The FRONTLINE Interviews
Jelani Cobb
Journalist and Author
Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for The New Yorker and is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.
Following is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore conducted on August 8, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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The Promise of Obama
… Obama comes in.He’s sold his bio, to a large extent, for what he was, what he was capable of.He was a man who could bridge the divide politically, racially.He was seen as a change candidate, someone who provided a lot of hope to people.Talk to a little bit about what the expectations were with Obama, why he was so attractive to the voters.
Across the vantage point of a decade, it gets difficult to recall exactly how magnetic and significant Barack Obama’s candidacy was in 2007-2008.The country was mired in this deep, divisive Iraq War and right on the edge of a recession and the housing crisis, and in comes this guy who, you know, famously [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid had described as “clean and articulate.”But he seemed like a kind of redemptive vision for American politics.
And what I mean by that is, you know, just like in Chicago, where he had come up, and he’d become a senator from that state of Illinois, he seemed to be in Chicago but not of Chicago in terms of the worst aspects of the political machinery there.Similarly, people on the national stage in 2007-2008 saw Barack Obama as a kind of man apart from the pettiness, the immaturity, the self-centeredness, the various kinds of ways in which politics did not reflect the highest aspirations of the United States or the society.And he’s black.
Add to all of this the fact that this kind of ancestral breach in the United States, the racial division that begins at the conception of the country.And for many people, he—even as he kind of denied that possibility himself, but for many people, he nonetheless seemed like a one-shot reconciliation that people would be able to move beyond this perennial epidermal conflict that defined so much of American society.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see how that was a doomed mission from the start.And one of the kind of best examples of this was David Dinkins, who was mayor of New York, first African American mayor of New York.And when he was elected, he spoke about the city as a gorgeous mosaic, and all these constituent parts that were different and diverse, but nonetheless equally significant and important.And then the city kind of imploded into, on his watch, imploded into infighting and conflict with the police.
And Rudolph Giuliani famously participated in a rally where Mayor Dinkins was referred to by virtually all of the racial epithets, including the N-word.And this was a rally of the New York City Police Department.So this is the black mayor being called out of his name by his own police force, and the person who succeeds him, cheerleading this kind of rabble-rousing.In short order, that was almost a preface for what we saw on the national stage in 2008, between 2008 and 2016.
Obama and the Growing Divide
The divide got bigger?
The divide got bigger.And for Obama, there were kind of missteps early on that you could attribute to the glare of being on the national stage in the presidency with a microscope analyzing everything that you do.But the first thing that happens is when Skip Gates—you know, Professor Henry Louis Gates—is arrested in his own home for trespassing, and Barack Obama says what virtually every black person in the country thought, which was that it was a stupid thing to do.
All of a sudden, there’s pressure on the other side.There are people who are saying that he’s anti-cop; there’s a concern that he’s racist, that he’s put his thumb on the scale of justice.Never mind the question, the fundamental question of how do you get arrested for trespassing in your own home?Like, that’s the question at the center of this.And what has to happen, as a result, is that you have this ridiculous “beer summit,” where you have the arresting officer; you have Professor Gates; you have the president; you have Joe Biden.They’re sitting there drinking beer.The only thing missing is a football game in the background.
And I think it was easy to see at that point that this was not going to be the simple, one-step reconciliation that people had billed his presidency as.
Eight years later, you’ve got a very different man standing up at the podium, giving his inauguration speech, inaugural speech, Donald Trump.How do we get there?And when you’re listening to what Donald Trump is stating, what his promise is, what are you thinking?
So in order to understand Donald Trump’s inauguration and what that moment meant, you had to kind of look at the broader span of American history.And what I mean by that is this: Like, we saw this tremendous moment of racial advancement, irrespective of all the complexities, irrespective of the criticisms that people could make of Obama’s presidency, of all the things that happened as a result of this black man existing as the chief executive of the United States.
