Finding the Beautiful Path

Oops, We Did It Again!

This country overwhelmingly reelected a president who has demonstrated clear disdain for equity and justice. We did not just regress; we relapsed. It’s hard to describe how I feel. I am not surprised, much like when Reagan was elected to quell the purported scourge of Black liberation, Black love, and most importantly Black Power, Trump’s reelection is a kind of whitelash, too. Just like last time around. In this context, whitelash is a double entendre. On the one hand, we know that the (white)lash, or whip, was a tool used to increase the productivity of enslaved Africans more than 400 percent, almost overnight (Sven & Beckert, 2021).1 The whip, the original whitelash revolutionized cotton production during chattel slavery more than an instrument that preceded it.

The second kind of whitelash, the whitelash I am invoking here is a systemic response to real or perceived encroachment into white spaces—whether they be physical, virtual, emotional, psychological, etc. Beneficiaries of unearned privilege based on their proximity to whiteness do not like to be told what to do. They do not want to hear that whiteness confers unearned privilege. They do not want to respect peoples’ pronouns. They do not want there to be any kind of affirmative action which accounts for the differential obstacles that people face based on their intersectional identities. Nah, they just want America to be great again—when every non-white, queer, non-Christian knew their place in America’s hierarchy.

I know the word now: Eviscerated. That’s the word. That’s the feeling. Not disappointed. Not shocked. Just… emptied out. As if something has been scooped from the marrow of my being and left me standing, as a husk or something. I should be angry, but I don’t even have that in me. Not today. Trump’s reelection is not a fluke, not an aberration, not a stumble on the road toward a more perfect union. It is confirmation. Confirmation that whiteness, as an economic and political apparatus, as a weaponized identity, is still the most powerful universal equivalent in this country. It blows my mind that people would rather suffer together under his boot than entertain the possibility of a world where suffering is not necessary at all. Trumpism produces proxy enemies, for his followers, in order to wage cultural wars in and launch weapons of mass distraction.

Now, his proponents no longer care about the economy all that much, not so long as Government employees can no longer include gender-pronouns on their email signatures. In film and television, this trope is called engineered heroism. Think about a TV show or movie that you’ve seen where the protagonist hires a friend or actor to create a threat, the fake danger gambit, only to emerge as the hero who stops said existential threat and therefore wins the heart of the impressed—and emotionally manipulated—love interest. This is an accurate depiction of politics in 2025.

Dr. Cornel West refers to this phenomena—when manipulation supplants the truth—as evidence of a spiritual Blackout. Politicians claim that they will slay dragons like CRT, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and wokeism in order to garner votes, political support, and political contributions. But, consistent with the engineered heroism trope, the people being saved are in no real danger in the first place. The danger that they feel is manufactured. There’s a maudlin and predictable outcome in all of this: people who fall for the fake danger gambit continually vote against their own best interest in order to ensure that the dragons slain by their political messiahs stay dead. Heather McGhee named this the “drained pool” mentality in The Sum of Us.2

Why They Drained the Pool

In the 1950s and 1960s, when federal courts ordered public swimming pools to be integrated, there was a huge whitelash. Rather than swim with Black people, white people in cities all over the country drained their pools entirely. They destroyed them. They actually rendered them unusable by filling them with concrete. This physical move is also resoundingly symbolic—whiteness concretized. Because whiteness—capitalism’s most violent lie, and most reliable tool—tells people that if they cannot hoard something, they should, instead, burn it to the ground. If Black people, brown people, poor people—and the intersections therein–might also have healthcare, a living wage, a future, then none of it is worth having, then these folks are out. They will drain the pool before they share it with people who they have been duped into believing are their enemies.

And that’s what Trumpism is. It’s the drained pool, the burning house, the empty lot where a future could have been built but was instead paved over with resentment, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, all in the interest of using painstakingly crafted WMD’s to hide the grift that Trump and his swamp mates control.

Trump doesn’t need to fix anything. He never has. He leaves destruction in his wake. His followers don’t expect their lives to get better. Not measurably. Their lives get better as the lives of their enemies become more difficult. They don’t need wages to rise or eggs to be affordable or their children to have a chance at something other than debt and despair.

They just need someone to punish. They need an “other,” they need a dehumanized other to suffer more than them. And he delivers that with aplomb. He conjures enemies—migrants, trans people, DEI initiatives, Black history in schools, pronouns in email signatures, CRT—because without those enemies, they might have to look inward. They may be faced with the reality that their love for Trump is fueled by a hatred of people who are different from them.

It’s also based on unflinching support of neoliberal, capitalistic notions of scarcity. This scarcity leads to a kind of zero-sum thinking. It’s not just about unwillingness to share. They firmly believe the lie that there are not enough resources to be equitably distributed. That’s why this contingent decries affirmative action, for example. They think that adding to the lives of their enemies subtracts from their lives. This is part of the proxy-enemy lie.

It May Be Worse Than We Thought

All of this matters to me, to us. As an educator, I cannot stop thinking about how much all of this matters to our most vulnerable students. And it weighs on the people who care for them. Education is wrestling with this tension. Trump wants to do away with the Department of Education. The Department of Education is not perfect. However, when it works well, it insists that education works to be the best version of itself by creating educational standards that are commensurate with job growth, and by holding school districts accountable for how they treat their most marginalized students.

Again, this is an instantiation of whitewash, which functions as a double entendre when we think about how overseers on plantations used lashes from a bullwhip to terrorize, threaten, and abuse Black people. This kind of whitewash represent a distinction without difference vis-à-vis the whitelash that characterized the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas.