SIMPLE & QUICK: It is not about the statues, but it is about the statutes. White supremacy relies on symbolism to sustain its systemic spread

Human beings are fallible. American exceptionalism, perhaps especially, makes no difference. Most of America’s original white male land owners, known as Founding Fathers, lamented taxation without representation. They also owned and enslaved people to hard labor with rape, torment, and murder as commonplace experiences. These white men later birthed the first new nation that guaranteed the inalienable Rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nevertheless, the free white men continued to enslave humans and continued to absorb the benefits of forced labor and wealth creation of owned people for the next 100 years of American chattel slavery.

Once these white male landowners, known as Confederates, were defeated through a civil war that accounted for more than 650,000 dead Americans, they were forced to free the people they kept enslaved after the 4th of July, 1776. In response, these white men turned to the existing racist inclinations of white prejudice within the American political and legislative power structure. They used it first to deconstruct the progress of Reconstruction. After successfully destroying the foreseeable future of progressive Southern society, these white men, known at this time as Klansmen, institutionalized racism by enacting far-reaching racist laws through Segregation, Black Codes, and Jim Crow.

Once the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, 100 years after the American Civil War, the ire of white supremacy sought a new identity in the white body politic— white nationalism. These white men assumed positions of power in banking, the judiciary, and public safety. Those still incumbent within political positions urged the erection of statues, monuments, and other forms of “heritage” preservation. White nationalist power brokers began practices such as redlining neighborhoods, over sentencing for petty crimes, and legalizing police brutality through qualified immunity.

America is now 45 years into the current iteration of white male supremacy nonsense, and they see underfunded schools and food deserts in predominately black and brown neighborhoods, their “Land of the Free” has the highest incarceration rate per capita on Earth with over 2 million fellow citizens behind bars— most of them black and brown; most of them for non-violent cannabis or other petty convictions— and the news today is erupting with examples of dead black and brown men, women, and children at the hands of their legally immune judge, jury, and executioner— the local police officers sworn to protect and serve them.

The President of the United States of America, Donald John Trump, spent this Fourth of July lamenting the recent removal, or “loss,” of 1950s era Confederate statues. And so he is promising a new “National Garden of Heroes”— it is not a cemetery. The President is also tweeting his support to “white power” & the Confederate traitor flag, but he thinks NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace owes Americans an apology. His Administration announced that thru ICE it will be actively deporting college students in the fall. The Donald’s reelection campaign just released a political ad grossly mischaracterizing police reform measures. POTUS clearly believes his pathway to re-election is found somewhere in the long, twisted history of American white grievance.

This is monumental nonsense. Look no further than Trump-the-builder’s fabled wall. MAGA’s original proposed landmark to white nationalism has failed to materialize, repeatedly. South Texans are among many suing to prevent it. After multiple attempts, Team Trump’s racist muslim travel ban is enacted; but today, it is Americans banned from travel. The “silent majority” now believes that “silence is violence.” White Americans are actively learning to become anti-racists. The American businesses are finally bumping bigoted bygones and are implementing racial equity.

Trump & co. may find the oldies as goodies, but 2016 presidential politics does not the 2020 Presidential pathway make. Racism encapsulated in inarticulate hatred of the first black President is not an option when you are now an incumbent with a long record of failed, incompetent policies and a war room of grifters and criminals. White male misogyny will also fail to defeat a white male competitor. White America is just as affected by the President’s incompetent handling of the coronavirus and economic fall out.

What POTUS does not yet see is that his ardent racism and the history of American white supremacy is being inextricably conflated with he and his Administration’s failed handling of the coronavirus pandemic and on-going exacerbation of the economic collapse. The more the President bellows on about angry mobs tearing down monuments and erasing “our heritage” and the more he barks on about dead Confederates, the more Americans are recognizing the echoes of passed failed white male racists and their tragic white nationalist policies. These policies are the genesis to and reasons why America finds herself in a failed state today as compared to four years ago— when black leadership legitimately lead the way.