If we debited all of that, we’d still have to say that this was a tremendous moment of progress for a person who represented a constituency who had not been able to legally vote in many instances just 50 years earlier.And so the other part of that, though, is that we know that with each moment of advancement, especially around issues of race in this society, there has been a concomitant backlash; that what we saw after emancipation, the emancipation and Reconstruction, and then we have a tremendously violent post-Reconstruction period that wiped away most of the progress that had been made during that time period.
When we saw the Great Migration, and millions of African Americans departing the South to come to the North and industrial Midwest in order to pursue opportunities and education and employment, that engendered a racial backlash in which the North’s politics around race started to look a lot more like the South’s did.When you saw the tremendous legislative achievements of a civil rights movement—if you go to Martin Luther King’s last book, Where Do We Go From Here?, he talks about the backlash, the building backlash that is happening, the fact that there is, you know, in Chicago and just outside Chicago, in Illinois, when they’re having these—these marches and protests, there in Cicero, Illinois, there are actually members of the American Nazi Party that are opposing him there.And then there’s a real divide.People are confused about whose side they should be on, Martin Luther King or [George] Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party the United States had just fought, just over 20 years ago, in World War II.
And so we fast-forward to 2016 and to January of 2017, when Donald Trump is inaugurated as president of the United States.He represents that backlash.He doesn’t get to the presidency without lying about the origins of the first African American president.That is his introduction to American politics.And that lie paves the way for a political career that culminates in achieving the highest possible office in American politics.
Trump and the Birther Movement
Why does he do it?Why does he become this leader, basically, of the birthers?
To understand why Trump does what he does in terms of pushing the birther movement and in terms of fanning the flames of racial resentment, there are lots of things that you could hypothesize.One is that it was politically profitable.There was a market to be served, and it was a market of resentful white people.But in Trump’s own biography, I think there’s a more salient detail, which is that Trump is from Queens, New York, and Queens has a really interesting niche in American society.It is currently the most diverse county in the United States, in the entire country.There are hundreds of languages spoken in Queens, representatives of immigrant populations from all over the world in this one place.
But when Trump was growing up in Queens, it was the second whitest borough in New York City.And Queens was so white, in fact, that when Jackie Robinson, who was then playing for the Dodgers, purchased a home in Queens, there was a cross burned near his property, and people thought that this was meant to say that he wasn’t welcome in this community.Queens [was] overwhelmingly white during these days.
And in 1965, we have an Immigration Reform Act, liberalizes American immigration.What had previously been, frankly, a racist set of policies to prohibit people from most parts of the world coming to the United States changed to a much more liberal policy.It literally changed the complexion of American society.Queens was one of the first places that that registered.And for a later generation of people, including myself, who grew up in Queens, the diversity was constantly touted as the thing that we were most proud of, that you could go to school with someone who was a Sikh and someone else who was a Russian immigrant and someone else whose family had come from Latin America, and, you know, the person who sat behind you could have family from Haiti.And that was just what your classroom would look like, and this was what we were supposed to be proud of.
But for the older generation of people, it was much more akin to a siege mentality, that the place that had gone from being the second whitest borough in New York City became the most diverse county in the country in the span of about two decades.And I don’t think that, for people of Trump’s background, they never quite reconciled themselves to that.And it was always the kind of simmering resentment of the immigrant populations there.
So you think that registered in Donald Trump’s mind, and it might have had some effect on directions that he has taken?
I absolutely think that that change, the rapid change in the community that he grew up in, is a formative aspect of who he is.And in 2016, when demographic changes had become a bigger concern for a bigger share of the electorate, it was just like talking to other people from Queens at that point.And so that was—the language of ethnic resentment and anti-immigrant xenophobia was something that Trump was fluent in.Other people were trying to learn to speak it, but Trump was almost a native speaker of that language.
Obama and the Economic Crisis
… Obama comes in, and of course he’s dealing with the Great Recession.He’s involved in saving the banks and the stimulus bill, and he creates anger in a Republican conservative community because of how he’s handled—he tells [Ben] Rhodes, “I know I’m going to be doing things that are not going to be popular, but we have to save the country, and we have to do things.”And he’s not getting a lot of help from the Republicans.
