Thread by @ibramxk

Let’s talk about persecution, and why it animates the tyranny of Trumpism. The historic defense of violent American bigotry is a projection of persecution rooted in a violent denial of reality. 1/13

Slaveholders imagined they were being persecuted by immoral and illegal abolitionists. Read the statements of secession. White male slaveholders imagined they were being persecuted for being seduced by enslaved Black women they raped. Read their fiction. 2/13

Ku Klux Klansmen imagined White people were being persecuted by tyrannical Black politicians and voters and landowners and activists. Read the statements justifying their lynchings and massacres and whitecapping. 3/13

Jim Crow segregationists imagined they were being persecuted by outside agitators. Read their statements of massive resistance. After the 60s, “not racist” Americans imagined they were being persecuted by affirmative action, welfare fraud, voter fraud, and super-predators. 4/13

Today, the red hats, who are mostly but not exclusively White, imagine they’re being persecuted by divisive anarchists, critical race theorists, and antiracists of all races. 5/13

None of these racist ideas are inherent. The Trumps of the world produced and circulated these ideas to make people think the problem—and the source of their own struggles—are those bad people as opposed to bad policies; that those bad people are persecuting them. 6/13

And I’m talking about anti-Black racism. Historians of anti-Native, anti-Asian, and anti-Latinx racism; historians of sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, ablism, and capitalism—to name a few—can share similar histories. 7/13

Subjected groups across the board who’ve been struggling for equal rights and resources and power and justice are framed as persecutors. Police officers imagine they are being persecuted by #Blacklivesmatter. Men: we imagine we are being persecuted by #MeToo. 8/13

Heterosexuals: we imagine we are being persecuted by queer activists demanding marriage equality. Cisgender people: we imagine we are being persecuted by transgender people striving to live and be themselves. 9/13

Why do Americans refuse to allow those other people to be free? Why are Americans so threatened by the other group’s freedom dreams? Why do Americans so commonly believe that they must lose for the other people to gain their freedom? 10/13

Why? Because the slaveholder’s mentality is still common. In the slaveholder’s mind, the subjected are supposed to submit to inequality and injustice and terror. When we resist, slaveholders’ frame us as persecuting them. 11/13

Read how slaveholders and segregationists framed Americans fighting for justice. The greater the antiracist resistance, the more power we seized, the more extreme slaveholders and segregationists became in their attacks, in their imaginary that THEY were being persecuted. 12/13

History explains the present. The slaveholders’ worldview is only submission to them or persecution of them. This is the worldview we’re facing today. This is the worldview of tyranny and fascism. But history is on our side.

Trumpism won’t age well like its predecessors. 13/13

Our descendants will know clearly what ideas and policies are wrong, even if some Americans can't see that today in the fog of propaganda.

To learn more about the slaveholder's mentality, check out this essay I wrote earlier this year.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…