President Trump and Charlottesville: Uncivil Mourning and White Supremacy (original) (raw)
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Charlottesville made clear that white nationalists see Donald Trump as their savior. Former KKK leader, David Duke confirmed the linkage: "We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That's what we believed in. That's why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he's going to take our country back." Reclaiming the country for white Christians has long been the not so subtle subtext of "Make America Great Again." Trump's unwillingness to condemn purveyors of racial hatred, without also condemning protesters against that hatred, made clear that "Make America Great Again" is not only a tribalist cry against the diversity of America today, but also a willful erasure and literal whitewashing of American history. Despite the swastikas and Neo-Nazi chants, the hatred on display in Charlottesville is not a foreign import. It is home-grown racism and anti-Semitism, fertilized in American soil. Ironically, the Christian appropriation of the central Jewish origin story greatly abetted an American politics of exclusion.
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In recent years, a wide range of political theorists have turned to mourning (" the funeral ") as a response to loss that can further the work of democratic repair within progressive social and political movements. Drawing on the #BlackLivesMatter movement's critique of contemporary white supremacy and the carceral state as a starting point, I argue that the turn to mourning tends to foreground what I call " exceptional mourning, " which has three core pitfalls: 1) It risks pathologizing forms of " antagonistic politics " driven by anger and disruption ("the riot "). 2) It rests on assumptions about white moral psychology that drive unduly optimistic expectations about what mourning can do to transform persistent hierarchies. 3) It inadvertently downplays questions of hierarchy and division confronted through widely varying accounts of anti-racist political action within the Black radical tradition and haunted today by the legacy of respectability politics. To illustrate these three claims, I turn to Martin Luther King's, Jr., whose politics might be read through the lens of mourning if not for his own transformation. While the early King's political rhetoric and practice can be read through a lens of "prophetic mourning " that aims to transform unmerited suffering into democratic repair, I argue that King began to question the underlying assumptions of a politics of mourning around 1963. King's post-1963 rhetoric and practice surprisingly aimed to effect change in dynamic reciprocity with a more openly antagonistic politics embodied in the riot, effectively drawing on the threat that the Black riot represented to Northern liberal elites in order to confront the latter with a choice between the " good " militancy of nonviolence and the " bad " militancy of riots. In closing, I argue that King's shift suggests that the current turn to mourning can be supplemented with more sustained reflections on a) the strategic interplay between different forms of militancy and b) the viability of an antagonistic politics of disruption within movements that refuse respectability politics. I conclude by suggesting that a greater focus on reception as opposed solely to the practices of the marginalized themselves might better inform an engagement between mourning and other registers of anti-racist politics.
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