March 10, 2025

The New Old Racism: Keeping ScOR #4

March 10, 2025

I like to think these posts won’t always be so heavy. Maybe, once upon a future time, I’ll write about smaller matters, lighter slices of life. Unfortunately, things feel – things are – momentous now, while also mind-bendingly stupid. That’s fascist authoritarianism for you. If I’ve launched this newsletter by dwelling on existential threats to democracy and the like, well, blame the times.

In fact, blame the times for Scene on Radio and what it became. When I started the podcast almost ten years ago, I didn’t imagine it would take on such serious stuff all the time. A 14-part series on whiteness and white supremacy? Twelve episodes on patriarchy? A dozen more on the cultural roots of the climate emergency? This was not the plan. Even the name, Scene on Radio, hints at a different vision. I thought the show’s calling card would be audio verité — scene-based documentary work, myself and other producers out there following people around. The opening series in 2015 was about sports. (OK, sports as a prism to explore race, class, gender, and so on, but still.) As you can tell from a glance at Season 1, the show was going to tackle social justice issues but also do funny and poignant stuff like the one where my son learns the painful truth about Santa Claus.

That was then. Everything shifted in 2016 and led to Season 2, Seeing White, our series on white supremacy and its origins. I was moved to take on that series, and to invite the brilliant Chenjerai Kumanyika to join me, because whiteness was rearing its head in such overwhelming ways. White folk were out of hand – not for the first time, I realize! Given all those police shootings of unarmed Black people, Dylan Roof’s massacre of the Charleston 9, #OscarsSoWhite, and on and on, I found myself pointing my lens at the people who look like me, the people “who believe themselves to be white,” in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ words. What finally convinced me to pursue the series was the rise of Donald J. Trump as a serious candidate for president — a development that, naively, I would have thought implausible. Holy crap, I thought. Whiteness is a powerful drug and a helluva story.

It still is.

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The first weeks of Trump’s second presidency have brought a barrage of headlines about tariffs and trade wars, imperialist trial balloons, abandoned alliances, and the Trusk administration’s smash-and-grab attacks on the rule of law and on government itself. Amidst this first-hundred-days onslaught, you could almost miss the regime’s aggressive racism. Well no, you couldn’t, not if you were paying any attention.

Trump and his henchpersons swept into office waving the flag of reactionary white identity politics – and policy. Trump has long been the “outer borough George Wallace,” as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie aptly puts it. And even though Trump may laughably declare himself “the least racist person anywhere in the world,” he and his closest allies have never tried to hide the central role of racism in their movement – least of all since Trump reclaimed the White House.

Making celebratory remarks on Inauguration Day, unofficial co-president Musk became Trump’s “right-hand man” in a whole new way, thrusting that appendage into a fascist salute, then repeating the gesture lest anyone miss it. Musk predictably brushed aside the outcry, grabbing the fig leaf of (im)plausible deniability. Major U.S. news media largely played along — was it merely an “awkward gesture”? — while German publications obscured Musk’s extended arm in their photos because the Nazi salute is illegal in modern Germany. Knowing their Nazis, Germans saw the gesture for what it was. So did American neo-Nazis. “Elon Musk did Heil Hitler,” said one far right commentator. “We are so back.” The fact that Musk wasn’t immediately shamed and run out of public life forever speaks loudly about the United States in 2025.

All of this points to the world that Trump and his allies want to restore, the America they would deem great again.

Next, Musk and JD Vance aligned themselves in extraordinary ways with Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant, holocaust-minimizing party, Alternative for Germany (AfD). Musk endorsed the party ahead of German elections and used his enormous reach on X to promote it, tweeting, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Vance, displaying gasp-worthy arrogance, went to Munich and scolded German leaders for their efforts to build an electoral firewall against the party that German intelligence classifies as extremist. Vance made a show of meeting with the AfD’s leader while snubbing Germany’s center-left chancellor.

The newly bold white supremacist agenda goes beyond symbols and political statements. Trump has placed anti-anti-racism at the center of his policy agenda, putting vastly more muscle into eradicating DEI than addressing the high cost of groceries and housing. The scourge of wokeness was the primary justification given for Trump’s executive order to freeze up to $6 trillion dollars in government payments authorized by Congress. Trump and “DOGE” ordered agencies to dismantle offices that enforce anti-discrimination laws. Thousands of federal workers were fired because they’d had something to do with DEI programs or even partook of them. In his March 4 address to Congress, Trump boasted that he’d “ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military.” He added, in a belligerent tone: “Our country will be woke no longer.”

This is what constitutes tyranny to Trump and his followers: efforts to make the workforce more diverse, to extend opportunity more equitably, and to include people from groups long systematically excluded. With his appointments, the president ensured that he needn’t suffer such oppression when he gathers with his overwhelmingly Caucasian cabinet.

