A Nightly Reid: what is America without us?
As American democracy falls apart, those who aren't actively emigrating are digging in for the fight, while the maga regime deletes all but the herrenvolk
What would America be without Hollywood? It’s something most of us don’t think much about, but go with me on it for a minute. To much of the world, America is defined by our celebrities; the movie stars dating back to the golden age of Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s, who exported an image of the U.S. to the world as a place of glamour, affluence, potential stardom, and excess.
Even before that era there was Josephine Baker, who arguably became America’s first international star — and the toast of Paris — during the flapper (and lynching) era of the 1920s.
When I was trying to recover from writer’s block to get Medgar and Myrlie written, I headed to Paris for a two week writing retreat and buried myself in the world of James Baldwin, seeking inspiration. Baldwin famously quit America after World War II for Paris; seeking a place where he could live as a full human being, without the weight of racism constantly pressing him down. He was not alone. Richard Wright, and other Black American authors and artists also gave up on America, even for a few years, and headed for the City of Lights. Despite racism not being completely non-existent there, it wasn’t the oppressive force that it was in their native land and especially in states like Wright’s birthplace, Mississippi.
During my two week Paris retreat, almost anywhere I went, whether shopping for pain au chocolat, having a meal outside my AirBnB, or popping into a dress or book shop while taking a tour led by a Black U.S. expat, I would get the same reaction from shop owners once they heard my American accent through my rudimentary French: “tu est Americain avec Josephine Baker!” It was the key to getting excellent service, as it turned out, since the alternative was being perceived as African and getting the rudest possible treatment while purchasing my cafe au lait.
America is defined by our famous people: the pop idols, athletic stars and the musical forms and fashions they proliferate around the world. What would America be without Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali and Joe Louis; Marilyn Monroe and Clint Eastwood, hip hop and jazz, Michael Jordan, Shaq, Lebron James and Venus and Serena Williams. America is Whitney Houston and Ella Fitzgerald; Frank Sinatra, Rock Hudson and The Rock.
Our stars define the American stereotype: ostentatious, affluent; maybe even wasteful and too bold. Even the American political leaders whose personas go global have a celebrity affect: the cigar chomping FDR and his maybe bear wrestling fifth cousin Teddy … war hero Ike who dropped two nukes on Japan, the dapper young JFK and his glamorous, dark haired wife (and starlet girlfriend Marilyn) … Ronald Reagan the B list actor who made it to the top … Bill Clinton and his saxophone … Barack Obama the global political star and yeah, even Donald Trump — the reality show star turned bully president and maybe dictator. That’s how many people in the world see us. Take the stars away, and America is basically England without the Rolling Stones (who of course were inspired by Black American soul music in the first place.)
So it is not not alarming when celebrities start abandoning ship. From The Guardian:
The first time that Donald Trump ran for president, plenty of people talked about leaving the United States if he won. Some were at least halfway joking; some were engaging in hyperbolic tough talk – jokes soured and bluffs unexpectedly called by Trump’s chilling 2016 victory. But even those with the means to hastily relocate mostly stayed put as the shock gradually wore off and plenty of high-profile celebrities lent their voices to protesting against the administration’s various policies (or, doing the celebrity version: making fun of administration oddballs through shaky impressions on the Saturday Night Live cold open). The message was clear: we aren’t actually going anywhere; we’re staying and fighting (or just trying to get through the day). Maybe some people still thought about leaving the country – I know a few who sincerely looked into Canada and Italy based on those countries’ particular rules. But after a global pandemic hit in 2020, there were other concerns involved with shifting residency anyway. Besides, later that year Trump himself was shown the door.
But that door was left cracked open, and with the second coming of Trump, there’s been a change. Courtney Love is seeking UK citizenship. Married couple Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi have already moved to the UK and recently put their final remaining US property up for sale, indicating the move’s permanence. Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes and their two children moved to London last summer – the same city where America Ferrera has been seen looking at schools, portending a possible move for the firmly outspoken actor. Rosie O’Donnell explicitly cited concern for her nonbinary child as her reason for heading to Ireland and seeking citizenship there. (Texas native Eva Longoria now resides in Spain and Mexico, though she insisted last autumn that the relocation was not political.)
As the article points out, there’s privilege in being able to get a fresh passport and expat to a European chalet. Not every American can afford to run from the country whose government is telling us in no uncertain terms that we are not, in fact, equal and never will be. Frankly, I’ve had the same temptation to declare “I quit this bitch” and bounce. I am blessed to have enough means to leave if I wanted to, and places I could go where I wouldn’t have to deal with the continual exhaustion of racism and where I already have family and friends. But becoming an expat is really not an option for me. My husband and my adult children live here and they are not leaving, so neither are their parents. Also my intersectional community: Black folks, people of color, nonwhite immigrants, multiracial liberals, queer folk like my daughter and several friends, Arab, Muslim and Jewish friends and other marginalized people, largely don’t have the resources or the desire to leave. The only choice really is to stay and fight. Let the fascists go somewhere else (though it’s not clear who would have them.)
But on this question of who makes America, America: note that our definers come in a variety of races, genders and backgrounds. America is just as defined by the artistry of Rupaul as by the machismo of Robert Deniro. And the only people who apparently don’t see it that way are the current regime, who apparently think that Black baseball legends and Medal of Freedom winners are not sufficiently American to highlight on military websites; nor are any women, trans people, or other nonwhite people worthy of inclusion in America’s glorious history. The maga regime are deliberately creating a kind of herrenvolk mythology that excludes all but straight, white, Christian men from the remembered history of the United States. Anyone but them is an unworthy DEI hire whose valor, to the extent it is valor at all, was stolen.
