"James Baldwin, for example, argued relentlessly that whites believe they are white because they consistently forget their history. In failing to deal honestly with the legacy of white supremacy, whites embrace their sense of identity as bound up with American virtue and in doing so they obscure notions of responsibility and culpability for historical wrongs and horrors that no reasonable person can deny took place. Baldwin felt that in refusing to deal honestly with the fact that their prosperity depends entirely on a history of black exploitation, rape, murder and pillage, whites imbue their identity with an innocence that allows them to see the future as open and free and their minutes and days as pregnant with possibility and power.
What happens in these instances is indeed a warping of time. The laws of the universe are experienced without friction for white Americans because a willful denial of the past leaves them with no sense that their present is insecure or that their future is in question. It will always be O.K. in exactly one minute, day, or year from now. But this is not many blacks’ experience of time. Rather, many blacks are now morbidly amused by America’s newfound horror over black death at the hands of the state. “We must do something to stop this tragedy!” the newly awakened shout.
But for us there is nothing new in this. Indeed, if we had been truly listened to so many decades ago the timeline of many innocent blacks would have been extended; the histories of so many families would be marked by more Christmases spent together; the futures of so many of the young and living would not be tinged with the apathy born of doubt and skepticism. These people — I suspect my graduate student is among them — would not look to tomorrow wondering if it really is in their power to change. We talk unceasingly in this country about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, but doing so isn’t only a matter of managing action, it is also about planning action, and doing that depends on what one really thinks an American minute amounts to.
To say at this point that his candidacy was controversial is, well, uncontroversial. In the time he made his case to the people we came to learn that he believes “the” African-Americans live in hell — linguistically defining us as a monolithic block of existential misery worthy of pity and more police. We learned that racial paranoia can be expressed openly by whites and left unchallenged; that nonwhite voters left unmonitored would “steal” the election; that the powerful can grab women by the genitals without remorse; that finding every way he could to avoid paying taxes and betting on a housing crisis was just called “business.”
All this indicates a man for whom normal expectations — what is supposed to happen a minute from now — are null and void. That he has been elected to the nation’s highest office indicates a largely white electorate that believes that the country’s future should be in the hands of a man to whom the present has no causal relationship to the past, and thinks that the future is what we make of it."
Trump’s Racial Time Machine - The New York Times
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