#ISeeItToo

I remember as a kid hearing racist jokes that mocked Asians and African Americans.  “Me Chinese, me play joke, me put pee-pee in your Coke” rang out across the elementary school playground as kids danced around pulling on the corners of their eyes.  More than once family members and friends asked me, “Did you know there are three main tribes of niggers?  Motees, Mombacks, and Hodedos.”

When I was eleven, I joined a youth organization for girls.  After the elaborate initiation ceremony, I attended my first regular meeting, where we were told not to bring any black friends.  The leader, an adult, actually said, “We’re not racist or anything like that.  They’re just not welcome.”

In junior high I invited a Filipino boy to a school dance.  For weeks, my friends and classmates teased me endlessly and sang “Ebony and Ivory” every time they passed me in the hall.

A black classmate’s family built a new house in a white neighborhood.  During construction it was vandalized with racial epithets spray-painted on the unfinished walls.

In my high school, the cafeteria was segregated, not by rule, but by custom.  One side was white, the other black.  We jokingly referred to the single row of tables in the center as the neutral zone.  If you wanted to eat lunch with a friend of a different race, that’s where you sat.

The clubs were segregated, too, with one set of service organizations overwhelmingly white and another set totally black.

The school was nearly half black, but the honors classes and AP courses were almost exclusively white.

In tenth grade, a girl whose friendship I valued told me one day with wide, insistent eyes, that “black people are just different.  They’re not like us.” 

A year later, I was left alone for a few minutes with a classmate’s mother.  As we made idle chit-chat, she told me how angry she was that “a nigger family moved in down the street.  Who do they think they are?  They don’t belong here.”  Yeah, she said it.  Nigger.

My middle school and high school history classes taught me that the civil war was fought over states’ rights, not slavery.  Some classmates earnestly insisted that the war had been unnecessary, that slavery would have eventually ended anyway, so the loss of life in the war was pointless.  Besides, they said, most slave owners treated their slaves really well because it wouldn’t have made financial sense to abuse their own property.

In college, a girl in my freshman dorm purposely displayed a large confederate flag when her black hallmates were around.

More times than I can remember, I heard white students claim that black classmates couldn’t have gotten in without unfair affirmative action.  Never mind that the black students they were referring to were on the honor roll.

A good friend dated a man with olive skin and dark kinky hair.  Another friend’s parents prodded about his lineage, hopefully suggesting he might be Italian.  Their disgust on learning he was Cuban was unmistakable.

As a young adult, I spent a year working on a project about the civil war.  Multiple civil war enthusiasts pointedly told me their favorite general was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was responsible for the massacre of captured black Union soldiers at Ft. Pillow and later founded the KKK.  One man told me he grew up in Mississippi and had lived there during the 60s.  He insisted that they’d had no race problem in their town, “not until those damn Freedom Riders came.  They started it all.  Before them, we had no problems – because everyone knew their place.”  It was thirty years after the Freedom Riders had come to Mississippi, and he was still angry that people no longer knew their place.

I have a black friend whose daughter was a powerful swimmer, one of the best in the league.  She was also a model teen, the kind of kid I hoped my young daughter would look up to and emulate.  Each year, the older team members were asked to serve as junior coaches.  She wasn’t asked.  The coach never offered a reasonable explanation.  She was one of the only black kids on the team.  All of the junior coaches were white.  My friend tried to talk to the coach about it, but he blew her off. 

A family member regularly referred to the Egyptian CEO of the company he worked for as a “raghead.”  For years, this same family member couldn’t say Obama’s name without including his middle name, Hussein, which he emphasized to highlight Obama's "foreignness."

For most of my adult life I lived in Durham, known locally as the black city.  Coworkers at my corporate job in a neighboring town were afraid to come to my house.  One of them asked if he was going to get shot in a drive-by.  He thought that was funny.

One of my white neighbors in Durham once complained that the mayor, the chief of police, and the school superintendent were all black.  She said it wasn’t fair because she wasn’t being represented.  This was the year after our white district attorney made a mess of the Duke lacrosse case.

I adopted my daughter from Guatemala.  When she was little a coworker told me she shouldn’t go to a predominantly white school because she should “be with her own kind.”