Define, if you can, how that moment will, in some ways, haunt him from then on, how it will lead to or help to lead to the growth of the Tea Party.Take us to that moment and how important and insightful a moment it was for him, and what the repercussions were eventually —
In 2009-2010, you have the economy in free fall.You have the housing market, which had been the main engine of economic growth, certainly for individual families, and that falls apart.And so there are all sorts of ripple effects that are happening.There are people who are saying that “We need to have another New Deal.”There are people who are pushing Obama far to the left on, you know, the ways in which he’s going to address this.He doesn’t go as far left as people want him to.And he strikes out, but winds up being a fairly centrist set of policies in terms of addressing the recession.But one of the things that doesn’t—that almost kind of casts the die for the rest of his term is the stimulus, which creates a huge degree—which had been in the works under George W. Bush, but, you know, the stimulus is attributed to Obama.It is kind of through the alchemy of American politics construed as evidence that Obama is a socialist.The bailout of the auto industry winds up being the rare kind of political gesture that is criticized by people on the left and on the right.
And in the midst of this, you have this growing kind of insurgent movement of the Tea Partyers.And what makes it complicated about the Tea Party is that, ideologically they are conservative, but the conservatism doesn’t quite—is not simply about economic matters.It doesn’t quite track simply to the recession, because many things that they’re concerned about were prominent issues during the presidency of George W. Bush, but they come to full flower during Obama’s administration.
There are other things that you see, like homophobic insults that are hurled at [Rep.] Barney Frank; the fact that people spit at Congressman John Lewis, who was famously a veteran of the civil rights movement.There are things that don’t square with their economic populism and their ideas of the country as headed in the wrong way in terms of policy.And this is what really begins to establish the divide that you see.
On the one hand, you have Obama and his administration and his supporters, and then you have this rapidly growing movement, kind of poorly defined, of Tea Partyers, and a mad rush for Republicans and conservatives to find themselves in their good favor.… I think that it’s hard to overestimate the significance of [House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor losing his congressional seat because he wasn’t far enough to the right for the Tea Party.That really established, in the minds of Republicans, that there was no room to get on the wrong side of this movement; that there was really no room to negotiate with Obama on anything; that the intractable gridlock that characterized Obama’s eight years in office—well, six of the eight years in office—that they were really established in that moment.
The Tea Party also—I mean, the famous summer of 2009, with the health care issue being, as some people have defined it, in a lot of their minds, a view that it was taking from them and giving it to the poor, another sort of welfare kind of policy, which they were very angry about.The other aspect of the Tea Party, which is also evident and which can’t be ignored, is you’d watch these demonstrations, and there were pictures of the president looking like a gorilla or a “savage” in Africa or whatever.What was going on there?How did that part of it define, in a lot of ways, where the anger was coming from?
One of the things, I think, that is—seems now like, fantastically naïve is the kind of vogue comment that Obama’s election suggested that we were headed toward being a post-racial society, which was ridiculous on its face for lots of reasons.But if there needed—if you needed any evidence of the invalidity of that idea, you simply had to look at the culture surrounding the Tea Party and the reaction that you saw to the Affordable Care Act.
The reactions to Obama were not simply about policy.They were about the race of the person promoting that policy.So the Affordable Care Act, in that context, becomes something that is akin to welfare.And conspiracy theories proliferate: the death panels; the black president is going to come and kill your grandmother; that the fact that this is something which is being negotiated with insurance companies but is nonetheless thought of as the knife’s edge of his socialist agenda.
… The absurdity of that moment really registered to me at one point when I was in Moscow.And so I was in Moscow while all of this was being fought out and doing a Fulbright fellowship, and a young woman came up to me and had a question.She was a student at the university, and she had a question about American politics.And she said to me, “Is it true that Americans think that Barack Obama is a socialist?”And I said, “Yes, some Americans believe that.”And she kind of wrinkled her brow for a second and said, “I think perhaps these people do not know what a socialist is.”
