A Nobel laureate's take on Donald Trump

Fresno CA

Description

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison wrote in The New Yorker: "Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of 'Americanness' is color." Reflecting on efforts -- largely by White men -- to define themselves by sustaining that poisonous definition, Morrison argues that those "who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status." In Morrison's formulation, fear-driven devotion to racial status is more powerful to many White Americans than even self-interest, shame or any belief in humanity. And it is this reality, that White Americans' anxieties in the face of a changing country have been and continue to be weaponized with disastrous and violent results, that has been instrumental in fueling the spread of so-called "replacement theory," the false and bigoted claim that elites are conspiring to replace Whites with minorities.