When Orval Faubus stood in the school house door to try to stop the integration of Little Rock Central High School, Louis Armstrong spoke out strongly against him. As recalled by Jelani Cobb in a fine new article in The New Yorker, Armstrong even cancelled a state department sponsored tour of the Soviet Union. Then, just as now, this strong expression of outrage against racial injustice prompted a predictable backlash from, in Cobb’s words, “legions of whites, shocked by the trumpeter’s apparent lack of patriotism.” Fast forward to Colin Kaepernick and the other athletes making a statement against the killings of mostly black young men by police by not standing for the performance of the “Star Spangled Banner”, and we see a lot of the same outraged backlash, especially from the Dotard in Chief. Once again the outrage is directed at people in the public eye who dare to speak out.
Yet the belief endures, from Armstrong’s time and before, that visible,affluent African-American entertainers are obliged to adopt a pose of ceaseless gratitude—appreciation for the waiver that spared them the low status of so many others of their kind. Stevie Wonder began a performance in Central Park last night by taking a knee, prompting [former failed Illinois] Congressman Joe Walsh to tweet that Wonder was “another ungrateful black multi-millionaire.” Ungrateful is the new uppity.
But back to Trump. It is not so much his “unhinged behavior” (we are used to that, and expect it) as it is the unbroken chain of casual (and not so casual) racism that stretches through Trump’s life from his full-page ads calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five through his contempt for Muslims and immigrants to his Department of Justices efforts to dismantle the community policing initiative. And now this. The only good thing about this latest tweet storm is that it seems to have had the opposite effect of what he wanted. This weekend dozens of NFL players protested in various ways, and even NFL owners (hardly a radical bunch) and TV commentators have joined them.
I will conclude with a longish quote from the end of Cobb’s article (bolding is mine). I hope it will encourage you to go read the whole thing.
Amid Trump’s nuclear brinksmanship and social-media provocation toward North Korea, amid the swollen gorges of water streaming through Puerto Rico, amid the craven and indefensible attempts to gut health care, amid the slower-moving crises of voting access, economic inequality, and climate change—amid all these things, Trump yet again found a novel way to diminish the nation he purportedly leads. He has authored danger in more ways than there are novel ways to denounce it. This is his singular genius. When this moment has elapsed, when some inevitably unsatisfactory punctuation has concluded the Trump era, we will be left with an infinitude of questions. But Trump, we will assuredly understand, is a small man with a fetish for the symbols of democracy and a bottomless hostility for the actual practice of it.