment of students of color and the implementation of diversity initiatives. Lisa Wade, one of Shabazz’s teachers, wrote the coda: “The irony in the whole thing is that UW requested photos of Shabazz shaking administrators’ hands in reconciliation (i.e., photographic proof that everything was just fine).”
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In the digital stream of images flowing from the story, administrators hoped the last would be one that restored the impression of the University of Wisconsin as an excellent, diverse school.