And to hear someone saying this in Russia, we’re like: “We very well know what a socialist is.This guy is not one of them.”And that was a vantage point that was sorely missed in the United States.But just as everything else about Obama was kind of viewed through a lens of race, it wasn’t simply a matter of, “I disagree with this policy on principle.”You know, there are these rallies where they’re depicting Obama as an ape, you know, on signs that they’re carrying.There are points that are making reference to him in all sorts of ways that kind of refer to pejorative stereotypes about Africa and Africans; that this is not simply a disagreement about policy; this is a repudiation of Obama and, more significantly, a repudiation of Obama’s race and the possibility of it coexisting within the White House.
Obama and the Trayvon Martin Killing
In 2012, the Trayvon Martin shooting: What are the stakes for Obama on this issue?As you sort of talked about already, he’s realizing that this is an issue which is a no-win situation for him.He also comes in sort of not—this is not an issue that is on the top of his list.He wants to win over America in a very different way, and he knows that this is dangerous territory because of the entrenched attitudes of people once you enter the debate.Trayvon Martin is shot.What are the stakes for Obama?What’s expected of him, and what can he deliver?
When Trayvon Martin was shot in 2012, and there was no arrest made of George Zimmerman, the person who shot him, there was—if there was kind of any moment to place Obama at the very intersection of all the rival forces pulling at his presidency, at least rival social forces, that would be it, because part of his allure to African American voters was that he openly expressed a familiarity with the concerns of African American communities.You know, he spoke informally; he spoke Black English when he was around crowds of African Americans.He just very culturally—it was like the video of him in a barbershop talking with these other black men, and he was indistinguishable from them.He was like any other black man that you would see in the barbershop.And with that came a concomitant hope that this would be a person who would understand issues that African Americans had often struggled to articulate to white leadership or to get them to understand the significance of them.Things that we would have to argue and protest and sign petitions about, he would seem to understand implicitly.
… So when you have a 17-year-old, unarmed 17-year-old, shot fatally by an adult armed neighborhood watch person, self-appointed neighborhood watch person, and over the objections of 911, when they tell him that he doesn’t need to pursue this person, nonetheless pursues him, shoots him fatally, that is a situation in which Obama’s black electorate expected him to speak on their behalf.
At the same time, that nexus of race and crime has always been politically fraught.Even though Trayvon Martin wasn’t guilty of any crime, it was easy enough for people to have imagined him—young, African American male, wearing a hoodie at night, a vision that people might have been intimidated by—it was easy enough to kind of round him up, or rather round him down into the criminal category.And you saw people organizing on the right about that, saying that this—George Zimmerman had been in danger, that they identified with him fatally shooting this 17-year-old.
And then in the midst of this, Obama has another ideal, which is a sound aspect of his reasoning.In terms of the Constitution and in terms of law, he does not want to, from the biggest bully pulpit in the world, speak out on a case that has yet to be adjudicated, in saying that that could very easily be cited, as a defense attorney, as having tainted every jury pool in the country.That’s a legal concern that he’s thinking about.That doesn’t work as a political concern.
And so there’s all of this—all this kind of criticism and people arguing that, you know, “Why haven’t we heard anything?”And then when Obama finally does speak, he says something which is, I think, as precisely politically calibrated as anything that he could have said in that moment.“If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin.”And what he’s really saying is, to African Americans, “Yes, I understand exactly the dynamic that you’re talking about.”He is reminding white people that, “Yes, I am an African American; I understand these issues implicitly,” and that there are these concerns around race and policing, almost as if he had existed in this cocoon that people had been able to imagine him outside of what it meant to be black in America.And he’s reminding people, like, “No, this is who I am.”
Well, with that comes a kind of response.It was like, “Well, if you had a son who looked like Trayvon Martin, let us just kind of react to you the way we would react to him.”You see a cascade of outrage, even for a fairly tepid statement, cascade of outrage from conservatives, from people on Fox News.Bear in mind, famously Glenn Beck had said that on Fox News that Barack Obama hates white people, and simply pointing out that Trayvon Martin could have—if he had a son, he could look like him, seemed to be a way of making the argument that he did, in fact, hate white people.Like, we saw the beginning of things going off the rails in that moment.
