Black Men Can't Speak
Laurel Raymond argues in Think Progress that the "Trump circus" -- in this case, Donald Trump's feud with Broadway actors -- is a "distraction": "... setting both the traditional media and social media chasing after boos at a Hamilton performance, Trump is also distracting everyone from the damaging, substantive moves he has made since being elected."
Not really. And if you read Charles Blow's column today, he will help you understand why. Trump's choices may feel "like a small collection of poor judgments and reversible decisions," Blow writes, but they signal "an enormous menace inching its way forward and grinding up that which we held dear and foolishly thought, as lovers do, would ever endure."
I would argue that this applies to Trump's little tantrums as much as it does to his policy prescriptions -- awful -- and personnel choices -- worse.
Look at who and what Trump is attacking in his anti-"Hamilton" tweets. The actor who spoke out to mike pence -- Brandon Victor Dixon -- is black. Most of the cast he spoke for also are racial minorities. Dixon's point -- that the Trump administration must recognize the diversity of the nation & serve all equally -- scarcely seems controversial to us. Even pence, not exactly Mr. Civil Rights, says he "wasn't offended by what was said. I will leave to others whether that was the appropriate venue to say it."
Trump's objection -- and demand for an apology -- also seemed to be venue-based: "The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!"
But it was not the "venue" that troubled Trump (and perhaps pence). It wasn't that Trump thinks the theatre should be nothing more than a fun place to enjoy meaningless fluffy musical comedies. (This is how media critics at the New York Times and Washington Post interpreted it.) Rather, it was the profession of the speaker.
Dixon is an actor. He is a performer. Since Trump is both of these as well, most white people miss the point. Trump appears to be whining person-to-person. But if you grew up in the South, or nearly anywhere in mid-century America, you'd know better. Black performers, once they gained hold in particular art forms and sports games, became acceptable -- if they stuck to their professional roles. Wealthy white people flocked to hear Lena Horne perform at Miami's Fontainebleau Hotel, but she wasn't allowed to stay there. My racist neighbor used to love to watch Nat King Cole's 15-minute TV show, but she sure as hell would not have let her daughter date anyone who looked like Cole. I watched girls swooning over Sam Cooke, the same girls who would have spat on any child of color who might try to integrate our whitey-white school. Hank Aaron used to dress up as an African diplomat and feign a "foreign" accent so he could get into toney Washington, D.C.-area restaurants when the Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves were on the road.
Remember when Trump complained about President Obama's saying that "Muslims are ... our sports heroes"? “What sport is he talking about, and who?” Trump asked, implying that Obama had invented the sports-hero thing to make the Islamic faith more acceptable. Trump didn't even recognize that he had personally met Muslim sports heroes like Muhammad Ali & Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It never occurred to Trump these stellar athletes -- these performers -- had lives outside their sports. Of course when Trump met these Muslim-Americans, it was in the context of their professions. Likely, they did not say anything to him outside that narrow frame. Nor should they, in Trump's view.
This is Trump's attitude. A person of color does not have a right to speak out -- even politely, as Dixon did -- to a white man, particularly a white man who holds a position of authority. A black actor may entertain, but his "rights" end with his performance. He may not express any notion that suggests he is in some sense equal to a powerful white man. In Trump's view, it is acceptable for Dixon to play a white man, minstrel style, but he cannot -- in real life -- speak on a par with white men. A black actor must know his place. He is not a person but a role-player. When Dixon stepped out of his role to directly verbalize the message of the play, he made the theater both "unspecial" and "unsafe," according to Trump. Real black men are "dangerous intruders" into "real America's" beautiful, "special" space.
It is all right for a Broadway musical to portray the country as one of diversity or even to implicitly or explicitly criticize the country for its failure of diversity, but it is not all right for an actor of color to jump out of his play-acting role to express, in his own words, those same sentiments. Racial diversity is now acceptable to Trump as an abstract fiction, particularly if only those who get to watch the joke are people who can afford $1,000-a-seat tickets. The rich theatre-goers are people, Trump assumes, who won't be fooled into believing the fictional message. Diversity is not acceptable as reality.
When Trump hires as his lead "team" racists Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn, he is expressing the very same belief that his tweets on the "Hamilton" musical convey. Yes, what Trump does is more important than what he says. But in this case, word and deed are perfectly consistent. Trump's beef with "Hamilton" is not a distraction; it is an expression of his actions. White supremacy is of the essence of the scheme.
P.S. Trump continued to tweet, berating the entire cast & the play itself.
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Reader Comments (7)
The problem is not just that black men can't speak. Alexander Hamilton will not be allowed to speak anymore.
