How White America Decriminalizes the White Crimes of White Criminals
The impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump is an example
The impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump was another white effort to decriminalize the white crimes of a white criminal. The Senate acquitted Trump of his white crimes because of white innocence and the white mob. White innocence and the white mob; those are two ways white criminals get away with white crimes.
Specifically, the denial of witnesses was a familiar method to secure white innocence by suppressing and ignoring evidence. Whites have used the legal system and the law for white innocence, and Toni Morrison described that para-legal work as “one who makes new laws out of the shards of those he breaks.” Used that way, the law makes consciences white and unclear.
One clearly absurd claim to white innocence was that Trump acted in the public’s interest. That claim comes from the mind that says, “Our ancestors tamed a continent,” “Black people are too stupid to vote for me,” and President Zelensky “should want to do this [the investigations] himself.” In that mind, it doesn’t matter if Trump benefits from investigations into the Bidens, and it doesn’t matter if whites benefit from whiteness.
During the investigations into Bill Clinton, Morrison called Clinton “our first black president” to illustrate who could identify with him for reasons that shouldn’t be. Biden may or may not be our first Black vice president, but Biden is experiencing a recognizable side of whiteness: Many whites justify the abuse of power based on how worthy they judge the abused. Defamation, double standards, and doubt—they justified Trump’s abuse of power at Biden’s expense.
This is how white terrorists came back to power after the Civil War; this is how white terrorists continue on and offline today; this is how white America makes whiteness.
The scholar Steve Martinot has identified a white pattern: Whites whiten themselves by “locating criminality in the victim in order to decriminalize the violence that victimizes.” That’s what Trump did to the Bidens and Ukraine. Trump located criminality in his victims to decriminalize his violence that victimizes.
White victimhood and sympathy have roles in white innocence too because sympathy is a strategy. Remember how Trump’s lawyers, to include William Barr, appealed to the public to sympathize with Trump? Trump’s supporters have “in-his-shoes” sympathy for Trump; it’s a sympathy that they would never have or walk in for Obama.
And then there’s the white mob. Cameron McWhirter’s book, Red Summer, recounts the white terrorism of 1919 that whites got away with because—law enforcement was guilty and complicit, whites acted as a mob in white solidarity, and whites feared the white mob too. The white mob interferes with justice, and in the halls of Congress, the Republican Party is the white mob, and they fear the white mob in their districts that will turn on them.
White America still decriminalizes the white crimes of white criminals by using the same twin tactics that haven’t changed—white innocence and the white mob. This is how white terrorists came back to power after the Civil War; this is how white terrorists continue on and offline today; this is how white America makes whiteness. For white crimes to continue, whiteness must continue, and for Trump’s next white crime, white America had to make Trump white again.