Jemele পাহাড় Called Donald Trump a White Supremacist. Where's the Lie? 

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Earlier this week, Jemele Hill, an African American woman and journalist at ESPN, tweeted that “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.” Given Trump’s own racist rhetoric toward Mexicans, Muslims, and African Americans, the cozy relationship he has enjoyed with Steve Bannon, and the fact that Ku Klux Klan endorsed him for president, one is hard-pressed to find the lie in Hill’s words. But what far too many white Americans hate more than racism itself is being called racist.

Many white people feel that this term is used too haphazardly, and that being called racist is a silencing tactic deployed by hypersensitive people of color who don’t want to move on from the past. It strikes me that the problem is exactly the converse of how many white folks formulate it: Black people and other people of color have not called out racism enough, and because white supremacy persists, many black folks continue to confront social and economic conditions – poor schools, excessive policing, disproportionate poverty, and overt racial antagonism – that should have been eradicated 50 years ago. It is white people who have romanticized the past. This is what the phrase “Make America Great Again” means – that the white American past with its visible and pervasive white dominance is better than the moderately more racially diverse and inclusive present.

Black people in this country are great believers in the American promise that “liberty and justice for all” is what “we” are striving for. Thus, many of us also bought into the widespread idea that whatever enduring problems with racism this country still has, we would never get anywhere close to the problems that plagued us 50 years ago or a 100 years ago.

But here we are: with Donald Trump,with Donald Trump, a man who was accused of refusing to rent to African Americans in a 1970s lawsuit, a man who questioned a judge’s ability to decide a case impartially because he is Mexican, serving as our president. Yes, these facts about Trump have been repeated so many times that you are probably tired of reading them. The repetitive nature of their being said does not in any way diminish the egregious offense and error that these comments represent.

After Jemele Hill’s comments, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called her words “a fireable offense.” ESPN opted not to fire Hill, but did indicate that her comments were inappropriate. On Wednesday night, Hill issued an apology to ESPN saying, “My regret is that my comments and the public way I made them painted ESPN in an unfair light. My respect for the company and my colleagues remains unconditional."

The only regrettable thing here is that we have a racist president, and a country full of people who don’t want to tell the truth about it. That black women like Hill, Rep. Maxine Waters, journalist April Ryan, and the 94 percent of black women who voted against Donald Trump are standing up to this madness should be applauded, not vilified.

The only people who should apologize are Sanders for using her White House bully pulpit to advocate for the violation of Hill’s First Amendment rights as both a private citizen and a journalist, and ESPN for acting as though Hill’s comments in any way did them harm. It is precisely this kind of cultural equivocation about who is at fault for racism that makes it hard to dismantle it. To be clear, it is not only Trump voters who struggle to take ownership of the racist choice they have made. Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us in his devastatingly clear piece on the unapologetic racism of Trump that appeared at

this week that everybody from Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders has chosen to say that Trump’s broad white coalition is, in the aggregate, neither racist nor sexist.

What is more appalling is that this circling of the wagons to protect the virtuous self-image of white voters is identity politics at its finest. But identity politics disturbs Americans only when black people like Jemele Hill point to the racism of white people like Donald Trump. This is bullshit of the highest and most dangerous order and it must stop.

The people who call out racism, by name and with proper definitions like white supremacy, are never the problem. Racists are and will always be the problem. Donald Trump is the problem. His hired "Yes Lady" Sarah Huckabee Sanders is the problem. Those on both the right and the left who act as cultural apologists for white racism are the problem.

Jemele Hill told the truth. But we live in a post-truth, post-facts era, where anything that makes us uncomfortable is a lie. If this moment of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and the destruction they have wrought should teach us anything, it is about never-ending perils of building houses on sand. The refusal of people who can read and think for themselves to admit that Donald Trump is a white supremacist is tantamount to building our cultural house on sand, and then being shocked when it inevitably falls apart. The death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville is what it looks like when things fall apart. After Charlottesville, Trump argued that there was “blame on both sides.” There is no excuse for this willful rejection of the truth. This man had to be forced to condemn white supremacy. That he had to be forced as a matter of political expedience to do so is, of course, no surprise, because it is not the nature of human beings to condemn the very ideologies in which they wholeheartedly believe. It\'s also no surprise that he returned to the "both sides" argument again just this week.

It seems clear that many white Americans struggle to accept that we have placed a ranting, raving, racist madman in charge of the free world. But let me qualify that “we.” By “we,” I mean y’all. Black women like me and Hill did not vote this man into office. That is entirely the victory of, as Coates reminded us this week, "a broad white coalition,” across class, education levels, and gender. Donald Trump is the president White America chose for itself.

These are facts. Not propaganda. Jemele Hill does not have to apologize for saying so. It is perverse and appalling that ESPN would expect such an apology from her. It is even more disturbing that there is a cultural expectation in this moment that those who criticize the president should be fired.

Others have pointed out that ESPN fired Curt Schilling after he made transphobic comments in 2016. Some folks wonder why Hill should not have the same consequences. There are two reasons. First, sports is not an apolitical space. Like every other thing in America, sports is bound up with the politics of race and gender in this country. To pretend that political commentary has no place in sports is only to further perpetuate the lie that every aspect of our society is not shaped by problematic ideologies. But the treatment of Colin Kaepernick and the boycott of the NFL being undertaken by many African Americans in this moment teach us otherwise. Second, to act as though Hill’s anti-racist comments are any way equal to Schilling’s transphobic comments is to engage in the very kind of false equivalences that Trump engaged in when he said there was violence on both sides in Charlottesville.

Racism and anti-racism are not the same thing. White supremacists are the perpetrators. People of color who must endure their absurd ideologies and immoral abuses of power are the prey – the victims. We must dismantle white supremacy. And this cannot happen until we can tell the truth.

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