When my daughter was in middle school, a white classmate told her she didn’t belong with the white kids, that she should go hang out with “the rest of the Mexicans, who, by the way, are ruining this country.”  None of the other white kids objected to what he said.  My daughter stopped hanging out with the white kids and struggled to find a new group of friends.

Some of the black girls in my daughter’s high school started a step team.  When they performed at a pep rally, a white classmate took a video in which he made fun of them by calling them slaves.  He posted it online. 

This is a partial list of racist incidents I’ve experienced or witnessed, just the ones I remembered as I wrote this in one sitting.  I know of many other incidents, shared with me by friends.  But those are not my stories to tell, so I haven’t included them here.

Today, conservative friends tell me racism doesn’t exist, at least not on any scale that matters.  When I tell them that black friends have told me about their painful experiences with racism, they tell me those friends are just jumping to conclusions, playing the race card, buying into the mentality of victimhood, that they misunderstood, misread, or misinterpreted the situation because they just see racism in everything.  They tell me racism isn’t the big monster I claim it is.  They say we’re past all that, and the only reason anyone thinks they see racism is because they’re determined to. 

I know they’re wrong.  I’m white and liberal.  I don’t spend much time around narrow-minded, prejudiced people.  Even so, I’ve seen racism firsthand my whole life.  I still see it today. 

As a white ally, the very least I can do is use my voice to say #ISeeItToo.

Bending Toward Justice

Over Thanksgiving I had a conversation with an old friend about how we should respond to institutional discrimination against others.  It wasn’t just the kind of philosophical chit-chat overthinkers like the two of us are prone to engage in.  The conversation arose from real circumstances that are causing a crisis of conscience for my friend.

At its heart, the question is this: If you are part of an institution that systematically discriminates against a group of people, is it better to leave so as not to be complicit in perpetuating the discrimination by supporting an institution that is too stubborn to change, or is it better to stay and fight the prejudice from within even if that means you try and fail, over and over, beating your head against an immovable wall? 

Generally, I’m a stay-and-fight, speak-truth-to-power kind of person, but I also recognize that there are times when your continued involvement does more harm than good, making it better to leave.  Sometimes the harm to your own spirit is enough to warrant your departure.

My friend has been fighting the discrimination from within for some time now, and it’s taking a toll on her.  She is unwavering in her commitment to justice.  She speaks up and advocates for marginalized people.  But she’s tired of being the lone voice, frustrated at the lack of progress, and increasingly convinced that she’s doing no good.  And so she has started to wonder, should she stay and keep fighting what might be an unwinnable battle, or should she leave and commit her talents to a different institution that treats people fairly because the battle has already been fought and won?  Which choice better promotes the cause of justice?

As you consider the question, ask yourself whether it matters who is facing discrimination or what kind of institution we’re talking about.  It could be discrimination against people of color, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+, or any other group.  It could be occurring in a government office, private company, university, church, or even a preschool playgroup.  If you knew who and where, would that change your answer?  Should it change your answer?

We didn’t solve my friend’s dilemma in our afternoon of conversation.  I’m not sure there is a single best answer.

Since then, I’ve continued to mull it over.  I was so moved by my friend’s sincere desire to do what’s right that I haven’t been able to let the question go.  The more I think about it, the more Lillie Mae Bradford keeps popping into my mind.

In 1951, four years before Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus, Lillie Mae Bradford was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for sitting in the white section of a bus in that same city.  Unlike Parks and unlike the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the case that eventually struck down bus segregation, Bradford found no justice and no recognition for her activism.  The arrest record plagued her throughout her life, limiting her employment options.  Even after the US Supreme Court affirmed in 1956 that bus segregation was unconstitutional, Bradford’s criminal record remained.  Fifty-five years passed before she was offered a pardon under the Rosa Parks Act, which became law in Alabama in 2006.   

Bradford did not change the world when she took a seat in the white section of the bus.  Her civil disobedience and subsequent arrest did not end segregation.  She did not win that day.  She was simply one person who chose to fight injustice, even though it must have felt like beating her head against an immovable wall.

Though her name has largely been forgotten, do you truly believe she made no difference?  Or do you believe, like I do, that she was a pioneer who showed others that it was possible for ordinary people to be brave and to fight for what is right? 

I don’t know who else was on the bus when Ms. Bradford took a seat that day, but I like to imagine the initial shock that rippled through both the white and black sections, slowly yielding to consternation, confusion, and then fear and anger, and later that day, that week, that month, the ongoing conversations in living rooms, bars, and church parking lots about what this one ordinary woman did and what it might mean.  Undoubtedly, many whites remained unflinchingly committed to the immovable wall of segregation.  And yet, she must have caused at least a hairline fracture in that wall.  There must have been some whites somewhere who felt the first pangs of doubt, the first hints that the world would change, that it must change, that they could not stop progress.  And what about people of color?  Surely, Ms. Bradford’s actions bolstered someone’s spirit and encouraged in them the same conviction that progress was inevitable if only because people like her kept beating on that immovable wall.  Who else did she embolden to take a swing at it?

Deep inside the story of Lillie Mae Bradford, and also in the story of my friend’s dilemma, is the question of what it means to be a hero, a term we often bandy about too freely with those who succeed but withhold from those who don’t.  It’s a term I think we mostly misunderstand. 

Heroism lies not in victory but in the courage to try.

Heroes don’t always win.  They aren’t always the last ones standing when the battle is over or the ones whose names and deeds everyone remembers.  But they matter.  They remind us we’re not alone.  They inspire us to act.  Without them, the rest of us might never find our own courage to stand up, speak out, and do what’s right.

This friend of mine who discussed her dilemma with me is one of my personal heroes.  Years ago, when I was struggling with the realization that I was gay, I was paralyzed by fear, fear of being rejected, fear of what it would mean for my future, fear that there was something deeply wrong with me.  Some people in my life kept their distance, or worse, fed my fears with their own.  Doubt wrapped itself around me like a dense fog, isolating me from the world, obscuring nearly everything good in my life. During that time, this friend was a bright light that never went out, cutting through the fog, giving me hope, helping me see my way through.

Her kindnesses were small and simple.  Friendship.  A lot of laughs.  A hug when I needed it.  And most of all, never treating me any differently after I came out.  Simple acts, offered freely and with love, that reminded me I was not alone. Those small kindnesses were powerful and healing.  She had courage to spare, and she shared it with me until I could find my own.

She is one of my heroes for the same reason she is struggling with her current decision, she believes in the kind of justice that is made of love and compassion, openness and understanding. 

Echoing the words of 19th century abolitionist Theodore Parker, Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us that "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." What that quote fails to note is that it doesn't bend on its own. It requires something of us to bend it. My friend has a gift for bending the moral universe toward justice. 

I don’t know what decision she will make in her current dilemma, to stay and keep pounding on the immovable wall, or to go and advocate for justice in another place, in another way.  Whatever she decides, I know this – it will be right, not because she will claim victory over discrimination, but because she has been and remains committed to fighting it with love.  And like that day in Montgomery in 1951, when Lillie Mae Bradford took a seat in the white section of the bus, others are watching.

Heroes don’t always win.  They don’t always conquer the bad guys or defeat injustice.  Sometimes, like Lillie Mae Bradford, and like my friend, they simply inspire us with their courage and remind us that we’re not alone.  And that bends the moral universe in the right direction.

The Conversation

When my daughter was three, she used to place her brown arm on my white leg and study the difference between her skin and mine.  Over the years, it has been a difference she sometimes felt, but one that I never did.  It’s not that I was oblivious to it.  It’s just that it never mattered.  That changed two days ago.

My daughter is in high school now.  Like many adolescents, she struggles with the increasing responsibilities of school.  I had checked her grades online and noticed that she had failed to turn in an assignment last week.  It’s a recurring issue, and I’ve talked myself hoarse trying to get her to be more conscientious about her schoolwork, to convince her that her choices now will affect her opportunities in the future.  When I picked her up after school that day, I resigned myself to yet another talk about the same old issues.

We’re alone in the car.  It’s an ordinary conversation, one that my daughter and I have had so often that as it starts again, already I feel the seed of frustration.  But there’s something more this time, something else where that seed is growing, an anxiety that hasn’t been there before.  I look at her, this beautiful, funny kid I’ve raised, and the reality of our new world order comes rising up my throat like bile. 

You can’t afford to do this, I think looking at her.  You can’t afford to throw away opportunities.  You might not have as many as you expect.  She is brown skinned, foreign born, and this country is once again governed by brazen bigotry. 

