THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 13
COMMENT
WORDSANDWOUNDS
I
n December, 1993, Toni Morrison flew
to Stockholm to deliver the lecture re-
quired of those awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature. Her subject was the power
of language. Words, she said, have the
capacity to liberate, empower, imagine,
and heal, but, cruelly employed, they can
“render the suffering of millions mute.”
Morrison was unsparing in her depiction
of people who would use language to evil
ends. Pointing to “infantile heads of state”
who speak only “to those who obey, or
in order to force obedience,” she warned
of the virulence of the demagogue. “Op-
pressive language does more than repre-
sent violence,” she said. “It is violence.”
Morrison died on August 5th, at the
age of eighty-eight. Her novels and es-
says, exploring black communities with
intimacy and imagination, took in the
legacy of slavery, the rejection of Re-
construction, the brutalities of Jim
Crow––the whole of American history.
Even in her final years, her political sense
remained unerring. Just days after the
2016 election, writing in this magazine,
she sensed the arrival of a troubling era,
one centered on a callous and cunning
confidence man:
So scary are the consequences of a collapse
of white privilege that many Americans have
flocked to a political platform that supports and
translates violence against the defenseless as
strength. These people are not so much angry
as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes
knees tremble.
On Election Day, how eagerly so many white
voters—both the poorly educated and the well
educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed
by Donald Trump. The candidate whose com-
pany has been sued by the Justice Department
for not renting apartments to black people. The
candidate who questioned whether Barack
Obama was born in the United States, and who
seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives
Matter protester at a campaign rally. The can-
didate who kept black workers off the floors of
his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by
David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Donald Trump is far from the first
President to express rank prejudice.
Thomas Jefferson, in “Notes on the
State of Virginia,” maintained that black
men and women had a “very strong
and disagreeable odor.” Woodrow
Wilson screened the Klan-glorifying
film “The Birth of a Nation” at the
White House. As we learned recently,
Ronald Reagan, in a telephone conver-
sation with Richard Nixon, referred
to Africans as “monkeys.” And so on.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
But what is unique about Trump,
at least in modern times, is the extent
to which bigotry is his principal means
of rousing support. Trump backers who
aren’t drawn to his bigotry choose to
tolerate it. Ours is a country that could
elect a black President preaching unity;
it is also a country where tens of mil-
lions of Americans continue to say that
they will vote for a man whose platform
is nativism and division.
There is calculation behind the big-
otry. Trump recognized that Obama’s
ascent to the White House, in 2008,
was met by a powerful racist reaction.
Hate crimes and white-supremacist
groups proliferated, as did threats against
the President’s person. And so Trump
began his political career deploying
the language of conspiracy theory.
First as a candidate and then as Presi-
dent, he spoke of Mexican “rapists,” of
“caravans” filled with encroaching
“aliens”; he directed invective at African-
Americans, Muslims, women, and im-
migrants, and at legislators of color.
Drawing on a long and toxic tradition,
he has put forward a form of white
identity politics in which violent lan-
guage gives license to violent acts.
Such language is hardly a matter of
thoughtless improvisation. Recently, the
Times reported that the Trump cam-
paign has seized on the imagery of “in-
vasion”––one of the President’s favor-
ite descriptions of immigration––as a
theme for its Facebook ads. Such lan-
guage is in synch with that of the mass
shooter in El Paso, who, before killing
twenty-two people and wounding many
more in a Walmart, appears to have
