Trump, racism and the American shame

By Martins Idakwo

The recent murder of George Floyd, an African-American by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, has sparked widespread outrage.

Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for at least seven minutes while he was handcuffed, lying facedown on the road, including another four minutes after the unarmed civilian stopped moving.

Officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng also helped restrain Floyd with officer Tou Thao standing nearby to obscure the view of onlookers and cameras.

The incident occurred during a raid in Powder Horn, a neighbourhood south of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was recorded on cell phone video by several bystanders.

The video recordings, showing Floyd repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe”, were widely circulated on social media platforms and broadcast by the media. The four officers involved were fired the next day. This is one death too many!

Some days later, United States President, Donald Trump, had tweeted ‘’I can’t stand back and watch this happen to a great American city. Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak radical left Mayor Jacob Frey. Get his act together and bring the city under control or I will send in the national guard and her the job done right”.

In another tweet, Trump said that ‘’ this thugs are dishonouring the memory of George Floyd and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to governor Tim Walz and told him that the military is solid with him all the way. Any difficulty and we would assume control, but when the looting starts the shooting starts. Thank you.’’

This sounds like what bullies and dictators do; they threaten to shoot protesters rather than address their concerns. The history books are evergreen.

In 1973, Trump and his company Trump Management were sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for housing discrimination against African-American renters. He settled the suit, entering into a consent decree to end the practices without admitting wrongdoing.

The Justice Department sued him again in 1978, claiming continued racial discrimination in violation of the consent decree. That settlement agreement, however, expired in 1982, ending the case.

From 2011 to 2016, Trump was the leading proponent of the already-debunked “Birtherism” conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. In a notorious and racially charged criminal case, Trump continued to insist, as late as 2019, that a group of black and Latino teenagers were guilty of the 1989 rape of a white woman in the Central Park jogger case, despite the fact that the five had been officially exonerated in 2002, based on a confession by an imprisoned serial rapist that was confirmed by DNA evidence.

Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign with a speech in which he spoke about Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

He claimed that a judge with “Mexican heritage” should be disqualified from deciding cases against him. He retweeted false statistics claiming that African Americans are responsible for the majority of murders of white Americans, and in some speeches, he has repeatedly linked African Americans and Hispanics with violent crime.

Trump’s controversial statements have been condemned by many observers around the world, but excused by some of his supporters as a rejection of political correctness and by others because they harbour similar racial sentiments.

Several studies and surveys have stated that racist attitudes and racial resentment have fueled Trump’s political dominance, and have become more significant than economic factors in determining the party allegiance of U.S. voters.

According to Martin Luther King Jr, there are three major evils; the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war. For the purpose of this article, we’ll stay on the first – racism.

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that racism is still alive all over America. Racial injustice is still the Negro’s burden and America’s shame. And we must face the hard fact that many Americans would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans but simultaneously a dictatorship over black Americans.

Donald Trump must face the fact that he has much to do in the area of race relations.

Now to be sure there has been some progress, and we should not overlook that.

Probably the greatest area of this progress has been the breakdown of justice segregation. And so the protest in some parts of the country has profoundly shaken the entire edifice of segregation.

I am convinced, though, that segregation is as dead as a doornail in its legal sense, and the only thing uncertain about it now is how costly some of the segregationists who still linger around will make the funeral of George Floyd.