The Impunity of Privileged White Men

“There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.” James Baldwin

Imagine if a female nominee for the United States Supreme Court acted like Brett Kavanaugh did last Thursday. Angry, belligerent, accusatory, self-pitying, whiny. How would that behavior have gone over if it had come from a woman? Yeah, think about that for a moment, think of the double-standard, and think of the courage it took Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford to walk into that lions den of mostly old, closed-minded, judgmental white men, who hired a woman to question Ford so they wouldn’t look like a gang of bullies. The drunken frat boy, son of privilege, white-skinned, always has the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence. Not so the woman, the accuser. She misremembers. She can’t be certain. She is distraught, emotional, easy to dismiss. Or she invited the man, laid a trap, cast a spell to which the man succumbed. Go home, my dear, bake cookies and polish the furniture.  

Brett Kavanaugh, like Donald Trump, is a symptom of a disease, the disease being hoary old white privilege, the presumption -- so persistent in America -- that whites, particularly prep school Ivy League whites like Kavanaugh - are the superior race, ordained by God to run the affairs of this world, and who are schooled in the notion that their behavior, no matter how obscene or injurious to others, carries no consequences, for they are the chosen, above the law, masters to whom lower mortals must submit. Members of the superior race cannot even be questioned about their behavior, their lies, their crimes without becoming outraged and indignant.

Kavanaugh’s White House sponsor, the lying, boastful, tax and draft evading, misogynistic and idiotic Donald J. Trump, is cut from the same bolt of fabric, also a son of privilege and wealth, saved from failure repeatedly by his daddy’s money and connections, who has never had to account for his boorish behavior and criminal deeds. Privileged white men like Trump and Kavanaugh defy the laws of nature and fail upwards. Trump is so morally and ethically bankrupt and debased that at one of his weird “rallies” in Mississippi, home to some of his stalwart supporters, he mocked Christine Blasey-Ford. The irony of the coward Trump mocking a woman who had the moral courage and fortitude to act on her conscience isn’t shocking or astonishing or breathtaking, it’s simply repugnant and despicable. That Trump can’t keep his mouth shut about the Kavanaugh confirmation process, like a normal sitting president, isn’t surprising; the man is deranged and cannot help himself.

I have, like most Americans of good will and decency, grown accustomed to the daily stupidity and idiocy oozing from the White House and Trump’s mouth, just as I am now accustomed to Trump’s nonsensical boasts about peace agreements and trade deals and the booming economy, but what I refuse to get used to is the cruelty, venality and mendacity of Trump and the people around him, and the moral indifference of his most ardent followers.