Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: Will America Go Forward Or Backward?

June 11th 2020

2019 State of the Union (The White House)

By Thom Hartmann

On the same day Donald Trump announced that on Juneteenth he’s going to go to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the home of one of America’s most brutal and deadly riots where white people burned, looted and murdered African Americans in an iconic, historic and prosperous black community, to give a speech written by Stephen Miller, Trump supporters wearing Klan robes and hoods showed up in Nevada.

At the same time the leaders of every branch of our military are reaching out to service members to condemn racism and planning to remove the names of Confederate traitor generals from their military bases, Donald Trump tweets his absolute opposition to their move and his support for this racist symbology.

Donald Trump’s openly racist posture represents an increasingly small slice of white America, although the power of America’s white oligarchs remains largely unchallenged and, in fact, grows every day as their wealth increases, regardless of what happens to the rest of us.

Killing racism is damn hard, because of the benefits that racism provides to people at the top of the power structures of every institution in America.

But racial equality, like gender equality, must be achieved in this country for us to truly claim ownership of the egalitarian ideals to which we have given lip service since the founding of the republic.

America’s most well integrated institution, the military, is today pushing back on Trump’s racism. Cities across America are rejecting racist policing. And media is finally discussing these issues in the larger context of economic and political power.

America is at a crossroads. Will we choose the path that Donald Trump, Steven Miller and the Boogaloo Bois have put before us? Or will we choose to be open, inclusive, and a nation where every life is respected?

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.