As I park the car in the garage, I turn to her and say, “Listen, there’s something you need to understand.  This election changed a lot of things.” 

I pause, searching for the right words, not sure of where I’m headed with this.  I wish I had a better story to tell her, one full of hope and happy endings, but this isn’t a time for fairy tales.  I take a breath, and I tell her the truth.  I lay it out as clearly as I can.  I tell her that the world she will inherit is not the same one I grew up in, that this administration is doing dangerous, damaging things.  I explain that they are changing the laws in ways that will hurt a lot of people. 

I slowly wind my way to the point I’m trying to make, afraid to make, must make.  The people in this administration seem to believe America should be white and Christian and straight, and others who aren’t white, Christian, and straight are somehow not American enough.  There might not be as many opportunities for a good life, and people who aren’t white will suffer the most. 

She sets her jaw and reminds me that we can vote them out in the next election.  I say yes, we’re already working toward that, but the people in power are changing the laws so they can stay in power, and it might take a lot more than the next election to stop them.  In the meantime, they can do a lot of damage.  We have to recognize that a lot of Americans agree with them, at least more of them do than I ever realized.

I impress upon her that she must see this for what it is, must understand that this is much more than the random inequities of life, that this is strategically unjust, a plan purposely set in motion and kept in motion by people who will never have to say these words to their children, never have to worry about the damage it does to them. 

I tell her she can’t afford to throw away opportunities, that she, a girl, brown skinned, foreign born, with lesbian moms and no religion, must – MUST – hang on to every opportunity she can, that the best way to fight back against the injustice is to succeed in life.  It’s such a heavy load to hand a fifteen-year-old.

I wonder if I’ve gone too far, said too much.  I hear myself telling her, I’m not trying to scare you, but I’m not sure that’s honest.  I don’t want her to be paralyzed by fear and hopelessness.  But she needs to know these things.  She needs to understand, and it’s my job as her parent to tell her.  I don’t want to, but I don’t think I have a choice.  I try to keep it simple and undramatic, but this truth is so big, it makes me feel small.

I make a point to hold her gaze.  I want to show her that it’s possible to face this reality and remain steady and calm, resolute, even hopeful.  She stares back at me, silent.  Her eyes search my face to find the weight and the truth behind the words. 

We are alone in the car, and yet, we are not alone.  The eyes I see looking back at me are not just hers, but the eyes of millions of brown-skinned girls and boys who have heard these words, millions of young people across place and time, back through generation after generation after generation, all hearing the message that this society believes they are not equal, not enough, not deserving. I didn’t want to say these words, not to her and not to them.  In the silence of their gaze, I feel even smaller.

It dawns on me that I am seeing these millions of eyes for the first time.  I’ve known they were there.  I’ve thought of them, studied them, talked of them, their pain, their struggle, from somewhere in my head.  I knew them the way I knew history, a series of facts and events, grand and momentous but remote and indistinct. 

In this moment, finally, I see them not as a single mass of humanity but as individuals looking out from warm, breathing bodies, each one with a unique heart and mind.  I look at my daughter, this one girl I love, and I see the millions who were also loved by mothers and fathers, grandparents and siblings, these millions who have lived and died, these millions who heard and continue to hear not just these words but others so much uglier, so much more damaging and unjust.  For the first time in my life, I feel with my flesh how big the divide is between white and black, white and brown, white and every other, the divide between me and the millions staring back, the divide between me and my own daughter.  This realization, this divide, this more than anything makes me feel small.

This moment is complicated.  I am acutely aware of my whiteness and what it represents, the position of privilege it affords me, and where it fits in our shared and often shameful national history.  I am aware of my daughter’s brown skin, different from mine, in opposition to mine.  I am giving her a painful truth, one that men and women of color have passed on to their children for generations, but in our case, this truth is coming from a white mouth.  I go to great lengths to make it clear I am not defending my race or vilifying hers.  Nevertheless, I am handing her a burden I have never had to carry, myself. 

Somewhere deep down I question my role in this moment.  By exposing the truth, am I attacking it, or only acknowledging it?  And if I am only acknowledging it, does that imply that I accept it, that this is just how things are?  I tell her I know how unfair it is, but do I?  Do I really know?  What do those words mean when they come from a white mouth?  They strike me as disingenuous even as I say them.

I had expected these words to taste sharp and bitter, that I would feel pain and righteous anger at having to say them.  I am surprised to find that the words are a tasteless mush and I feel nothing.  Or not nothing, really, but a sense of nothingness that feels like an empty duty.  I hope it is not futility in disguise.  I feel like a pawn, a puppet, a player on the stage saying the words that have been placed in my mouth, words that are unfamiliar and foreign, words that have never been said to me.  Where is the honesty in saying words I have not had to live with, myself?        

                                               

These are not my words because this is not my world, not the America I have believed in, the one I as a white child grew up in and thought we all shared.  I realize that my America is not my daughter’s America.  I sit with the knowledge that my America has only ever existed for some of us.

The fact that as a white woman I never expected to have this conversation, never expected it to be necessary, does not make it any worse.  I know I am not the first to do this.  I won’t be the last.  And I am getting off easy compared to so many others.  Still, in some way, my daughter is every girl and boy who ever grew up in a society that deemed them other and less because of their race or religion or some equally meaningless distinction.  I am every parent who ever feared how far that society would go to enforce this hierarchy.  I need her to understand this, to feel it, to know it without thinking, but to know it for the injustice that it is.  I fear that she will internalize this message until it becomes her own inner voice.  She needs to know that this is not about the random chance of life, the freak accidents, the unexpected windfalls, the individual circumstances that lead some to success and others to failure.  This is something more sinister, something planned, something ugly and unjust intentionally woven into the fabric of our society.

My daughter breaks the silence.  “They’re afraid,” she says, referring to those who are dismantling our civil rights protections and writing discrimination back into our laws, those who support an administration that welcomes white nationalists.  “The world is changing, and it makes them afraid.  That’s why they’re doing this.”

I nod.

She continues, “They’re naïve if they think they can stop it from changing.”

I allow myself a tiny moment of pride at her use of the word "naive."  I hope she’s right. 

I’m not sure what I feel at this point.  I am at once saddened and oddly, comforted.  That night when I go to bed, these feelings wrap around me as I fall asleep.  In the morning when I wake they have settled in and I know they live here now.  The sadness I expected.  The comfort is as clear as it is surprising.  It seems to come from the millions of eyes watching me.  They are not accusing or shaming me, but inviting me in, urging me to see a larger truth, that my daughter is one of them.  And so am I.  Not because my daughter has brown skin.  Not because I had this conversation with her.  I am one of them because we all are.

They are me with brown skin, and I am them if they were white.  We are all players on the same stage, each cast in a role by birthright and circumstance.  In a different play with different casting, our roles might be reversed. 

This is the truth we must see in order to break the cycle of prejudice and injustice.  It’s a truth I thought I already knew.  I have always believed in equality.  I have been an outspoken advocate for civil rights my whole life.  I have always been proud of that.  I still am. 

But I have spent my life advocating for others instead of advocating with them.  I have lent myself to others’ struggles instead of seeing those struggles as my own.  If advocacy is only offered as an expression of noblesse oblige, then where is the moral imperative to achieve equality?  It cannot be dictated from on high, even with the best of intentions.  It is not enough to fight for the rights of others if you still see them as others.  We must learn to fight for one another as though we are fighting for our own lives, because we are.

I am still unpacking this conversation, examining it, feeling my way through the layers of meaning.  I’m not sure what else I will learn from it, but I do know this.

I am small.  We are all small.  But we are not alone.  Our fates are intertwined, and we will all succeed or fail together.  This is the truth, but to truly know it, we must learn to see ourselves in one another.

Coup-Coup-Cachoo

I think it’s time to stop talking about the Trump administration and start talking about the real power and vision behind the current presidency, Steve Bannon.  We joke that he’s the puppet master pulling the strings, but it’s no joke. 

He is, in effect, the shadow president, and this is his administration, his grand plan.  I don’t mean as a mere strategist.  I mean the whole plan is his, including the goals, which means we need to focus on what he believes and what he wants.

Steve Bannon’s worldview is anti-globalist.  He admires right-wing nationalists, law-and-order governments that maintain tight control of the people, and hard-line opponents of immigration.  He has no qualms about leveraging Anti-Semitism, racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia for political gain.  Like his alt-right compatriots, he views the enforcement of civil rights laws, environmental policies, and all manner of business regulations as no mere inconvenience or even government overreach, but as a form of tyranny.  He views government as a win-lose endeavor, and he intends to win no matter what it takes.

When we consider his views, the first round of executive orders from this administration is not surprising.  They are Bannon’s handiwork.  The border wall, the immigration ban, the death of the Affordable Care Act, and the rest of the odious orders thus far are in alignment with Bannon’s worldview, but I would argue that they pale in comparison to the sudden upheaval in the structure of government.  This is Bannon’s real goal, and it should be the big story.

What we’ve seen of this administration so far is not a mere sea change in policy.  Bannon seems to want nothing less than a total transformation of our very form of government.  That might sound extreme, but consider that more than once, he has expressed a desire to completely bring down the entire establishment.  Bloomberg quoted him as saying

"I come from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats.  I wasn't political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter f---ed things up.  I became a huge Reagan admirer.  Still am.  But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that Bush had f---ed up as badly as Carter.  The whole country was a disaster."

This quote strikes me as central to his ideology.  What he sees as the breakdown of our society is not the fault of any individual administration but the result of a flawed system of government.  A blowhard who complains non-stop about the idiots in government no matter who’s in charge isn’t unusual.  But this one is now directing the president, and if he has his way, his ideology will reshape the American government completely, and our society along with it.

Toward the end of the campaign, Trump promised to drain the swamp in DC.  The crowd loved it.  It became a rallying cry.  We all expected to see an administration of outsiders.  So, as the transition team took shape, and the cabinet picks were announced, we on the left jumped on the list of elites, the party operatives, and Washington insiders Trump had chosen and accused him of hypocrisy for not even trying to drain the swamp.  On top of that, we argued, many of the picks were undeniably unqualified.

We should have paid closer attention.  The picks were not foolish.  Even the cabinet nominees who are clearly unqualified fit Bannon’s goal of upending the government. 

Who better to take down the Department of Energy than the man who said if elected president he would eliminate it altogether?  Who better to gut the Department of Education than a woman who believes in handing government funds in the form of vouchers to companies and religious organizations that operate private and charter schools?  Who better to ignore Housing and Urban Development initiatives than a man who claims that ensuring access to basic necessities is a form of slavery? Who better to yank the regulatory teeth out of the EPA than a man who sued the agency repeatedly?  I could go on, but you get the picture.

After just one week, the path of destruction Bannon seems to be plotting is impressive in its scope.  The upper echelons of the state department have been cleared of career personnel.  The work product of scientists engaged in climate change research is largely considered to be at risk of destruction.  Programs across the federal government are slated for elimination in a scorched earth strategy General Sherman couldn’t match. 

Bannon and company seem to be hurtling toward their goal of dismantling the institutions of the federal government at a breakneck pace.  As fast as they’re moving, it would be wise for us to consider what obstacles of resistance remain in their path.

There are five variables in this equation, five entities that play a role in determining the outcome – the three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial), the press, and the people.  Over the years, the balance shifted fluidly from one entity to another, allowing power to flow in one direction and then another, always searching for equilibrium. These five entities balance one another, righting the ship of state as needed, keeping it from capsizing. 

For Bannon to succeed, he has to capsize the ship.

He appears determined to consolidate power in a shrinking executive branch that will be more tightly controlled by a small cadre of like-minded crusaders who are beholden to no one but themselves.

The legislative branch is under the control of the Republican Party, swept into power by a combination of Trump’s populist wave, voter suppression, and gerrymandered congressional districts that all but ensure republican control of a population that leans democratic.  Despite their initial show of resistance to Trump, they’ve largely caved in.  Though some of them surely object to Bannon’s vision and tactics, the specter of battling both the administration and the voters back home keeps their mouths shut.  For the past few years they’ve been like a pack of dogs chasing Obama’s car down the street, yapping and snarling.  Now, like the proverbial dogs that eventually caught the car, they don’t know what to do with it, so they gladly stand by and watch while Bannon hands Trump a sledgehammer and sends him swinging at the windshield.

