TRUMP’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS
Revisiting American Racism
Donald Trump is a racist, misogynist felon and the worst president in American history. Yet the evils that have emerged under his rule are not his work alone. The vast majority of Germans in Nazi Germany, Daniel Goldhagen argued in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, had been steeped in centuries of antisemitism. In the United States, prejudice and hate toward Native Americans, blacks, Latinos and other people of color have been widespread since the first explorers arrive in the 15th century.
People are not born with bias and racism, according to an April 2021 article in American Psychologist by Steven O. Roberts and Michael T. Rizzo. It must be learned. In the United States, white people are often segregated from persons of color in their cities and neighborhoods, they write, denying them opportunities for contact with others that would help them challenge their racist perceptions, preferences and beliefs. They add:
... most Americans have more frequent contact with White people than with people of color, which results in more narrow perceptions, unfavorable preferences, and pessimistic beliefs about people of color...
Indeed, the status of ‘American’ itself is readily granted to White Americans, and often denied to Americans of color, and particularly Asian and Latinx Americans. Because of this denial, immigrants and refugees face a host of explicit—and often societally sanctioned—prejudice and discrimination, with long term consequences for health and wellbeing...
By 2042, Americans of color are projected to make up a majority of the U.S. population. When White Americans are made aware of this shifting racial landscape, they often feel that their status is under threat and show greater pro-White biases and support for conservative policies, parties, and political candidates... Indeed, several social psychological theories propose that high-status groups are motivated to maintain their high-status advantage by oppressing low-status groups ... Americans are bombarded with social myths that assert that high-status membership is at the same time earned by hard work, fixed at birth, and given by God...
Simply put, American society teaches Americans citizens that Whiteness is superior, and whereas White parents often remain silent about those lessons, allowing White children to internalize them, parents of color often speak out against those lessons to prevent their children from internalizing them.
The authors also review how political leaders help shape racial biases. Adolf Hitler bombarded Nazi Germany with myths of an “Aryan race” with supposed “pure blood” and racial superiority that stemmed from “God’s will.”
In his first term, Roberts and Rizzo note, Donald Trump’s rhetoric corresponded with the resurgence of white supremacists. He referred to Haiti as a “shithole” country, suspended immigration from majority Muslim countries and denigrated Mexicans, calling them rapists and “bad hombres.”
“It is no surprise,” Roberts and Rizzo write, “that individuals high in racial prejudice, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, dehumanization, and essentialism, and low in interracial contact, were particularly likely to support Trump’s political platform. Over the first three years of Trump’s presidency, nationwide hate crimes on the basis of race, religion, and sexual orientation all increased at a rapid rate. By normalizing various racist behaviors (e.g., publicly insulting entire nations of color), Trump may indeed have inspired others to view such behaviors as acceptable, if not ideal... Trump’s popularity and American racism have undeniably risen hand in hand, highlighting how psychological biases and sociocultural policies are inextricably linked.”
Trump has expanded his hate-mongering in his second term. He has targeted immigrants with mass deportations, attacked freedom of speech and the right to protest, undermined the rule of law, attacked women and transgender people, shut down Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs and threatened universities that embrace racial equity. Trump and his acolytes have fired minorities and replaced them with unqualified white appointees, scrubbed government websites of any references to gays and minorities (even removing mention of the Enola Gay) and renamed military bases after Confederate generals. Stephen Miller, who has close ties to white nationalist and hate groups, has led the campaign to deport both legal and illegal immigrants and end birthright citizenship.
Tara Setmayer, who heads a women-led political action committee called the Seneca Project, told The Guardian that Miller’s ascent means he can “use the powers of the federal government to unleash his fascist worldview.”
“[That view] has now been transformed into the main political policy and aim of Donald Trump’s presidency,” said Setmayer. “The demagoguery of immigration has long been at the center of Donald Trump’s political rise, and Stephen Miller’s desire to make America whiter and less diverse, married with the power of the presidency without guardrails, is incredibly dangerous and should concern every American who believes in the rule of law.”
Roberts and Rizzo suggest that more research is needed to determine how psychology can work against racism. “One of the most important steps for future research,” they write, “will be to shift our attention away from how people become racist, and toward the contextual influences, psychological processes, and developmental mechanisms that help people become antiracist. In a state of increasing racial inequality, we hope to find future students and scholars, both in the United States and beyond, well-versed and embedded within a psychology of antiracism.”
Please support organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (https://www.aclu.org/) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (https://www.splcenter.org/) which are leading the fight against Trump’s racist policies.
Source:
"The Psychology of American Racism," Steven O. Roberts and Michael T. Rizzo, American Psychologist 76.3 (2021): 475-87
“The rise of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policy,” Robert Tait, The Guardian, June 15, 2025
It’s always the same performance.
A well-educated voice—often cloaked in progressive vocabulary, psychological citations, and historical analysis—appears to “bravely” denounce racism from the safety of an academic perch. The tone is grave. The references are many. And the villains? Clear: Trump, the far-right, the openly racist, the easy targets.
But never themselves. Never their jobs. Never their neighborhoods. Never their proximity to real Black voices they don’t platform. Never their role in systems of polite exclusion and curated suppression.
This is not an attack on scholarship. It’s a critique of who gets to define the narrative.
Because what I read in these long Substack essays—those self-soothing, self-rewarding, self-exalting rituals of liberal guilt—is not truth. It’s not justice. It’s not solidarity.
It’s performance.
You Speak of Racism Like a Disease You Never Caught
You talk about racism like it’s something that other people do. Like it lives in MAGA hats, Mississippi, or the past. Like your gentrification, your silence, your selective platforming, and your refusal to center raw, radical Black voices has nothing to do with the very system you claim to critique.
You call out hate crimes.
You quote peer-reviewed journals.
You cry out about history.
But you will not call out yourself.
You won’t write about:
How you got your job.
Why Black writers like me are pushed to the bottom of the feed.
Why your Substack page gets algorithmic boosts while mine is hidden like contraband.
You quote psychologists. I quote lived experience.
You cite theory. I carry memory.
You frame the problem. I am the problem—according to the very systems you benefit from.
You Think Writing About Racism Means You’re Not Part of It
Let me ask you this:
If I can’t speak about my pain without being flagged, shadowbanned, or ignored—but you can speak about my pain and get applause and subscribers—how is that not supremacy?
If a white liberal writes about the horrors of racism, they’re “brave.”
If I write about it with unfiltered honesty, I’m “aggressive,” “inappropriate,” “too emotional,” or “not productive.”
What does that tell you?
It tells me that even anti-racism, when filtered through the lens of white respectability, becomes a shield to protect your ego—not a sword to destroy injustice.
This Isn’t Just About You. But It Is.
I don’t know you. Maybe you’re not white. Maybe you’ve done some good work. Maybe you think you're helping.
But this needs to be said:
If you’re not directly confronting the systems you benefit from…
If you’re not standing beside the Black voices who speak with the same fire you claim to honor…
If you’re not risking your comfort…
Then all you’re doing is rearranging the furniture inside the master’s house while calling yourself an architect of revolution.
Don’t Talk About Us. Talk to Us. Better Yet—Step Aside.
I’ve seen more opportunity in the damn U.S. military than in the writing world of so-called progressives. I’ve seen more sincerity in poor Southern towns than in liberal NYC cafes.
You people will write dissertations about how white supremacy harms the world—but never give the mic to the Black man who lives it, breathes it, and fights it every day.
We are not here to be your subject matter.
We are not your trauma porn.
We are not your thesis.
We are here to tell our story. And we don’t need you to “interpret” it for us.
Stop taking up space that isn’t yours.
Just imagine this if there wasn't a white person around to feel pitiful for us. Your counterparts would have eradicated us ages ago. The only reason we're alive to watch this bullshit. We're in is because of the pity that you guys seem to have for us.
Let me be real with you—if it weren’t for the few white people who felt pity for us, your counterparts would’ve wiped us out a long time ago. Don’t get it twisted. The only reason we’re still here to witness this nightmare is because enough of you decided we were worth sparing—not uplifting, not empowering, just sparing.
Our existence has been reduced to your mercy. You didn’t save us out of justice. You saved us out of guilt. And you built a world around that guilt, called it progress, and expected us to be grateful.
I say this with sincerity,
Fuck you and your “merit”.
You wrote a piece to white people, for white people in a way that asks absolutely nothing of white people, except applause. Nice one professor.
I’d bet money the only time you actually engage with Black people is when they fit a version of Blackness that still makes you feel in control. Black feminist women. Queer Black men. Basically, the ones who dont bother to challenge your comfort—because they want more than anything—proximity to it. That’s not allyship. That’s curation. You don’t seek out Black voices—you seek out Black compliance.
Look, I get that your article is about Trump’s racism and the bigotry of the people who support him. That part’s not hard to see. But liberals like you always pull this move—pointing fingers at the far right while pretending your own hands are clean. And the truth is, you're often worse. Because while the Trump types stay at a distance, you move into our neighborhoods. You smile, you wave, and you ruin everything. You study us like a science project. You track us like case studies. You keep close, so you can make sure the machine runs just how you like it. You gentrify, displace, and destabilize—and you call it progress. I can avoid a right-wing racist. I can't avoid you.