Obama and Ferguson
… So how does Ferguson then complicate matters even more?How does the president deal with that?And is there sort of a backlash within the black community?Not a backlash, but there’s a feeling that we have to push this ourselves, because we’re not going to be able to depend on even our black president.
Aug. 9, 2014, you have a confrontation between Darren Wilson, who is a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and Michael Brown, who is an 18-year-old who has just finished high school in Ferguson, Missouri, and it becomes a kind of Rorschach test.Michael Brown is unarmed.He is fired upon by the police officer who says that he attacked him.There are varying eyewitness accounts that dispute that.What is not in dispute is that his body lays on the street, where he was shot, in the sweltering heat for multiple hours, as people in the community see him there, deceased.And it becomes a tinderbox, explodes.
People want an immediate reaction from Barack Obama and his administration.They are—in the first nights after his death, there are some small-scale riots.There’s really a looming threat that there will be much larger-scale violence in Ferguson.And in the midst of this, one of the things—and I was there reporting on this—in the midst of this, one of the things that happens is that people begin talking about the fact that Eric Holder is going to come, that the attorney general will be there.And it literally is the negotiation.There’s like factions that are ready to set things on fire right then.And the other side, there are activists who are saying, “The attorney general is coming; give him a chance to investigate; let’s see what happens,” and so on.
And, you know, these conversations are happening back and forth.And when Eric Holder gets there, they begin this inquiry about, you know, what was the nature of the incident?What happened between them?But in a bigger sense, Ferguson became a metaphor for this entire complex of relationships between black people and police and the criminal justice system.And here you have the black president square in the middle of it.
And the difficult situation that it is for the president is what?
The difficulty of this situation for Barack Obama is that it kind of exposes him again and again and again to the most inflammatory thing about his presidency.Aside from the speech that he gave about [Rev.] Jeremiah Wright, which he was really pushed to give, he had tried to campaign in a way that did not emphasize race, that did not think that that would be a winning strategy for his electorate.And here it is again and again and again in his presidency, with the beer summit and Skip Gates, with Trayvon Martin, and now with Ferguson, that he is brought again and again back to this third-rail issue of the disparities of race in this country.
And so by the time Ferguson comes around, there is a conversation on the right, and certainly within police unions, that is saying that the president is anti-cop.You know, that’s not really valid based on any kind of metric, but that’s the conversation that you’re hearing in American politics on the other side of it.
Obama and the Rise of Partisanship
… 2012 election, he wins again.He feels that the fever has been broken, that he can now maybe accomplish some of the things that he had intended to accomplish the first four years.It doesn’t turn out that way.Newtown is certainly the first sign of that.But there are many other signs.And eventually, by 2014, when the Senate goes to the Republicans, he gives up on bipartisanship, and he uses executive orders and such.… What’s your overview of how, during this period of time, he was struggling with attempting to deliver on the promises that he came to office with, the hopes that people saw in him?
It’s worth remembering what [former Speaker of the House] Newt Gingrich had said about the Republican reaction to Barack Obama’s election.And, you know, he talks about a meeting with other high-ranking Republicans in which they were all demoralized by Obama’s victory, and he says they start kind of mapping things out, and by the end of the night, they feel much better because they’ve sketched out the beginnings of a kind of Republican intransigence; that it is massive resistance to Obama’s presidency, defiance to stop him in any way they could.
[Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell famously stated at the beginning of Obama’s presidency that his objective was for Obama to be a one-term president, and so you see what the political priorities are there.2012, Obama is reelected, and he continues to hope that there’s going to be a chance to move the legislative agenda forward.But in some other ways, there’s reason to believe that not much is going to change, and the reason I say that is that time and time again, Obama had held out for the promise of bipartisanship, or believing that there could be public intransigence and opposition, but behind closed doors, they could negotiate and do politics as politics had always been done.But there was a new dispensation, that this was a completely different set of circumstances that he was operating under.
