HuffPo - Calling Out White Supremacy Comes With Consequences For Black Folks

[TomCADem]

The fact that ESPN has reprimanded a host for calling the President a white supremacist is outrageous.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/calling-out-white-supremacy-is-a-costly-consequence-for-black-folks_us_59ba9851e4b086432b04e923?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

In both the year preceding and the months following Donald Trump’s election, his most fervent detractors embraced a common theme: the romantics of “normal.”

The refrain was and continues to be that Trump’s bizarre, megalomaniacal obsessions and his defiance of political tradition “undermined our democratic norms” — and that given this, Trump’s reign “is not normal.” There is, in these notions, a subtle naïveté, which ignores the fact that the illiberalism accompanying a Trump presidency had already been met upon millions of black and brown Americans to some degree. Police violence had not waned, voter disenfranchisement persisted, and white males were largely granted blind deference prior to the 2016 election.

But the longing for normalcy speaks to a very real departure from presidential decorum under the current regime, and with very real impact. It is, for example, unique for a president to publicly defend neo-Nazis; or oafishly endorse police brutality; or boast about sexual assault; or claim Mexican immigrants are rapists, drug mules and violent thugs. And from a president whose message of ethnocentric nationalism captivated millions, these are performances with clear reverberations throughout our nation. They grant allowance to those wresting American identity for themselves at the expense of all others, and in response to people of this ilk, complicity breeds violence.

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Her tweets were met with vitriol from Twitter users who deem such labels insults rather than provable identifiers. To these users, being called a racist or white supremacist is unseemly, even if the label is technically apt.