Everyone knows the source of President Donald Trump’s power, according to a civil rights legend, but he’s been allowed to get away with his institutional destruction because not everyone is willing to admit that essential truth.
The president’s appeal has always been rooted in racism, argued civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill in an interview with Slate, and she said the U.S. Supreme Court was betraying the source of its own authority and esteem by granting Trump nearly unlimited power.
“The irony of it is that the U.S. Supreme Court got this reputation and the confidence of the American public after Brown [v. Board of Education],” Ifill said, “and that’s why, as much as this court is hollowing out Brown, they’ll never overturn it because that is how they became — how they got the reputation, certainly among Black people, for many decades, of being the people who come to your rescue. The shift started to happen with the Burger court in the 1980s.”
Many Americans express a hope to return to some idealized past, before Trump entered the political scene, but Ifill said there’s no past that’s unproblematic, and she argued that it would be more appropriate to push for a better future instead.
“I have no desire to return to 2010, I have no desire to return to the ’80s,” she said. “I’ve been a civil rights lawyer for 35 years. The ’80s were a nightmare. What are we returning to? I don’t have a dream time calling out to me. People will say, ‘When Obama was president.’ I mean, really? Because most of the videos you’ve seen of police killing unarmed black men, most of that was in the second Obama administration. That was Eric Garner. That was Ferguson. That was Walter Scott running in that park. So if you’ve been doing the work that I’ve been doing, you’re always invested in the future.”
That racism that’s always been embedded in American life has become a forbidden topic of discussion during the Trump era, Ifill argued, even as the president openly expresses racist views and deploys the government to enforce his hateful ideology.
“We’ve made it seem illegitimate to talk about racism,” Ifill said. “It’s almost like you’re being soft, you’re being anti-intellectual, you’re not doing the rigorous work of politics if you’re talking about race.”
“In fact, race is threaded through every institutional structure of this country, and we have someone who is exploiting it every day,” Ifill added. “It’s not that I’m talking about race, it’s that he just stood up the other day and said, We want the Danes, the Swedes, and the Norwegians. We don’t want people from shithole countries. We’re being told that it’s illegitimate to keep talking about race when we’re confronting a tsunami of a movement that uses racism as its stalking horse.”
Racism has always been the source of Trump’s political power and appeal, Ifill argued, and there’s no way to repair his destruction without confronting that.
“It is the lure that brought so many people into this movement,” she said. “It’s important to help people understand that that’s the bait they’re using. The bait that says, ‘Yeah, I’m not sure that those people are qualified,’ right? Yeah, all of that stuff that just lives in this country, that’s being used as the bait for this smash-and-grab, for this power grab, and I don’t think we’re doing this country any favors by steering people away from that realization.”
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