“God help us all.”
When Trump called the federal government’s response in Puerto Rico a success, Carmen Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan, said, “If he thinks the death of 3,000 people is a success, God help us all.”
Hurricanes Irma and Maria were more warnings about Trump. What he did back then is happening again with the coronavirus. And he’s in charge because whites voted for whiteness. God help us all.
The facts aren’t enough, even when they’re stark. No matter how difficult and deadly whiteness becomes for whites, whites won’t give it up. Today, whiteness kills large segments of whites by suicide, gun violence, inadequate health care, austerity, and addiction. But none of this is new, and none of this has ever mattered enough for whites.
In 1948, Harry Haywood wrote, in his book “Negro Liberation,” that Southern whites had more sickness, more death, more underfunded schools, more exploitation of women, lower wages, and less democracy than the rest of the country.
The writers of the book, “Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction,” underscore the point:
“[W]e disclose how white southern politicians obstructed their own region’s economic and educational development by blocking policies that would have helped it advance in these areas, for fear of upsetting the region’s increasingly rigid racial hierarchy.”
In the hands of an incompetent leader, elected for whiteness, the coronavirus is a weapon of war.
Jonathan Metzl’s book, “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland,” makes a similar point:
“[W]hite Americans make tradeoffs that negatively affect their lives and livelihoods in support of larger prejudices or ideals.”
The lesson is clear. Whites will sink the ship, and whites will go down with the ship, to avoid a color change in command. No lives can matter with whiteness because whiteness hates humanity.
This is deadly. This is the mass action of cults. This deal has demise as a detail: Whites willfully die for this war. Trump says he’s a wartime president, but his war isn’t against the coronavirus. His war is a race war. In the hands of an incompetent leader, elected for whiteness, the coronavirus is a weapon of war.
Irma and Maria were fair warnings about Trump. The coronavirus kills whites who voted for Trump too. But they will rest in peace, for they get what they wish for in Trump. Trump is all the help they want; he signs their Bibles. God help the rest of us.