Michael Eric Dyson: White Supremacy Governs Every Political Decision in America

EXCERPT:

DYSON: "Yeah, here’s the hope. Now it’s a negative hope, so to speak, but, you know, if Donald Trump is reelected, that has got to say something to the folk who don’t support him. And look, as many people as there are that support him, there's millions more who don’t. There will no longer just be Donald Trump, because what will have been revealed is that there’s something roiling beneath the surface that is fundamentally in opposition to us as human beings. That’s what’s gonna happen, that could happen. And to finish my thought about what happened on January 6, the real religion, the real politics, the real force of society, the real democracy is whiteness. A particularly virulent, narrowly focused, narcissistic whiteness is the real basis of what America is about. The great philosopher Beyoncé Giselle Knowles said, when giving an award to the football quarterback, ex-football quarterback Colin Kaepernick, said, 'It has been said that American racism is so deeply entrenched in the country that it’s identified with America itself, so that when you challenge racism, it looks as if you’re challenging America.' So many more people will come to grips with the fact that this is not simply about Donald Trump. This is about a way of life that we have embraced. And I think the fall will be precipitous and I think the revelation will be thundering, but we have to continue to really gnaw away at that resistance. That’s the only choice we have, because if they can win that battle of the will and they can make us believe there is nothing we can do about it, they will have won the ultimate prize, which is the conversion of us into a kind of hopeless knot of voters who don’t even use what we have at our disposal — a lever to make a difference in this democracy."