The Game of Racism

How to keep it fun for white people

From Fox News’ coverage of Trump’s latest rally:

Almost immediately, Trump charged that the “Democrat party is now being led by four left-wing extremists who reject everything that we hold dear” — an apparent reference to the “Squad.” The comment drew jeers, but no chanting, from attendees.

There’s something about that “jeers, but no chanting” bit that reminds me how this game is played in Trump world.

The guy has gotten so obvious about his racism in recent weeks that even news organizations previously accustomed to use euphemisms like “racially charged” in reference to his mouth-farts are starting to say okay, that’s racist.

And out in the white world, the pronouncement of such a judgment is always the part where the dumbest cracker motherfucker you know goes, “I’m not racist, you’re the Real Racist™” — because, in his mind, by using that term you’ve proven he hit a nerve when he told you to go back where you came from or that only rats would live the way you live. He has seen video clips of dirty alleys he was told were in Baltimore, rather than out back of a meth shack in Kentucky, so he knows he is only telling the truth. Why else would you get mad at him?

These guys may not be able to tell the difference between “your” and “you’re,” but they get mighty lawyerly when it comes to race.

So of course Trump did that in follow-up, saying the black Maryland Congressman he had slandered a day or two before was himself a “racist” who had “played the race card.” And as your racist friend might do (unless he got a smack in the mouth the first time, which unfortunately has yet to happen to Trump), the President doubled down at his rally on Thursday in Cincinnati, in the Kentucky part of Ohio. Fox News again:

Trump then condemned the “wasted money” that has led to “blight” in inner cities run by Democrats, but initially declined to specify which cities he was referring to, because as he put it “we want no controversy.”

By “we want no controversy” he meant: use your imagination. Because Trump supporters will always tell you every city with a substantial black population — even New York, safe at it is — is a shithole, and his fans’ fear of the black plague contaminating their suburbs is what keeps them Trumpified.

Still, Trump couldn’t restrain himself, and he went on to attack Los Angeles (“horrible, horrible disgusting conditions”) and San Francisco, which he didn’t need to characterize because his rightwing buddies have already busily spread a poopoo-caca meme about it. Shit and rats and black people! Is it any wonder they scream for the Great White Father for protection?

And because Trump is better funded than your local racist, he engaged 10 or 20 black people to stand up in his crowd Thursday night and hold aloft “TRUMP & Republicans Are Not RACIST” t-shirts, to the applause of ten thousand white people who will return to their jobs and hangouts knowing who the Real Racists™ are.

At the end of its story, Fox News gave us some background on the “jeers, but no chanting” at the rally:

Trump said earlier Thursday that he would “prefer” that his supporters at the rally don't engage in a similar chant.

“I don’t know that you can stop people,” Trump said. “We’ll see what we can do. I’d prefer that they don’t. But if they do it, we’ll have to make a decision then.”

Trump rallies are very well-orchestrated affairs — the original “send them back” chant came after Lara Trump whipped up the Greenville, North Carolina crowd against Reps. Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Pressley (“If you don’t love our country — the president said it...” “Leave!”). The occurrence or absence of the chant was no more an uncontrolled phenomenon than that sudden appearance of a cluster of African-Americans holding up Trump t-shirts in Cincinnati.

Nonetheless Fox News encouraged the notion that the restraint of the crowd had been a matter of some suspense:

Even his closest advisers had seemed uncertain as to what might transpire.

“If it happened again, he might make an effort to speak out about it,” Vice President Mike Pence said recently.

The real intended message here is not that the great mass of Trumpkins had been educated or humbled by the moral outcry against their previous racist tropes — as if anyone believes crowds, let alone a demagogue’s crowds, work that way — but that they and Trump are working on the same routine. They know better than to scream the grosser slurs — they know, as Ronald Reagan did, that you save that kind of talk for other white people who share your feelings. They know when to let the string out and when to reel it back it, especially when the Boss is giving them cues.

They don’t think of racism as a blight or a curse or anything really bad; they think of it as a game where, as long as you don’t use one of a handful of proscribed words, the black and brown people and their white friends (who, in the words of popular conservative Rod Dreher, “think more highly of other races than they do their own people”) can’t touch them — and in fact, by the rules of the game, if you make them mad then you get to call them Racist. Which just makes the game of Racism more fun.

And you have to keep finding new ways, as the President and his enablers do, to keep that game amusing for white people — because any game can get boring when you’re never allowed to lose.