Trump is a racist. And....

Here is my column from this morning about how Donald Trump is criticizing Critical Race Theory and "The 1619 Project":

It is unlikely Trump has read or personally tried to understand much about CRT or "The 1619 Project," or possesses the capacity to engage with either meaningfully. But he probably understands one important thing. What both those efforts have in common is an effort to understand and address the experience of being Black in America — where slavery and Jim Crow have been the law of the land for all but a few decades — and to do so from a Black perspective.

That is what Trump is against.

After nearly four years of this guy's presidency, it feels insufficient to say "Trump is a racist" over and over again. I mean: It is one of his defining characteristics. But the people who are going to listen to you say it already agree with you. Also, it's easy. But it also seems worth pointing out how that actually works from time to time.

I'm not sure I have the best handle on how to do it. Here is what I wrote this morning:

Black Americans are definite underdogs in the telling of this country's story. So theories and histories that center their perspective get crosswise with the old axiom that "History is written by the winners." Trump, we know, has a rather narrow idea of who constitutes America's winners — and contempt for everybody else as "suckers" and "losers." So it is to be expected that he defines such Black-centric ideas as "un-American," and attempts to put them outside the bounds of debate.

And here is a more straightforward way of saying what I was getting at.

“To say antiracism is anti-American is to say racism is American, which is to say Trump wants white Americans to be racist,” said Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Anti-Racist” and director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. 

How to address the problems of this era in a true and meaningful way -- rather than just heaping more kindling on the fire -- remains a challenge for me. I'm trying to get there.