This commentary is by Lane Felting, a psychologist who grew up in Sharon, left to go to college, and during the Covid-19 pandemic moved back to Sharon to spend time actively writing.
Donald Trump’s response to his indictment and arraignment have been characteristically bellicose and scattered. He has suggested that his indictment is politically motivated, and that it is racially motivated, and that it is un-American.
Of these, the first has received the most discussion but it is the second and third that I find particularly interesting because they, and particularly the second point, offer a window into the plight of the Republican Party.
The assertion that the New York district attorney’s case against Trump is racially motivated — that Alvin Bragg is bringing charges against Trump specifically because Trump is white — is the logical and perhaps inevitable result of the Republican’s Southern Strategy.
It shows the extent to which the Republican Party has shrugged off any allegiance it once had to Black and brown people and has come to adopt the same white supremacist views that prevailed in the South after the Civil War — views that doomed Reconstruction to failure.
One of the central fears of American Southerners throughout our history is that the U.S. might live up to its high ideals and apply the law equally to all citizens; and that if Black and brown people were to find themselves in positions of authority in the state, the execution of the law might no longer favor white people.
It was this fear that gave rise to Jim Crow laws and it was this fear that led to the severe and brutal efforts to suppress the vote of Black and brown people in the South in the decades following the collapse of Reconstruction.
When Trump claims that Bragg (along with Letitia James and Fani Willis) is being racist by applying the law without fear or favor, he is invoking this fear. He is reminding his audience that the application of the law in the U.S. has always favored white people over Black and brown people (to say nothing of Indigenous people), and he is railing against the erosion of his privilege.
When he says that equal application of the law is un-American, he is accidentally making an important point — the law in this country has always been unequally applied, and it has always favored people who look like Trump. The erosion of white favoritism (read, white supremacy) is what propelled Trump into the presidency in the first place — after eight years of being led by our first Black president, a powerful minority of American voters found Trump’s racist rhetoric deliriously refreshing.
Those of us who did not support Trump might take this opportunity to give ourselves a self-righteous pat on the back, but this would be a mistake. The Southern Strategy that the Republican Party has adopted and that has culminated in Trump is not merely a reflection of the mendacity of the Republican Party. It is a reflection of the white electorate, North and South.
We should remember that the Republican Party was founded on an abolitionist platform and we should realize that if the Republican Party can give in to racism, the Democratic Party (with its mixed history on racial issues, to put it politely) is far from secure.
Racism is a problem in the white electorate, and until we in white America learn to do better, racism will continue to be a defining feature of American culture and history.
