FEATURE
BY: BROTHER DAVID H. JACKSON, JR., PH.D.
AMERICA’S RESPONSE TO THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: TRUMPISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY
I
received a startling phone at about three o’clock in the morning of November 9, 2016. It was my son, Brother David H. Jackson, III, with the sound of despair in his voice, calling from his Florida A&M University residence hall. “Mom and dad, Trump won!” We had fallen asleep before the final election results were reported, but attempted to calm his fears even though we were flabbergasted and disappointed. We would be okay. As a historian, I could not help but reflect on history as I tried to go back to sleep and process what this meant for us in 2016 America. So, what is history? The late master teacher, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, taught that “history is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass that people use, to locate themselves on the map of human geography. History tells a people where they have been and what they have been. Where they are and what they are. But most important, history tells a people where they still must go and what they still must be.” Within this framework, I analyze the historicity of the matter. The election of Donald J. Trump was white America’s response to the country’s first non-white-male president, Barack Hussein Obama, an African American. Since the era
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of Reconstruction, ostentatious advancements of the Black race have often been followed by what historians call a “white backlash.” We are in the midst of another white backlash where many of our fellow citizens have felt for the last eight years a need to remind non-whites that they have a proscribed “place” in American society, and it takes only a few historical examples to solidify this point. During the holocaust of African enslavement, Black people had very little control over their minds and bodies. The rapes, sadistic beatings, separating and selling of families, along with other features of the system worked to dehumanize African people and break their spirit. The notion of Black people one day controlling their own lives economically, socially, spiritually, and politically, became an idea that many whites could not fathom. At the time, Black people had no influence in terms of decision-making in Congress because they were excluded from the political system. However, after the Civil War, which lasted only a few years, white southerners’ reality was turned upside down. Many things they never imagined they would see in their lifetimes concerning Black people happened right before their very eyes. During the years of Reconstruction (18651877), the country witnessed the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which freed four million enslaved Africans in America. Congress also passed the Fourteenth Amendment granting Black folks citizenship THE SPHINX