So he was not able to get any kind of bipartisan support, even though he made concessions on things like offshore drilling, but did not get any bipartisan support on climate change legislation, which is what he was hoping that would open the door for; could not get any bipartisan support, even after the massacre of 20-something six-year-olds in Newtown, couldn’t move in a bipartisan way on gun reform.
There were usually, typically, the country is loath to show its dirty laundry in public in terms of foreign affairs, but even with the START treaty [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] with Russia, there’s like, all this kind of Republican intransigent opposition, which is unprecedented in American politics.There was no way to get any kind of bipartisan support for the Affordable Care Act, even though it had started out as a Republican initiative in Mitt Romney’s state, Massachusetts.
Are things going to change now in 2012?Is it going to be a different order?Not really.And then in 2014, when the Republicans gained control of Congress, it becomes just even that much more entrenched.And, you know, this left Obama in a position where he began enacting more and more policy through executive order, which became a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.If bipartisanship is not an option, and concessions, which have typically lubricated the wheels of the political machine, that doesn’t work, and you do have this other tool, which is the executive order, if you use that, they begin referring to you as a king or a tyrant.
And so effectively, any attempt you make to actually be president is going to rub these people in opposition the wrong way.And I think the final indicator of this is the Merrick Garland nomination to the Supreme Court.When Mitch McConnell says that, you know, “This is a Republican seat,” or a conservative seat, there is no such thing.There’s no designation such as this in the Constitution.And he points to the fact that they’re in the last year of Obama’s term, and that’s why they shouldn’t have this—this seat filled, as if somehow or another, Obama’s presidency ends before January of 2017.
And at that point, if the administration didn’t know that there was a kind of catch-22, the public certainly knew, and certainly Obama’s supporters knew that this was an attempt to effectively nullify the first black presidency.
The last State of the Union, I suppose, is sort of the time when he admits this inability to have bridged the divide, the “rancor and suspicion between the parties” is worse than ever, he admits, he explains.So what are the results of this, I mean, that dire sort of admission to the effect that he was not able to accomplish one of the things that he had hoped to do?
If you think back to Obama’s early candidacy, he would talk about cynics and cynicism a lot.And in some ways, cynicism became a kind of stand-in for race.When people would say things that had racial implications, Obama wouldn’t call them racist, but he would accuse them of being cynical.And he framed his candidacy as a kind of hope versus cynicism.And that was part of the appeal.
And then the eight years of his presidency were really an exhibition of what cynicism in public life looks like.And so when he is talking at the end of his presidency about the—the rancor and the division and, you know, the discord between the two political parties, it’s almost a kind of concession about the power of cynicism when wielded.When paired with a disinterest in the greater good for the nation, that’s really what he’s talking about, what cynicism can actually do.
And in some other ways, I think that it took a real audacious courage to believe in 2007 that a black man could be elected president of the United States.I would always say about that moment, that in early 2007, there were four people in the country who thought that a black man could be elected president, and they all lived at the same address on the South Side of Chicago.And through the most outlandish, statistically improbable set of circumstances, that actually happens.
And so it’s easy to believe that you see something, a kind of new horizon, that you are able to exist outside the gravity of race in the United States.Eight years later, we were having a conversation about the strength of the tenacity of old habits and the ways in which the worst elements of American history have reasserted themselves in generation after generation after generation.I think that that’s what those two moments, if you put them side by side, that’s what those two moments represent.
The Rise of Donald Trump
And so when we end up with Donald Trump, how?How does that come about?And how does it come out of what you’ve just described?How do we end up that America, this America that had the hope and had elected the first black president, the next time out votes for Donald Trump, especially with the message that he gave when he first came down that escalator?
Donald Trump does not exist in a vacuum, and the United States has always been uncomfortable confronting its history, like, the more unsavory aspects of its history.And so, because we don’t nationally like talking about the history in this country of slavery, the fact that the country required the near eradication of the indigenous population in order to come into existence, the fact that sharecropping and exploitation and all these things have been part of the narrative of the United States, even as it understands itself as an exceptional nation very much willing to have the conversation about all the things that point to this being a bulwark of democracy—the oldest constitutional democracy in the world, the fact that we have this unbroken chain of electoral secession, the fact that we have these informal mores around how politics is and is not conducted, like, all those things we’re willing to grasp.Every Fourth of July, we talk about those things.