The family of Medgar Evers has responded to his erasure from the website for Arlington National Cemetery, with his widow, Myrlie Evers Williams, calling the deletion of the record of his meritorious service “a spit in the face of all who have served, honored and fought for this country.”
Beyond the arrogance and offensiveness of trying to make Black and indigenous and women’s contributions to America disappear, there’s the question of what these people think would be left if we were deleted. America’s culture was built by its multiracial community — by men and women who came from all over the world to build a globally dominant, ethnic hybrid culture. Take us away and you have to give up rock and roll, the blues, jazz, hip hop, gospel, soul, Samuel L. Jackson, Louis Armstrong and Denzel, the modern NFL, Major League Baseball and the modern NBA, the stoplight, automated elevator doors, the super soaker, potato chips, french fries and ice cream, Shondaland and Black Twitter, without which Twitter has become nazi trash, and much more. Take women away, and really there is no Hollywood. All of the great glamour goes away. Take away the gays and good luck with Vogue, all haute couture, Langston Hughes, Frida Kahlo, the March on Washington, a bunch of Hollywood history and really just fun itself. Every group in America has contributed to American greatness, and that culture is indivisible. Trying to rinse out all of the Blacks, the women and the LGBTQ folks will leave a bland, uninteresting America that could never, would never, have become the dominant cultural force it is today. So good luck with that, maga.
Another brick in The Wall
Donald Trump thinks he can get rid of the Department of Education using an executive order.
This is the same cantankerous senior citizen who thinks Canada puts 200 percent tariffs on U.S. imports despite having literally negotiated the free trade agreement updating NAFTA that we’re living under today. Here’s a handy fact check from CNN:
President Donald Trump correctly noted Friday, as he has before, that Canada has tariffs above 200% on dairy products imported from the US. But Trump again failed to mention a critical fact.
Those high tariffs kick in only after the US has hit a certain Trump-negotiated quantity of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada each year – and as the US dairy industry acknowledges, the US is not hitting its allowed zero-tariff maximum in any category of dairy product.
In many categories, notably including milk, the US is not even at half of the zero-tariff maximum.
“In practice, these tariffs are not actually paid by anyone,” Al Mussell, an expert on Canadian agricultural trade, said in an email Friday.
Somebody get this man some Geritol and put him down for a nap. Congress might just vote to end the Department, gutting the civil rights enforcement the agency conducts to keep girls, students of color and LGBTQ students safe, because Republicans are spineless sycophants. But that EO ain’t gonna do it. Congress created the Department of Education, and only Congress can un-create it.
Demographics are destiny
This week, Steve Kornacki broke down some really important information about why we are stuck in the rut we are in: and it comes down to a war within white America, between white men without college degrees, and white women who have them.
And this is the point. Whiteness has been the most powerful invention in the history of the Western world. Once it existed, from the 15th century on, a certain percentage of people who claimed whiteness or had it (or proximity to it) bestowed on them, could almost instantly be induced to vote against even their own benefits and supports in order to protect their tribe from the “not white” people. My friend Joan Walsh wrote an excellent book on the subject called What’s the Matter With White People, in which she wrote about how white working class Americans turned against even the New Deal that saved their parents from poverty, with the mere inducement, particularly during the 1980s that such programs were in fact, nothing more than welfare for Black people. It’s a switch the billionaire class can flip on during every election, and it almost always works to secure a supermajority of white voters for whoever the Republican candidate is.
What’s change in recent years is that the resentment today isn’t just against Black people (and undocumented immigrants, whose own Latino communities can clearly be flipped against them, through the belief that their proximity to whiteness will protect them and their families from ICE) — it’s also against the largely urban white women who have outrun white men in terms of college degrees, and who aren’t marrying and having children with working class white men at the rate they used to. And that wide cleavage is wreaking havoc on our democracy; driving the obsessive opposition to things like DEI and nonwhite immigration. More on the NBC News poll here.
At the same time, the anger we’re seeing among white Americans, as they begin to lose the supports, jobs and benefits that some who voted for Trump presumably thought would only be ripped away from Black and brown people, is palpable…
…as are the doubts that seem to be creeping in among the Trump base…
The question is, how long does this pot simmer before it boils over.
Watch this space…
I have been watching your newscasts for years, and it gave me so much hope to see such a brilliant woman anchor who powerfully spoke her mind, armed with experience and crystal clarity. I am so grateful I still have a way to hear your voice, and it is coming through loud and clear. Thank you for all you do!
Age 14, I read "Gone With The Wind" and my heart broke for the inhumane way slaves had been treated. Age 16, (1966) while traveling in the south, I witnessed the "whites only" signs, and I was horrified! I grew up with racist parents, and reading one book made me realize how wrong racism was. Now, trump has dismantled the Department of Education. Other moves were made over the past several years to try to erase our checkered history from school books. The United States of America is not perfect, but we are our collective history - all of it. We need to look at a new way to rule. The democrats are voted in and we bring down the deficit; we create social networks to help those who are less fortunate. The repukelicans get into office, run up the deficit and do harm to those in need. Let's rethink our entire system.