Well, so much for those “You Ain’t Black” T-shirts .
President Donald J. Trump and the Republicans — always ready to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as their handling of the pandemic demonstrates — were all set to capitalize on former Vice President Joe Biden’s gaffe that presumed to tell black people they couldn’t really be black if they voted for Trump, as if there aren’t black Republicans and conservatives. But Biden’s remark, however maladroit, contained the kernel of a question: Might a black Trump supporter actually be voting against his own interests?
The answer to that became apparent once again as “the Birther President” illustrated why he is called “the Birther President.” “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump tweeted in response to Minneapolis citizens protesting the shocking death of George Floyd, an African-American man, at the hands of a white officer who had his knee pressed on Floyd’s neck despite his plea for breath. Looting, burning a Minneapolis police station: These things are never right, and they only harm the protesters themselves. But you don’t call your fellow, protesting citizens “thugs” and threaten them with violence. At least a real leader doesn’t.
In times like these I turn to the words of a real leader. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was arriving at a campaign stop in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968 when he learned the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Two months and two days later, Kennedy would meet the same fate. But on the night of April 4, he not only broke the news to the waiting, largely African-American crowd, he sought to comfort, inspire and find common ground without presumption. Here in part is what he said:
“I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.
“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black -- considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible -- you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization -- black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God..’…”
The narcissistic Trump is the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time. When he spoke of “American carnage” in that brutal Steve Bannon-flavored inaugural address, he was speaking of a self-fulfilling prophecy. His leadership vacuum —created by white working-class grievance and affluent exploitation — has led to the American carnage of the pandemic mishandling, a ravaged economy and a hatred of the other of which Floyd’s death is but the latest manifestation.
But leading ourselves, as we must, we will find that wisdom that comes “through the awful grace of God.”