The conversation surrounding Trump’s latest racist rants has provoked us to revisit author Toni Morrison’s 1975 keynote address at Portland State University on the true purpose of racism.
ByJulia Craven. Huff Post.
It began on July 14 when President Donald Trumptold four Democratic congresswomen of color — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — to “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Hedoubled downon this attack during a press conference on the 15th and in another series of tweets the following day. He renewed the attacks once more duringa campaign rally on July 17. He insisted, repeatedly, that given their criticism of his politics and policy, they must hate America. (The crowd even shouted “Send her back!” in response to his comments about Omar.)
On July 27, Trump called Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) a “brutal bully” who was failing to “clean up” Baltimore, his “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” of a district (as the president put it). Later that evening, Trump conjured up a Reconstruction-era tropeof black politicians and proclaimed without evidence that Cummings was a corrupt congressman who “has done nothing but milk Baltimore dry.” Two days later, Trump went after civil rights leaderAl Sharpton, referring to him as “a con man” and “troublemaker” who allegedly “hates whites and cops.”
Simmering underneath the public outrage over the president’s attacks has been a conversation among journalists, political observers and pundits who are mulling over whether calling Trump a “racist” is accurate, how this will play as a political strategy for the next presidential election and whether anything the president has said can trulyspeak to his heart and mind.
It’s an exhausting, pointless conversation that serves no true function, and time is wasted when spent explaining why telling people of color to “go back” whence they came or baselessly claiming that black public figures are corrupt is deeply racist. But the conversation has provoked me to revisit author Toni Morrison’s 1975 keynote address at Portland State Universitywhere she outlined the responsibility of artists and scholars to tell the truth, the true purpose of racism and what underlines the motivations of racists.
It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
This quote, arguably the best known from the keynote, has been getting a bit of play online. It’s poignant and speaks to the frustration many black folks and people of color more broadly share about this week’s news cycle. Yet the full context of this speech makes it even more relevant to what’s currently unfolding before us — both Trump’s language, the surrounding debate and people’s reactions to it all — and lays more plain the utter failure of journalism in this moment.
Morrison begins her keynote by reading an inventory list from ”The Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1957.” She makes extensive note of the dehumanizing language used to describe enslaved Africans and how they were listed as “imports and exports,” devoid of all humanity and treated as monolithically as rice. It isn’t the responsibility of historical statistics to provide such information, she maintains. That responsibility lies with artists and scholars, who also have the duty of unpacking how race itself has never been the real issue. This is, and has always been, about using distraction as a tool to create a dynamic that maintains white supremacy and the access white people have to power and profit.
