Welcome to Witness, a reader-supported publication where I write in the traditions of Black resistance and survival in an age of artistic and political suppression. If you find something of value here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.
When Barack Obama was president, he bent over backwards to make white people feel safe about the fact that a Black man was now occupying a seat of power that was never designed for Black people to ever occupy.
He publicly chastised other Negroes. He denounced his Black pastor. He told Black men to pull up their pants. He made Black people sit down and have beers with the racists who arrested them for entering their own homes. He gave the order to kill the “Scary Brown Man” in Pakistan. He bombed the Black and Brown countries. And on and on and on. He did whatever he could to assure white folks that he meant them no harm and that he could, in fact, be a benefit in that he could keep the Negro population in check quite easily by maybe dancing a little jig or singing a little Dionne Warwick or Al Green.
None of that mattered.
In response to his overseer application, white folks formed first the Tea Party movement, then the Birther movement, then the Make America Great Again movement—all of which are cults and modern versions of a much older cult known as the Ku Klux Klan. Because debasing themselves was not enough, they decided they would also debase the country and the presidency itself by once again electing the least qualified white person they could find—not once, but twice, and perhaps forever.
And now this least qualified individual, one Donald J. Trump, convictred felon and adjudicated sexual abuser, is attempting to direct his cult away from the fact that he’s likely implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking/rape files by utilizing white Americans’ ancestral, inherited, fetishistic, enduring, and zeitgeist anti-Blackness to get them to back him in his accusing Obama of things he did not do.
It’s an old strategy: When all else fails, blame a Black man. Susan Smith did it when she had to find someone to take the rap for her murdering her own children. Charles Stuart did it when he needed someone to take the fall for him killing his pregnant wife. Sometimes, they do it just for kicks, like Carolyn Bryant did to Emmett Till. And there are countless other examples of this pathology, which is committed, sadly, not just by white people, but by everyone.
The reason why they continue to use this strategy is because it works. It has worked for centuries. It’s working now. It works because Black men are the easiest to villainize. Since the 16th century, the people on this now-American soil have been conditioned to think of Black men as inherently criminal, savage, and guilty. It’s a knee-jerk, gut, instinctive response for them. One Black man does something bad? No problem. All Black men are made responsible for his actions, and further, are implicated in his lawlessness. Even if the truth is ultimately revealed and the Black men are ultimately absolved, the American impulse is to still believe that we are responsible for some wrongdoing. For them, we are living felonies waiting for an appropriate accusation to be pointed in our direction.
Though he probably believed he was, President Obama is not exempt from this injustice. The increasingly hostile Trump and MAGA rhetoric around him is deeply troubling because it seems like they are trying to invent a narrative, and a transgression, that will justify whatever it is they have planned for him. And what do they have planned for him? Well, Trump has been making false claim after escalating false claim that makes it clear and present to me, without speculation, the danger President Obama is now in.
And though some media pundits believe differently, we cannot rely on the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold their own ruling about the immunity of presidents because that is really an exception that they made to apply specifically to their cult leader, not other presidents. Trust me when I tell you.
This is, in fact, a lesson for Black overseers. Even when you are of the enslaver’s own blood, you must never confuse your station with your actual value to the enslaver. At the literal drop of a dime, the enslaver will still whip you, rape you, sell you, imprison you, or kill you because familial relation has no bearing on their sadistic tendencies and you are nothing more than at the mercy of their whims.
If I was President Obama, I would not trust that the system that is supposed to protect me (is it really supposed ot protect me?) will actually protect me. I would assume that the system is actually out to destroy me. And in that case, I hope he has an exit plan. I would take myself and my family and get the hell out of Dodge. Just to be on the safe side.
Before it’s too late.