“If you don’t understand white supremacy, then everything else will only confuse you.”

— Neely Fuller, Jr., author and mentor to the late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing

The most important and intriguing thing about white supremacy is not its cruelty nor its utter inhumanity. To be sure, white supremacy is that — cruel and inhumane. But its most salient aspect is its tenacity, its sheer ability to simply endure over the last five centuries. It has done so by deftly adapting to changing conditions and circumstances. Whenever whte supremacy/white racism is exposed as the consummate evil and scourge that it is; whenever it is outnumbered, or out-legislated, or even out-gunned, white supremacy/white racism will “go to ground” (underground) where it re-groups, re-organizes, and re-assesses its position, tactics and strategies. And then, when “circumstances” permit and/or the “right” leadership emerges, white supremacy/white racism comes roaring back in new form and often, literally, in new clothes as a “new and improved,” more palatable product. …

From the Ku Klux Klan to The Proud Boys

“You can’t tell by just lookin’ which white folks got that racist crap in ’em. So, until they show you that they don’t, you assume that they all do.”

— Willie Lee Dyer (1915–1991), my mother

Dear Sisters and Brothers:

We are on the cusp of perhaps the most dangerous time in our long and tortured sojourn in this nation-state — or, at least since the 1968 brutal murder of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and quite possibly since the immediate aftermath of the Civil War 156 years ago.

I recently watched (again) the 2016 Hollywood (now Netflix) flick, “The Free State of Jones.” That movie graphically depicts the period when thousands of defeated and disaffected Confederate veterans and their millions of white southern sympathizers first organized themselves to resist the then-new political, economic, social and cultural dispensation, namely the federal government’s militarily-enforced edict that the former slaves, “henceforth and forever,” were to be treated like human beings rather than as chattel property. …

It’s not the Negro problem; it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think that you are white.

— James Baldwin, during a Q & A session following a speech at Harvard.

Not long before her death, in an appearance on the now-defunct PBS “Charlie Rose” gabfest, the late, brilliant author, Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel Prize Laureate and social critic, Toni Morrison, answered my above question this way: “White people have a very, very serious problem.”

She put the matter in psychological and moral terms: White folks’ hatred of black people is really a manifestation of their own self-hatred, she argued; their outward animus against not just black people, but all and anyone who does not “look like” them was more of a projection than anything else — a refusal to recognize, indeed a denial, of their own inner moral weakness. …

In a recent interview with radio host Dean Obeidallah, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) acknowledged that Trump is an “authoritarian” rather than an out-and-out fascist. But Sanders blamed both Trump and the Democratic Party for the “division” that characterizes today’s United States. (Neither Obeidallah nor Sanders, however, dared to use the “R-Word” in assessing Trump. And Obeidallah should know better especially since he is not white and a Muslim. He does fancy himself as a “liberal,” though).

To wit: When asked specifically about Trump’s authoritarian proclivities and whether such a descriptor is “overblown,” the good senator responded thusly,

“It is not overblown to say that Donald Trump is an authoritarian who does not believe in democracy.” …

And If Chicago’s Black Female Mayor Didn’t Know, She Should’ve Known

If I had made the wrong move, I felt like they would have shot me.

— Anjanette Young

If this had been a white woman in Lincoln Park [the predominately white north side of the city], this would not have happened.

— Attorney for Sistah Young

By now, the whole world has seen the full-frontal nudity of one Anjanette Young, a fifty-year-old black woman and Chicago social worker.

Sistah Young was essentially sexually assaulted in public by an entire phalanx of white male Chicago cops on a brisk early evening back in February 2019. You see, Chicago’s Finest used a battering ram to break through Sistah Young’s front door and then rushed in with guns (including automatic rifles) drawn, pointed — but thankfully this time, not blazing. They “caught” her in the threatening act of standing “buck naked” in the bedroom of her own apartment, as she prepared herself for bed and a well-deserved good night’s sleep. Her anticipated rest was overdue because this always-giving-to-others and “essential” social worker had not long returned home after a long and grueling shift of counseling distressed and downhearted, mostly black and brown people. …

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955

It is one thing when black people, including yours truly, argue that Donald Trump’s avid, indeed rabid, support among seventy million-plus “Americans,” the vast, vast majority of whom just happen to be “white,” is grounded in rock-hard, unyielding, and historic white racism, white supremacy. When black people point to this “ideology,” this fear, this resentment we are simply stating the obvious. …

Author’s Note:

This essay is dedicated to all those “black conservatives” who can’t get enough of Donald Trump. Especially the “late, great” Herman Cain.

As Trump’s court cases contesting the election continue to fall flat like a never-ending line of dominoes; as state election officials everywhere have steadfastly refused to submit to his demands that they throw the election to him even as they certify Biden’s win; as both “mainstream” and even many not-so-mainstream media begin, finally, referring to Biden as the “President-elect” and more and more GOP elected officials do the same; and, of course, as the old clock on the wall keeps tick-tick-ticking inexorably towards twelve o’clock high on January 20, 2021, Donald Trump is displaying an increasingly frenzied, desperate frustration, even mania, as the law of diminishing returns closes in on him. …

Now comes the astonishing news that the Georgia State Board of Elections will allow county election supervisors to stop and/or disregard would-be (new) registered voters who do not have a car registered in the state.

This is an obvious and direct effort to not merely suppress but to eliminate altogether the voting power of low-income, “urban” (read: black) voters and, of course, elderly people, disabled people, and students — anybody and everybody who may or traditionally has voted for Democrats. This new “guidance” has been promulgated just in time for the January 5 run-off election for Georgia’s two US Senate seats. That election carries more potential and possibility than perhaps even the late presidential election because it will very likely decide the makeup of the Senate. …