I recently wrote that there is a rational explanation for the rabid, white supremacist, fascist behavior of MAGA Republicans.
For them, it’s about survival. Rapid, seismic cultural and technological changes of the last 60 years created an existential threat to white MAGA America.
Starting with the modern Civil Rights Movement, which corresponds with an escalating Cold War, Jim Crow was beaten back. This culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965. This put the modern Confederacy in retreat, but it never surrendered.
The threat is to their identity and what it has meant historically to be white in America. The American white person, as understood by MAGA America, is wrestling with the idea of extinction.
So, what about us? How have these same changes transformed the Black community over six decades? It has impacted us in ways we hadn’t anticipated and left us with consequences we’re figuring out how to manage.
There is an inverse relationship between Black and white America when it comes to the American Experience. The same cultural and technological changes that produced existential tread for white MAGA America has also lightened the burden of what it means to be Black in America’s racial caste system for a substantial portion of Black America.
In 2018 I wrote, “In a perverse way we’re also American immigrants, except we didn’t choose to come here. We were forcibly brought here for the sole purpose of providing labor for America’s early-stage capitalist development. While the institution of slavery is as old as human history, what was done to enslaved Africans in America was uniquely evil. [Enslaved people] were also robbed of their historical identities and even the very idea of themselves as human beings.”
The 43 million people in America today who identify as Black are descendants of 400,000 who were brought here from Africa, who survived the Middle Passage, and were enslaved in what was to become the United States of America.
Today’s Black community is a function of overt, structural, systemic oppression of a disparate group of human beings around the social construct of race. The Black community was forged in the crucible of slavery, but our modern political culture and identity were shaped in post-Civil War America on the anvil of Jim Crow.
America is evolving but it hasn’t been transformed. Starting with the modern Civil Rights Movement, which corresponds with an escalating Cold War, Jim Crow was beaten back. This culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965. This put the modern Confederacy in retreat, but it never surrendered.
Black Americans began to experience personal choice for the first time in our 350 years in North America. The choices were restricted at first, but as we discovered the market, and the market discovered us, those choices expanded. We began to exercise personal options independent of, and without regard for, each other. We began acting like white Americans, except they had the advantage of white privilege, and we were still Black.
Every Black child born in a decade since 1970 was born into a socially more liberal and culturally more inclusive America – not necessarily less racist, but inarguably superficially more tolerant. If someone born in 1950 had a child in1975 and that child became a parent in 2000, there are three generations of a Black family, each with a distinct experience of what it means to be Black in America.
We must never forget the very idea of Black social equity triggers violent emotional, and very often a physical, white reaction.
MAGA Americans represent today’s White Citizens Council. Donald Trump is George Wallace, Ron DeSantis is Bull Connor, and the Republican Party equates to white Southern Democrats.
As the more overt chains of racial oppression have loosened, so have the bonds of community that have held us together and helped us to survive. Evolution has shaped all organisms to give top priority to survival.
We survived because our ancestors adapted and transformed themselves from a group of disparate enslaved individuals into an intelligent, tough, strategic, and resilient community.
Regardless of adverse conditions, that community had the moral and structural integrity to protect its children and prepare them to prevail. The fate of the individual was not separated from the destiny of the community. We are no longer that community.
What does that mean as we again prepare to engage in another existential battle with the eternal enemy?