When a black CNN reporter was arrested live on air last week while covering the protests in Minneapolis, it was met with denunciation that something like this could happen in the US. It was “a sign of American disintegration”, wrote the Washington Post. The head of civil liberties group PEN America called it a “dystopian spectacle”. On social media, the accompanying indignation to his arrest was that: “This is America, arresting journalists for doing their job doesn’t happen here.” But the list of things that don’t supposedly happen in America continues to grow. Peaceful protesters don’t get teargassed: this is America. Presidents don’t threaten to unleash troops on those protesting against killing and oppression: this is America.
For black and minority ethnic people, the country has always been the America of an immune police force, white supremacy and a legal system that protects only those who can afford it. The Trump administration is simply suspending convention, ditching the pretence of pious protocol and ritual that has always been central to the survival of the “not in America” myth. This has always been America, what’s different is that it no longer feels the need to hide its true nature.
Since Donald Trump became president, non-Americans have taken to drawing tongue-in-cheek comparisons between America and Arab dictatorships – its fetishising of the military, its president’s clumsy and vulgar stabs at religiosity, its centuries-old ethnic tension erupting in clashes – but even these jokes now wear thin. Because since George Floyd’s death, since the government and institutions of sanctioned violence have bared their teeth, the US’s flattering view of itself has taken such a battering that jokes are no longer needed to do the job.
Those clutching their pearls at assaults on the media and police brutality hold dear the belief that America’s inherent virtue will prevail, even as police officers hammer it with batons on mobile phone footage. American exceptionalism is the proverbial cockroach weathering a nuclear attack – it survives everything. It survives school shootings, the suspension of due process in Guantánamo Bay, and the torture and killing of millions of innocent civilians from Vietnam to Iraq. It is at this moment surviving despite the US having the highest coronavirus death toll in the world.
American exceptionalism is at its most robust when faced with the reality of its structures of racial oppression, the central challenge for which it was designed. In the founding years of the US, a belief in its inherent morality, godliness and superiority to its European origins had to be squared with its savage cruelty toward, and exploitation of, black slaves on an industrial scale.
The closer the threat of abolition came, the more elaborate the excuses became. In order to defend slavery, John C Calhoun, seventh vice-president of the US, leaned on Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, the history of Greek democracy and the glory of the Roman empire. The argument was that not only was slavery a positive good, it was a feature of successful civilisations and not bad at all for the slaves themselves who, according to Calhoun, had never “attained a condition so civilised and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually”.
The reconciling of moral mutual exclusivities continues to reproduce the same denial: racism without racists to pin it on to when black Americans die at disproportionately high rates of Covid-19; police killings without murderers when their perpetrators aren’t charged; and a president who exploited racial animus for support but for whom no racists voted, only the “left behind”.
But Trump is a challenge to this robust tradition of normalising evil through eloquent guile. Vulgar and relishing conflict, he seems to be ushering it closer to some endgame. There is something old and something new in this latest racial conflagration. Its global resonance and its national traction is a result not of its uniqueness, but its intensity following an escalation of events. Trump’s rhetoric, the bloodlust of Republicans spoiling for a fight, police with clear orders and appetite to stifle protest, and emboldened white supremacists, have heaped provocation on a nation that was already a tinderbox after three years of Trump related polarisation.
It will inevitably be a wasted opportunity if the recent entrants to the race war, Trump and his emboldened cohort, are seen as too central to the crisis. Too often, the US is cast as a protagonist in a morality play, wrestling with demons that will eventually be defeated if only the right conditions are met. If only the Democrats hadn’t nominated Hillary Clinton, if only Joe Biden can win the election, if only another messianic Barack Obama figure would appear and heal the nation.
These historic moments will be written rhapsodically in liberal publications, where the “American tragedy”, as David Remnick called it in his New Yorker essay on the day of Trump’s election, will once again be decried. But they will reach the wrong conclusions, as Remnick did, when he ended on the note that the way forward is “to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals”. There are not two competing visions of America battling it out. There has always been one – under Trump, Obama or whoever is to come next. And its ideals have always been the same: to deny its black population the human rights it extends to its white one, and whenever it is caught doing so graphically, brutally, undeniably on camera, convince itself that this is the exception and not the norm.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist