White America ought to know “guilty until proven innocent” is nothing new
Cry foul when and where it counts
When challenged about the allegations against his Supreme Court nominee and what his message is to young men in America, Donald Trump cautioned about a reality that America already forces too many people to live.
Trump stood at a podium with rambling gestures and said:
“When you are guilty until proven innocent, it’s just not supposed to be that way. In this case, you are guilty until proven innocent. I think that is a very dangerous standard for our country.”
With that lopsided statement, Donald Trump offered to his white America the whimpering and wistful words that patriarchy and the privileged say when threatened.
Those words rolled from the mouth of someone resolved to be ignorant of how racism turns skin color into an inherent criminality.
The person who says America is now precarious with “guilty until proven innocent” refuses to see that dreadful reality reflected in racial profiling.
What kind of mind says a federal judge can’t be impartial because of his Mexican heritage and now wants to talk about innocence?
Anyone who trumpets a Muslim travel ban and then decries a prescribed guilt for themselves and their favorites is only compartmentalizing.
Only a person shielded by white supremacy could be so callously thoughtless about how Black lives have had to survive with the — stern and scary — talks from our mothers about the rigged fingers too many white women point.
Those one-sided words are a racist hypocrisy by Donald Trump.
This is the same Donald Trump who, without an apology, smeared the Central Park Five and still holds them guilty with a never-ever innocence.
This is the same Donald Trump who demanded a birth certificate from a president elected without the crowning support of the Kremlin.
This warning about presumed guilt comes from a man who gave law enforcement officers a glaring green light to rough up suspects as they enter police vehicles before a court determines their fate.
Only someone rich in denial, demagoguery, and discrimination can spout and serve these selective and sinister statements.
Because assigning guilt to the innocent is the ruling way of white supremacy.
If you are Black or brown in white America, white America invents and invests in ways to make you guilty.
If a police officer in Dallas, Texas, breaks into your apartment and kills you, white America will search for and spotlight a small quantity of weed in your apartment to stone your high character.
This is a white America quick to plant, grow, and forge counterfeit evidence as it kills its victims twice with character assassinations.
On the balance of justice, white supremacy has never removed its dense and damning fingers from the flimsy scales.
White supremacy created and maintains an America where 47% of exonerations are Black people.
White supremacy stokes the hostile living environment that wrongly convicts Black people for murder at 7 times the rate of white people.
In the Confined States of America, Black prisoners convicted of sexual assault are three-and-half times more likely to be innocent than white sexual assault convicts.
And for women, it’s patriarchy that says the women — with credible allegations against men — are “guilty until proven innocent.”
Patriarchy believes women are guilty of being mistaken, guilty of being in the wrong place, or guilty of wearing the wrong clothes.
This white supremacy suited in patriarchy cries foul to preserve its prized privilege to trample others with impunity.
And now, Trump and his supporters claim their America — that calls the police on Black people for sleeping — is now dangerous because Americans may consider first-rate white people “guilty until proven innocent.”
This insidious narrative belies how false accusations surround and seize certain people more than others.
So, it’s racist to forget how white America starts with guilt for those born with a skin tone shining with color. And it’s racist to sound a false alarm on something that’s common for people who don’t look like you.
This phony flag by Trump is more proof that white America doesn’t want its Black and brown treatment, and white America doesn’t want to end its Black and brown treatment.
Instead, these ideologues of white supremacy and patriarchy make themselves the victims as they victimize others. This bluff and selfish concern by the powers in America is a perfectly bad cover for their ongoing offenses.
And to white supremacy and patriarchy I say — welcome to the world you created.
Because “guilty until proven innocent” is nothing new in America; it’s through and through in America, and it has always been an undue process.
