It may very well be an “antisemitic trope.” It has also sparked the anger of many prominent members of the American Jewish Community, but it was not really directed against only American citizens of Jewish descent (See “Trump Stands by Antisemitic Trope That Sparked Anger Among Jewish Americans” (The Guardian [US Edition] 8/21/19). We learn that it really started with a “conservative talk-radio host” by the name of Wayne Allyn Root, who first raised the fascist and racist possibility that former President Barack Obama, the first African-American President of the United States, was not even an American citizen, since his father had been born and raised in Kenya.
Well, the name “Allyn Root” gives me the creeps or goosebumps, as Ghanaians of Akan descent are wont to say. It reminds me of Mr. Dylann Storm Roof, the White Supremacist who “stormed” a Charleston, South Carolina, African-American Church and systematically executed more than a dozen people who had done absolutely nothing against this maggot-looking white man, except that they happened to be wearing the natural identity given them by Divine Providence. It is rather ironic that almost invariably White Supremacists appear to feel most confident of their ethnic and racial identity only by negating the humanity and existence of people who do not look like them. Now, this kind of pathological attitude actually reeks of “White-Inferiority Complex” to me.
As a literary artist, there is something strikingly evocative of the mirror-imaging of the names “Root” and “Roof.” And I am also almost certain that if he did not have any access to the media, the radio, to be specific, to be venting his spleen on a daily basis, literally speaking, Wayne Allyn Root may very well have gone on the rampage and ended up executing far more non-Aryan people than his “cousin” Dylann Storm Roof did in South Carolina. The reality of the matter or situation is that Mr. Root may have actually used his hate-radio broadcasts to execute more people than his cousin Roof ever did or could ever have done. In his dastardly attempt to disinherit then-Candidate Barack Obama of the latter’s birthright citizenship as a bona fide American. Mr. Root led the White-Supremacist Movement that became known as the “Birther Movement.” The now-President Donald John Trump would ride the crest or coattails of the thoroughgoing racist sentiment evoked and systematically promoted by the “Birthers” to the White House.
I have often told my community college students, increasingly dominated by ethnic and racial minorities, that their best answer to the relentless terrorism of White Supremacy is to fiercely challenge these human vermin by letting the latter fully appreciate the fact that by the very fact of their creation and existence as earthly, or earthbound, humans, like everybody else, no individual group of humans have a right to claim superior spatial rights or preeminent privilege to accessing the collective wealth of all humankind, as made readily available and accessible to all by Divine Providence. I also do not believe, for even a nanosecond, that President Trump reserves any right, constitutional or non-statutory, to dictate how any race or cultural group or community in the United States ought to choose and make political alliances, especially as regards one’s membership of the Democratic Party (DP) or the Republican Party (RP).
In other words, whether Jews choose to vote predominantly Republican or Democratic is an inalienable right granted by the Constitution of the United States of America. It is inexcusably fascistic for any politician, including, yes, even the President of the United States, to cynically attempt to bully any section of the great community of the United States into doing so. For those of us who self-identify as African Americans, this gross Trumpian display of fascistic arrogance is absolutely unsurprising; nor is it anything new. The fascist and proto-Nazi foundation of the modern United States of America was inescapably and indisputably predicated on our global African existence and identity.
You see, White Supremacy thrives on the terroristic annihilation of those of us who have been designated as “Non-Aryan” people. President Trump has drawn the battle lines; how the rest of the world, including the White World, responds will determine both the fate of the Trumpian Presidency and the rest of us self-minding sons and daughters of Divine Providence.
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