Trump Is a Talking Example of White Ambivalence
The coronavirus is more proof that no one needed
Trump’s mind and mouth are moving targets.
It’s hard to nail them down, and white identity is the same.
Recently, the Washington Post published an article with Trump’s contradictory statements about the coronavirus. The article shows what many people can already tell—Trump says one thing and then says the opposite.
Speaking about the coronavirus, on February 28, Trump said, “It’s going to disappear.” Then on March 17, Trump said, “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
Every day, Trump unapologetically talks out of both sides of his mouth. His words go back and forth, and his double-talk comes from the double-minded ways of whiteness. Trump is a talking and tweeting machine of white ambivalence.
Merriam-Webster defines ambivalence as:
simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (such as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action
2 a: continual fluctuation (as between one thing and its opposite)
b: uncertainty as to which approach to follow
White ambivalence comes from white identity.
In her book, “How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America,” Karen Brodkin says, “In one sense, the experience of whiteness is an experience of ambivalence.”
Whites don’t experience white ambivalence alone. Whites and white institutions force people who aren’t white to encounter and fight white ambivalence too.
Joel Olson, in his piece on polarization, quotes Dr. King:
“[W]hites have always been ambivalent toward black struggles for progress. ‘The white backlash,’ King wrote, ‘is an expression of the same vacillations, the same search for rationalizations, the same lack of commitment that have always characterized white America on the question of race.’”
White ambivalence has a lukewarm quality. It should make people sick and spit. It’s all over the map; it’s north and south at the same time. It selfishly holds conflicting positions like a three-fifths clause and truths it calls self-evident.
White ambivalence is “sometimey.” See it in Lincoln. See it in Jefferson. Read it in court rulings. Measure it in public opinion polls. White ambivalence is a swing voter; it’s the two-party system, and it needs to hear from both sides. It goes with Obama, it says that’s enough, and then it goes with Trump.
Trump should look familiar to whites. Trump makes visible the daily humiliation of white identity. In his essay, On Being White and Other Lies, James Baldwin wrote, “And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves.”
Trump’s presidency is a device that puts whiteness in picture-in-picture mode. He’s a mirror—Trump reflects white self-esteem. And whites can do whatever the hell they want with their mirror: look at it, ignore it, move it, cover it, or even smash it. But none of that changes the picture, and there’s no two ways about it.