Much more hesitant to talk about the more nefarious aspects of American history, and what that means is that you are consistently susceptible to those things reasserting themselves.So in 2016, when Donald Trump began to emerge as a front-runner in Republican politics, very much playing to ethnic resentment, very much playing to backlash politics, very much if not implying, then overtly saying things that are racist, starts his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists.Only someone who’s unfamiliar with the history of this country would think that that would have limited appeal.There is a very long tradition of racial populism in American society, and a very powerful tradition as well.
And so the fact that it was a failed businessman with multiple bankruptcies-turned-reality TV star, that may seem a little bit ironic or strange or, you know, like a kind of eccentricity of American politics.But for the agenda that he was promoting, it is hard to believe that that would not sell, particularly at a moment like that.
Trump and Charlottesville
Charlottesville,… Trump’s “both sides equally to blame”: What are the results of this?What’s at stake here?It energizes people like white supremacists.Why is it important to understand?
I think Charlottesville is important because—I mean, there’s been racism in American politics since there’s been American politics.But, you know, [Republican strategist] Lee Atwater famously pointed out about, in the wake of the civil rights movement, the ways that the most overt, hostile, antagonistic racism had to be cloaked, and people had to use code words.Instead of the N-word, you had to talk about busing or taxes.
And eventually, you get to a point where you’re still playing the politics of racial resentment, but it’s in this very coded way.What Charlottesville did was reemphasize something that people really had good reason to know already, which is that Trump had dispensed with those old politics of coded racial language; that you could have a situation in which a white supremacist drives a vehicle, at full speed, into a crowd of protesters and kills an innocent woman, and the president of the United States could say that they were nonetheless very fine people who were on that side of the equation as well., It’s kind of a strange contrast, because on the one hand, if there are people who are identifying themselves as Nazis, you would think that other people would be tainted by association.But his commentary was saying that that’s not necessarily the case; that you can be in association with these people, that people who are going out and chanting that “Jews will not replace us,” people who are carrying torches, who are shouting racial epithets and those aspects that are kind of under the rock of American history, yeah, that has now become—entered the mainstream and become part of American politics, part of the dialogue.
Trump and the Cultural Divide His attack on democratic institutions, his mainlining of racism even to the point of the attacking of the four congresswomen [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib], what is the meaning behind what he is doing and the results of it?
In the United States, there’s the oft-repeated phrase, “We the People,” you know—“We the People,” our founding creed; “We the People, in order to form a more perfect union,” etc., etc.We have not really defined who “We” includes.And so at the beginning of this country, the first immigration law in 1790 said that only white men could immigrate here and become citizens.Bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War, four years, 700,000 people die, the fundamental question is, who is included in “We”?And we’ve had this dispute, you know, again and again and again.
So we see the flag.You know.What does that symbolize?The people who are segregationists hold the American flag; the people of the civil rights movement who are marching for freedom and equality are holding the American flag.That’s one of the reasons why I think people go to the Confederate flag, because they want to be clear.People who are opposed to the civil rights movement begin flying the Confederate flag again because they want to be clear that they are in opposition to the way that America is being interpreted by people in the civil rights movement.
So we’ve had this ongoing dispute about who is included with “We.”When Trump says that people should be—four sitting congresswomen should go back to where they came from, what he is effectively doing is nullifying their citizenship.He is making an entry into that conversation about who is included in “We the People” and is saying it does not include them.That’s a strange kind of thing to say, you know, especially when you think about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when he says she should go back to where she came from.Well, she came from Puerto Rico.If she went back to Puerto Rico, she’d still be in the United States.Or if he was talking about Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, which was another kind of weird thing to say, because Ayanna Pressley is African American.Trump’s family came here as immigrants.African Americans, we’ve been here since 1619.
