The “Benign” Racism of White Liberals Will Re-Elect Donald Trump

7.8.19

Written by Gayle Leslie

Last Saturday, as I sat at the kitchen table finishing up “Kamala Harris vs. Drinking Heavily and Waiting to Die,” I got an email from a man I’d met online. I’d been receiving an email from him roughly once a week for about a month. From his emails I learned that he was in his mid-60s, had had a successful career (at what I was never clear on,) that he was now retired, lived alone in a large house in New Jersey, had at least one daughter who was some sort of professional in Manhattan, and that he did lots of volunteer work at a hospital. And he identified himself as a Democrat, which is significant because I include in all my online contacts this disclaimer: “While I am certainly open to any conservative who is a thoughtful, well articulated person on matters of policy, if you are still a Trump supporter after all we’ve witnessed over the past several years, please pass me by. Travel in peace, but take that somewhere else.” In my experience, though, men I meet online will lie about nearly anything to get a gal they fancy to go out with them, even if it’s just to initiate a fight. So I was just taking him on faith.

I was just about to publish when I got his email so I was really preoccupied with work. If I’m honest, I so resist the act of sitting down to actually start typing that I have to have a piece essentially written in my head and exploding onto the page before I am compelled to physically put the metaphorical “pen to paper.” It was urgent that I seize the moment. But that article had taken on a life of its own after the first debate. I was merely the channel by the time it heaved itself onto my keyboard; it took less than two hours to write it.

So this man interrupted my flow, and I was not in a head to continue this odd process whereby he left info like a trail of breadcrumbs that might ultimately lead to his coming to Manhattan to take me to dinner. Eventually. While I did appreciate his taking the time to get to know me a bit before committing to dinner as most of the time, if a man doesn’t get what he wants pretty much immediately online, he disappears and frankly, that’s fine. Time not wasted. But I also don’t need blood work and a background check to have a glass of wine with a man, so this was all starting to feel pretty “stuffy” and one thing anybody who knows me will say is that stuffy is not a thing I do. Also, he was starting to feel to me somewhat wounded and needy, and we hadn’t even met. All relationship is by definition high-maintenance, but I had not chosen to be “in relationship” with him yet.

I decided to cut to the chase, to find out whether or not I might be underestimating this man — as I have done that before — or whether my instinct that we might bore one another silly by spending three hours of our lives that we can’t get back together. So I sent him the link to “Kamala Harris vs. Drinking Heavily and Waiting to Die,” before anyone else had read it.

This was his unedited response: “Thank you for enclosing your well written article. Mr. Biden does not have to apologize for Kamala Harris’s statement. Instead she should show him respect. Kamala Harris is only half Afro Caribbean. Her mother is a renowned cancer physician who is a Tamil Indian. Her Jamaican father is an economics professor at Stanford. Her parents from these two cultures would have stressed education and respect. Her attack against Mr. Biden was unwarranted.”

This struck me as so wrong on so many levels that I responded by articulating those to him. Suffice it to say we did not have dinner.

The weekend was a slow steady rise before “Kamala Harris vs. Drinking Heavily and Waiting to Die” went pretty much insane online beginning on Monday morning. The response was almost all positive. Even people who did not entirely agree with me seemed to much appreciate the opportunity to have a literate conversation.

But predictably, not everyone agreed. There were thousands of comments and I read almost all of them. Aside from the trolls that have mostly migrated as no one on my page fed them, and some really coarse responders who — interestingly — were mostly men decrying the use of LinkedIn as a platform for political discourse, there were a hand full of posts that echoed that failed suitor’s comments. I’ve had some time to ruminate on this and it feels like something needs to be said because this is all resonating with that “Birtherism 2.0” meme that Donald Trump Jr. threw in the deep end last week as chum to his father’s base. And to any white liberal who doesn’t realize he is perpetuating a fundamentally and grossly racist premise.