Dixon is also gay and HIV positive, something that I don't suppose Trump nor Pence are aware of. If they had been would it have made a difference? Would his message to Pence have struck a deeper cord?
James Baldwin tells of his experience during the civil rights march: As they marched through one particular southern town a group of girls were leaning out of a two story window giving Baldwin and other black marchers obscene gestures while calling out, "get out of my town, niggers." Suddenly the girls spotted Sidney Poitier and their whole demeanor changed–-they screamed with delight, calling out to him with affectionate words.
Instead of 'Can't' perhaps 'Shouldn't' is the verb that Trump's Tweet implies. His behavior prior to becoming President-elect (gah! I hate to write that) hasn't changed at all. He continues to be crude and rude. He's a national embarrassment to all of us! If there is such a thing as a Philistine scale ranking uncouth to inanely ignorant, he is off the charts.
@MAG: This was a play on "White Men Can't Jump," a sports performance thing. "Shouldn't" loses that. More important -- Trump believes black performers do not have the right or authority to speak. Therefore, they can't. This isn't about bad manners, as "shouldn't" implies, but about breaking the white man's cultural taboo.
Marie
Well said, Marie. Dead center on white dominance.
But I see a larger pattern emerging here, which others may have noticed before. The Trump phenomenon has brought into sharp focus most of what the Republican Party has been moving toward for decades.
It's all about dominance. Whites over blacks and brown. Men over women. Christians over Muslims. The rich over the poor and everything else including the planet. And oh yeah, lots of freedom--for me.
As you say, all the Trump choices and behaviors are of a piece. Someone or something is always being bullied, threatened or put in its place, with the tweeting Trumpster high in the tower looking down on everyone else.
If each day were not less and less funny, I'd be thinking of the Trump Action Figure as a black actor dressed up in whiteface, who with a sly wink satirizes the behaviors of generations of "superior" white masters whose infantile speech and actions would have to come across as pure buffoonery.
Now that I think of it, I had some of the same images without the whiteface come to mind when Bush II's chickenhawks were on the scene, but those images were more fleeting.
But I don't think I'll be able to shake the Whiteface Trump. Don't think I'll even try.
It's just too incredible and terrific.
@CW Okey dokey..got it!
My first thought on hearing President-elect Dullard complain that the theater should be a safe place was "Tell that to Aeschylus". But I don't think Donaldo's pique stemmed from any sense of a proper place for the arts in society or how they should be considered. I doubt he or any of his ilk have any thoughts on the arts worth airing. It's not as if he, like Plato, sensed the ability of art to upend and question set conventions, or to stimulate discussions those in the ruling hierarchy would rather not entertain. For those reasons Plato was suspicious of the arts, especially the imitative forms such as the theater. Trump has no such thoughts. But I do believe that Marie has hit on exactly what does bother Prez-elect Dullard about this particular situation.
Trump's racism is the sort that goes deep into the bloodstream. I will bet he would never admit, even to himself, that he is a racist. He's all for minorities as long as they know their place and stay there. If not, it's deportation or prison. This is how he can state that he's not like David Duke. Of course he's not. The only difference is that Trump never actually put on the white hood.
This presidency has the potential for reversing, not decades of progress, but centuries. Surrounding himself with like minded bigots, small minds, dullards, haters of things they don't understand, lashing out at the slightest provocations, he is preparing to launch the right's ultimate weapon, a Supreme Court justice far to the right of Scalia, Alito, and Thomas, through whose offices Trump's deep seated racism, his promise of a renewal of white dominance, will become incarnated upon the land. What they will soon be losing at the ballot box, they will win by fiat through the Supreme Court of Wingnuts for decades to come.
And who's to stop him? Chuck Schumer? I saw a CNN lede the other day that made me laugh out loud. Something like "Democrats hope Chuck Schumer will be their champion in stopping Trump". Chuck Schumer? All Chuck Schumer will be for the Trump/Bannon/Ryan/McConnell hate wagon is a speed bump. And a pretty small one too. They'll ride right over him.
One of the more prevalent themes in the plays of Aeschylus, is the strength of the people, the Demos, especially in setting aright that which has been overturned and warped by the actions of gods and damaged and distraught humans. And that may be our saving grace as well. Granted, a large (far too large) number of Americans opted for an ignorant, hateful bigot as president, but a larger number voted against him. I wonder if Aeschylus would have written a play in which his characters wondered about the folly of something like the Electoral College that allowed a foul demagogue to come to power, an odd democratic tinker-toy that threatened at long last to end democracy.
He might have called it The Trumpesteia: A tragedy.
Definitely a tragedy.