And so what, in your understanding, means that a person whose family came here in the 20th century has the right to tell someone whose family came here in the 17th century that they should leave, if we’re not talking about a definition of American citizenship that is calibrated to skin color?
And so that is effectively what he is saying in making that pronouncement.And it’s clear; it’s not coded.It’s not—there’s no double-talk.There’s no real room to back-pedal and interpret it as something other than what it is.It’s a declaration that citizenship in this country is fundamentally white.
Trump and Immigration
… Let me ask you about his rhetoric on immigrants being defined recently as leading to the mass murders in Texas, in El Paso, the rise of helping to, in the rise of white supremacists.What’s at stake here?This argument that’s taking place about what he said and what it means, what’s at stake in very real terms?
You know, the presidency is the most important platform in the country, possibly the most important platform in the world.And when the president talks about immigrant populations, particularly Hispanics, in ways that are dehumanizing, he refers to people as animals, refers to people as rapists and criminals, when he paints with a broad brush about who members of that community are, it gives aid and comfort to people who are inclined to act upon their worst impulses.
And so there’s this conversation about whether or not the president’s rhetoric causes violence to happen, and I think that’s the wrong question.I think fundamentally the issue is whether you have a president and a violent bigot who find themselves to be of like minds, that they’re in a dialogue in which they agree on who the immigrant community is, and they mutually reject the humanity of this immigrant community, then violence is always a consequence of that kind of kinship.
And so we are talking about, really, the propensity of violence in this society, directed at the most vulnerable people.
Trump and Charleston
I’ve got to ask you about Charleston and Obama.
… I was in the auditorium when Barack Obama gave the eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, and it was as horrible a moment as you could imagine.It was insanely hot outside, and people had lined up for hours in that unrelenting heat trying to get into this auditorium to pay their respects to this pastor and to hear from the president.And when he’s giving this eulogy, and then there’s that moment, that really long moment of silence, and everyone in the auditorium is wondering if something is wrong, if the mic has gone out, the speakers have gone down, what is the problem?Just silent for that long spell.
And then he starts singing “Amazing Grace,” which is fitting.It’s in the American tradition; it’s in the African American tradition.It’s what would happen if he was being eulogized in a small country church by a local pastor.And it was a kind of profound spiritual moment.But it also, to me, was troubling, because it meant that I think the array of options had been exhausted that that was Obama’s prayer at that point.You know, he was beseeching in that song.It was written by a white man who was seeking forgiveness for his involvement in the slave trade, and Obama was deploying that song in a kind of beseeching way for some sort of divine intervention, maybe, into the morass of race and violence in this country.
And I don’t know.I think it was hard for everybody who was there.Like, people got a lot from the fact that he sang.People thought that politically it was brilliant; that I’m sure the family felt that he had done his very best to give them some measure of comfort in that terrible moment.But for me, I think it felt like this is not going to get better, at least not in the short term.
So an admission of his inability to bridge the divide?
I think I saw that song as an admission of his inability to bridge that divide.And maybe that’s a harsh assessment of it.But as I was walking away, I think that’s what I took from that.And there’s a—there’s a kind of profound implication to this also.So Obama knew Clementa Pinckney.They had interacted previously.Rev. Pinckney was dead, in large measure, because Barack Obama was the president.When you look at the rhetoric of the young man who murdered Rev. Pinckney and eight other people in the basement of that church, he is driven to violence by the fact that—he says this—he says that black people are taking over the world.
And so Obama is eulogizing a man whose death has come as a consequence of his own presidency—not his fault, not his doing, but as a kind of unintended consequence of this, as a kind of consequence of the backlash to him being who he is.And so I won’t say there’s like a moral weight to it, but there’s a certain maybe spiritual or historical weight to that moment that’s freighted, you know, between his presidency and Pinckney’s death, and I think he resolves that riddle, or he addresses that riddle, the riddle of that moment, with the song “Amazing Grace.”
And I left like, this situation is going to get so much worse.
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