This President has been many things since descending an escalator a decade ago: a national embarrassment, a global punchline, an environmental disaster, a divider of people, a prolific murderer of the English language, not to mention countless human beings.
But he’s also been a floodlight.
He’s fully exposed millions of people who’d kept themselves carefully concealed, many of whom I thought I knew. I can see them now in ways I never could previously. It’s all out in the open.
Intellectually, I always knew that racism was deeply embedded into the fabric of our nation. Still, I’d convinced myself that it had slowly but certainly begun to unravel, that we weren’t as hopelessly bound by it as our ancestors had been.
As a pastor in largely white churches in the South over the past two decades, I told myself the story that the Church, like this nation, was changing. It may have been a combination of privilege, ignorance, and wishful thinking, but I truly thought that we were getting better, that the arc of the moral universe was again bending toward justice
I surely never imagined that so many people I loved, lived with, worshipped alongside, or worked next to were as afflicted with supremacy as they have revealed themselves to be. I never fathomed that so many people claiming to love Jesus would so resent foreigners, so worship America, and so abhor diverse humanity. The people around me were either really good at pretending, or, in my naivety, I was just willing to believe the lie.
I saw the cracks in their facades begin to show when Barack Obama was elected; their carefully coded hate speech, their ever more antagonistic social media posts from fringe sources, their incessant, desperate search for something to be outraged about, their inability to give him any credit or acknowledge his goodness. They grew more entrenched in their positions, more tribal in their tone.
But even then, they kept their prejudices and phobias close to the vest, never really tipping their hand, always dancing around the words without really saying them. The mask was splitting and sliding off, but they would not fully show themselves because it was socially unacceptable (they would call it “politically correct.”)
Then he arrived a decade ago: someone who gave them what they needed to finally abandon the performance completely: permission to be horrible; someone who erased any semblance of decorum, any expectation of decency, any level of accountability. After so many years of pretending, they finally received white Presidential consent to be outwardly racist—and now, in his second coming, the dam of their suppressed bigotry has burst, and they are letting the toxic hatred flow freely.
White pastors now lob it through incendiary sermons into their congregations, white politicians plaster it upon campaign billboards, white police officers send it out in group emails, white teachers wave it in front of their students, white civilians spit it out in viral videos at coffee shops and public parks, white terrorists parade it unmasked through city streets.
And my white friends, family members, and neighbors are rejoicing in this Renaissance of open ugliness—and I never saw it coming, even if I should have.
And this has been the most disorienting, stomach-turning, sickening part of this terrible season in America: the realization that I have lived near, worked alongside, and ministered around people who claimed to believe in Jesus while harboring such corrosive hearts—and that I was oblivious to it all. I am both angry at them and disappointed in myself.
But now, their open contempt for immigrants, their apathy in the face of his corruption, and their callousness toward suffering people all testify to their hearts.
And I suppose that is the small bit of gratitude I have for this malignancy of a movement here; the way it has fully revealed people—and this is an unwelcome but invaluable gift.
I know what I didn’t know before.
I can’t excuse the truth away.
I no longer give them the benefit of a doubt that they have fully removed.
My eyes are clear and open widely, and now I’m responsible for what I do and say in response to who they are.
We all are.
Regardless of what happens in the future or how the political landscape may change or who we have helming our nation, what has been revealed about us as is going to remain, and we’re going to have to deal with the unmasked, unearthed, illuminated hatred that we are this violently afflicted with.
That might be this President’s only worthy legacy.
