Opposite Day and White Statecraft

It’s you; it isn’t us

Top: White terrorist with his foot on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. Bottom: The Birth of a Nation racistly depicts Black legislator with feet on desk

My mind is still processing the picture of a white terrorist with his foot up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. And the song “What It Feels Like” by Nipsey Hussle and JAY-Z brought it up again with this line:

“You let them cr**k*rs storm your Capitol, put they feet up on your desk.
And yet you talkin’ tough to me. I lost all my little respect.”

The picture reminds me of the film The Birth of a Nation and its racist depiction of a Black lawmaker with their feet on a desk. After I first saw the picture, it took me a few minutes to put the two together. Now I can’t shake the association.

And today, the picture reminds me of Reagan and Nixon calling African country leaders “cannibals and monkeys who are still uncomfortable wearing shoes.”

The Birth of a Nation; Nixon; Reagan, and the Capitol attack. The white continuity is unbroken. As whites’ racism would have it, white terrorists, who would probably vote for Wilson, Nixon, and Reagan, took a shit and pissed in the Capitol on January 6. And Black people and people of color had to clean up the mess.

The two images make Opposite Day. Every day is Opposite Day with whiteness because projection is a major aspect of white identity. Projection is one way white identity makes itself. Toni Morrison called it “the projection of the not-me.” George Yancy says, “At the heart of whiteness is a profound disavowal: ‘I am not that!’”

In bad faith, white identity “calls the things that are not as though they were.” It’s a demonic effort because white identity conjures what should never be. As Wilson, Nixon, Reagan, and many others prove, this “Racecraft” is also a tool of white statecraft.

I noticed in his song that JAY-Z called the white terrorists cr**k*rs.

James Baldwin might have called them something else:

“Well, I know this, and anyone who has ever tried to live knows this, that what you say about somebody else, you know, anybody else, reveals you.

What I think of you as being…is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own, uh, fears, and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you; I’m describing me.