Right here a disclaimer: Many of the comments I’m referencing here reflected a very fine line between what is racist and what is misogynist. One commenter had only to say that he didn’t think Harris was “hot at all.” He didn’t understand why Donald Trump would be intimidated by her looks and that that made it impossible for him to understand what I was talking about. Seriously, I think he was probably twenty-nine going on twelve.

I suspect that for people saying these things those issues are so conflated as to be basically one. So if I allude to the sexist aspect please understand that I don’t see much difference at this point. It is all adding up to the same thing, either people identifying themselves as “liberals” genuinely don’t know what motivates them sufficiently to recognize their own bias, or they’ve appropriated some of the talking points of this new incarnation of Birtherism because it validates their own insidious true beliefs, or they simply don’t realize they are being played. And they are being played by forces bent on ginning up derision and division among democrats who then act out against one another without even understanding why they do what they do but do have some underlying sense that they have reason to be ashamed of themselves. Projection is easier than self-appraisal and accountability.

Some people on the fringe of liberal ideology are not nearly as “woke” as they think they are. Reference the tall, white knucklehead with the man-bun who jumped up on stage and grabbed the mic from Senator Harris during a conversation with Karine Jean Pierre a few weeks ago. He only took that liberty after everyone else had spoken, he only then interrupted Kamala Harris. Trust me, that fool doesn’t think he is sexist, racist or a bully: he thinks he is entitled to treat women and people of color as he wishes because he is “entitled.” And how is that really any different than Donald Trump or Harvey Weinstein? And before you say, “But he didn’t assault her!” I will say, “How do you know what he would have done if Senator Harris had resisted? Or if he hadn’t been stopped? How do you know what a man who behaves that way publicly is capable of doing privately? You don’t,” No one does. And I doubt seriously that that man-child would have tried such a thing on Barack Obama.

Kamala Harris did not “attack” Joe Biden. If I saw that comment once, I saw it a hundred times: the insistence that she’d attacked him. The black female prosecutor came prepared for a professional forum; the sweet old white guy did not. So let’s just start with, if you are a professional man who perceived that as an attack, would you have perceived it that way if a white male attorney had done the same thing in court? I’d doubt it.

Barack Obama bit his lip again and again because he knew that if he performed as an aggressive professional he would be labeled by a lot of white people, “the angry black man.” And many white voters fear angry black men, so any indication of conviction, character or even legitimate anger would have justified their prejudice in the minds of whites looking for an excuse for what amounted to the pure racism they’ve buried in their basements.

And I will go out a limb here and add that part of the reason some white folks are so irrationally afraid of angry black men is because, in their heart of hearts where truth dwells, they know that black men writ large in this country have some things to be angry about. That doesn’t make them violent, but it can make them adamant, and the need to express that and to demand change makes them human. Simply human.

So what to do when it’s a black woman? You can’t admit you are afraid of her because that makes you less of a man: it makes you a coward in the eyes of other men. What’s left but to disparage what amounts to her “job performance.” That debate was about her job performance. She executed her job better than Joe Biden executed his. That is essentially an empirical fact in the eyes of a significant number of reasonable people.

Some comments from particular men outraged and incensed by Senator Harris’s direct and legitimate query of Vice President Biden bordered on hysterical and nonsensical, not unlike my suitor, though he was a man of fewer and more concise words.

This one pretty much sums it up so I’ve left it essentially unedited as it speaks for itself.

“…despite Donald Trump’s many shortcomings, Kamala Harris is not a black woman, please stop trying to make her what she is not. She is a lineage combination of Jamaican and Indian from India. You and others do a disservice to the voting public to pretend that she is a part of the black or African American community. Moreover, she has never stated or admitted that she is black not mention the fact she won’t be able to make inroad into the black voting bloc. And the gentleman,…, is correct LinkedIn is not a political platform, but a business environment and I hate to be responding to such in this medium, but your comments to him were so politically distasteful I felt compel… stop beating up on people because of the color of their skin and their chronological age it breeds resentment and discontent…”

So, “Deconstructing Birtherism 2.0 for Dummies”: The fact is that Kamala Harris was born 54 years ago in Oakland, California, making her a citizen of the United States. Her Indian mother and Jamaican father were professional people who took education very seriously.