The Trumpian Whites First agenda is global in its scope and its costs. U.S.A.I.D. did much of its work in Africa, the poorest continent, and the wanton slashing of its programs and contracts may lead to millions of deaths from H.I.V., malaria and other diseases. In his speech to Congress, Trump made sneering reference to an aid program in “the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.”

If racism is a tool, a means to other ends, that’s not to say that those at the top of this regime are not sincere white supremacists.

The administration used DEI to justify its purge of military leaders. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and branch leaders are meant to be nonpartisan, apolitical positions, and new presidents normally don’t replace top generals before the officers’ four-year terms are up. But Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth had told a podcaster in November that firing Charles Q. Brown, the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, should be a priority. “Any general that was involved … in any of that DEI woke shit has got to go,” Hegseth said. General Brown had put out a raw personal statement after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Hegseth mused about whether President Biden appointed Brown because he’s Black. We can all rest assured that Hegseth himself, the former Fox News weekend host and Trump fanboy with a drinking problem, no relevant management experience and white Christian nationalist tattoos, earned his lofty position on “merit” alone.

Hegseth also fired the number two officer in the Air Force, General James Slife, who is white. Why? Hegseth didn’t say, but Slife too had written a statement decrying Floyd’s murder and telling his airmen that it “would be naive to think that institutional racism and unconscious bias do not affect us all.” (Slife also wrote a memo to 500,000 Air Force personnel recommending our Seeing White series, an act highlighted by far right media that attacked Slife as unacceptably woke.) Another officer fired in the purge was Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as the Navy's top leader. Hegseth had publicly suggested that Franchetti was hired because she was a woman.

All of this points to the world that Trump and his allies want to restore, the America they would deem Great Again: one in which anyone in a position of authority who’s not white and male can be presumed to have been hired illegitimately. Trump appointed a man named Darren Beattie to a high-ranking job in the State Department even though (or because) Beattie has made extreme statements, including this tweet in 2024: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

Patriarchal white nationalism is obviously a core tenet of MAGA, but listen closely and you’ll glean that it’s not the movement’s ultimate end. The real goal is limitless power. Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks argues that the most chilling part of Trump’s military purge was not the firing of generals but rather the dismissal of the services’ top lawyers — Judge Advocates General, or JAGs. Firing JAGs is “what you do when you’re planning to break the law,” Brooks wrote. “You get rid of any lawyers who might slow you down.”

Asked about this on Fox, Hegseth dismissed Brooks, only to confirm her point in the next breath: the administration demands loyalists in these key positions. “We want lawyers who give sound, constitutional advice and don’t exist to be roadblocks to anything — anything that happens in their spots,” he said.

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If racism is a technology, as Chenjerai likes to say, a means to other ends — a tool to maintain “white” solidarity across classes and to leverage and justify the seizure of political and economic power — that’s not to say that those at the top of this regime are not sincere white supremacists. It appears they are. Musk follows and amplifies the X accounts of extremists who post about the genetic inferiority of non-white people. He accused Black leaders in his native South Africa of “openly pushing for the genocide of white people.” Musk has repeatedly attacked George Soros, the Jewish billionaire philanthropist, accusing him of various conspiracies and comparing him to comic book villains. (The antisemitism is strong with this one.) JD Vance, too, is an avid social media follower of eugenicists who advance notions of a racial “IQ gap” and “genetic pathways of crime.”

The fact that Musk wasn’t immediately shamed and run out of public life forever speaks loudly about the United States in 2025.

Trump insults lots of people but reserves a certain flavor of racially-coded scorn for Black and Brown people, and especially Black women — those who step out of their place to challenge him. He’s attacked some of the most accomplished women in America — CNN’s Abby Phillip, Rep. Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris — as “stupid, “seriously low-IQ,” “slow,” and “lazy.” Trump drips with disdain for non-white people, who occupy “shithole countries” and bring their “savage,” “rapist,” “terrorist” ways to America. No doubt that’s why he can talk so casually about the mass removal of Palestinians from Gaza — which would be a horrendous crime against humanity. (No question, callousness to Israel’s slaughter of Gazans is all too bipartisan.)

The men of MAGA may be weird and cringe to many of us, but everything about the way they carry themselves shouts “We Are the Übermenschen.” That’s a leading reason for the cringe, of course.

Two things can be true. Racism is a core driver of the MAGA movement and a weapon to leverage and hold power. It’s all one project: total, unchallenged domination by a white male billionaire oligarchy.

In our Season 4 series, “The Land That Never Has Been Yet,” we devoted an episode to the neoliberal era of the last half century, with its simultaneous retrenchments on race, economic justice, and democracy. We called the episode “The Second Redemption,” an allusion to the first Redemption — the post-Civil War, white supremacist backlash that crushed Reconstruction and reversed America’s progress toward multiracial democracy. Trump II clearly sees itself as the Second Redemption’s end game.

For those of us determined to fight back, it’s helpful to see as clearly as possible the war that these people are waging.

Comments are open, y’all. Thoughts?

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Scene on Radio the podcast is available wherever you get your shows, and at sceneonradio.org.