curated news excerpts & citations
Steward Beckham: A Presidency of Racist Memes
This morning, I woke up to the news that the president had posted a social media video depicting the former and first Black head of state and his wife as chimpanzees. It was grotesque. It was also tragically unsurprising. We’ve had roughly a decade of this kind of political rot: a carnival barker’s politics of enrichment for the wealthiest, paired with racist shiny objects tossed to a sizable, influential slice of the working public like bait.
A few Republicans pushed back. Senator Tim Scott suggested it was racist, but also may have been a “mistake” by the president or his communications team. Congressman Mike Lawler also framed it as a possible mistake while admitting, plainly, that this wasn’t borderline anything, just raw racism. It was overt.
I grew up on a saying my mother repeated often: what happens in the dark comes to light. American politics has its own version of that law. Think of Ronald Reagan launching his 1980 general-election campaign with a “states’ rights” speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi, only sixteen years after the murders of civil rights workers there. On paper, “states’ rights” can sound like a tidy argument about federalism. In historical practice, especially in the post–Civil Rights era, it functioned as coded reassurance: desegregation went too far; the old order should reassert itself; separate but equal (that peculiar institution’s afterlife) deserved a second wind.
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Same with Reagan’s “welfare queen” trope.
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So when the president posts something like last night’s video, he’s not merely being tasteless or provocative. He’s reaffirming the bargain at the center of his rise: political power built on the destabilization of the country through racial grievance through the insistence that a Black president disproving racist stereotypes was not progress but an existential theft. …
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