The argument that she is not African American falls short when you consider that the slave ships stopped and unloaded “cargo” in Jamaica, so she likely is part African. That, however, is not the point: the real issue is that it is not the actual business of my suitor or of this commenter — or any of his like to parse Kamala Harris’s “blackness” — because it is no white American’s business to parse the degree of blackness of anyone identifying as black. That is — in and of itself — profoundly racist. Harris is observably a woman of color, that is all you need to know to cease with this foolishness and move on.

Why that needs to be said baffles me.

As for her parents achieving advanced levels of professional success: These gentlemen imply in their comments that, because Harris’s parents worked hard to improve their lifestyle, they have abandoned and are no longer entitled to identify with the people of color who are making a blue color living and have lesser means. How does financial, educational “success” diminish one’s ethnic credibility? As if race and class are somehow contingent on one another in a given moment, and simultaneously mutually exclusive at the whim of the sensibilities of absolutely any passerby. That is so racist it is hard to imagine an educated individual — let alone those cloaking themselves in liberal creds — even uttering the words without self-consciousness or just a hint of irony.

Most liberals are “pro-choice.” Most left-leaning men will say out loud that a woman should have absolute agency over her body. Most will agree that — ultimately — no man, let alone a bunch of old white guys in any state house anywhere, should have a single word to say about it. In the end, no man gets to tell me what to do with my body.

Well, that is the way I feel about telling black folks how black they have to be — or how poor they have to be — or where they have to descend from — before I consider them black enough to identify as black Americans: that is stupid. I have NO RIGHT to do that. No white person has the right to do that. That is not negotiable.

Donald Trump Jr. retweeted this on the night of the second democratic debate, left it online just long enough to get it picked up, then deleted it. It is a calculated effort to gin up the racist base and to misinform liberal whites so that they will fight amongst themselves about absurd nonsense. Don’t take it any other way:

Retweet: Donald Trump Jr. @DonaldJTrumpJr

Is this true? Wow.

Tweet: Ali Alexander @ali

Kamala Harris is “not” an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican. I’m so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It’s disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2?…

…

@ali is a professional troll who works for right-wing organizations specifically to sew discord. He is a mercenary paid to pick the scabs he knows exist, triggering people to behave unconsciously and destructively.

This tweet is ridiculous on the merits: There is simply no way in this real world that having a savvy, successful woman of color running for the highest office in the land is doing this nutter any harm. Actually, it is the opposite. Which is why I suspect he is either a real idiot, seriously loathing and terrified of women, or that he has another agenda altogether. And if any reader hesitates for a moment before reacting, it is obviously just a stupid tweet.

@ali could just as easily have been a troll in a basement whacking off gleefully over his mischief making or he could’ve been a bot in St. Peterburg. This may well have been Trump or Russian operatives fanning the proverbial flames, counting on all the suckers on Twitter to go batshit.

None of that has anything to do with Kamala Harris.

If whites identifying as liberal Democrats — decrying the horror show that is the Trump presidency — do not look deeper within at the real reasons the black female prosecutor wrapped their panties in a knot by simply doing her job, if white liberals continue to deny the real implicit power of black female countenance in the face of a pathologically weak man like Trump, if white liberals keep screaming that only a white guy can prevail in 2020 — even though Hillary Clinton beat him badly in the popular vote in ’16 — and even though one of the most cohesive, reliable democratic voting blocs are black women, Democrats will gnaw their own limbs off. The “benign” racism of white liberals will re-elect Donald Trump.

With that I return to my original premise, if Democrats screw this up by showing up to a knife fight with their good intentions hanging out, we can all settle in to drinking heavily and wait to die.

About the Author:

Gayle Leslie is a writer, political consultant, published author, actor, and policy wonk publishing extensively on Medium. She is a native Texan, graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and Circle in the Square Theatre School in NYC. She wrote her serialized memoir, Dwelling in the Vast Divine Vol. 1 & Vol 2. You can follow on Twitter at @gayleleslie7