The press has been under attack from this administration since before the election.  Bannon’s team has undermined the serious press and elevated both the egregiously slanted Fox News and a number of even less responsible fringe organizations, his own Breitbart among them.  Any news coverage they don’t like is simply labeled fake news.  If the administration dislikes the coverage, the offending journalists are threatened.  Bannon went so far as to call the media the opposition party and say they should keep their mouth shut.  Meanwhile, the barrage of fake news continues, and Trump’s followers gobble it up like candy.

This brings us to the judiciary, the branch of government that presents the greatest roadblock to Bannon’s plan.  With the executive branch already being reshaped and the legislative branch largely brought to heel, the judiciary is next on the hit list.  Despite the vocal complaints about Obama and the Congress, it’s the judiciary that Bannon’s crowd truly hates.  This is the branch that holds the others two in check, especially with regard to civil rights, because this is the branch that has the power to say no.  When the courts rule that a law is unconstitutional, that law cannot stand.  It is the courts that ensure our civil rights, the courts that protect the individual from the state.  

On the left, we admire the courts.  Over the years, we’ve fought and won many important battles in courtrooms.  Our civil rights movement has relied on the rule of law as interpreted by the courts.  But among Bannon’s crowd, so-called activist judges undermine the system of government as they believe it should operate.  They frequently decry the rulings we celebrate as being at odds with majority rule, which in their eyes is not so different from mob rule.

The problem here is that the judicial branch has no power to enforce their rulings.  Have you ever wondered what would happen if the executive branch simply refused to comply with the judicial branch’s orders?  I believe we’re about to find out.  This past weekend, DHS agents in airports across the country defied a federal court’s orders by refusing to allow detainees to speak to attorneys.  What if this was just a trial balloon to see what they could get away with?  If so, what’s coming next will be far more than a typical shift in the balance of power among the branches of government.  Bannon would love to see the judiciary hobbled and unable to oppose the administration on issues of civil rights and deregulation.  We could be headed for a constitutional crisis focused on the question of judicial power. In this context, Jeff Sessions as attorney general is even more chilling. 

That leaves only one entity standing in Bannon’s way – the people, or at least some fraction of us.  That’s where the slew of executive orders comes in.  Week one was designed to shock us, divide us, and create chaos.  The mess of the immigration ban was not simply incompetent bungling.  It was designed to go badly.  The bigger the mess, the more adamant our protest.  Thousands of liberals chanting and shouting in defense of Muslim immigrants and refugees sends quite a message to middle America Trumpville, where people already conflate Muslims with terrorists and cautious foreign policy with a lack of action.  Liberals, they claim, will risk the lives of every American to avoid hurting the poor little feelings of a single terrorist.  Divide and conquer.

With each new outrage, we protest and demonstrate.  The administration claims the protests are small and insignificant, their media proxies belittle the protestors, and Fox News blasts their talking points to Trumpville. Regarding the protests this past weekend, Fox posted a piece with the headline “Forget the hysterical mainstream media – America likes Trump’s agenda, including his immigration pivot.”  Their viewers roll their eyes at us and buy coffee mugs from which they can sip liberals’ tears.

Before the latest outrage even dissipates, the cycle starts again - Trump signs the next executive order, we erupt, they condemn.  Lather, rinse, and repeat until our diverse and unwieldy resistance coalition cracks under the weight of the chaos.  That’s the plan.  They will push us until we begin to fight one another, or until a demonstration becomes a riot, which will be a convenient excuse for a law and order crackdown.

This is what consumes us all.  And yet, this past weekend, as our outrage surged into public protests for the second time in a week, this time swirling into airports as well as the streets, Bannon quietly replaced the chairman of the joint chiefs on the national security council, a move that in normal times would have grabbed the headlines.

Bannon is the architect of this new regime, this new world order.  He’s the mastermind, and Trump is the stooge, the celebrity spokesman who entertains the crowd with the ideas and words Bannon has fed him.  This is not Trump’s administration.  It’s Bannon’s.  We know who he is.  What know what he wants.  Just as Hitler laid out his plan in Mein Kampf, Bannon has laid out his vision in articles and interviews over the years.  He wants to replace our system of government with a more authoritarian regime in which the white nationalist mob rules, and the rest of us know our place.  He will achieve these ends through lies, intimidation, and fearmongering.  Can violence be far behind?

As the destruction of our institutions of government continues, I have to ask, how far does it have to go before we begin calling it a coup d’etat?  I know, that sounds crazy.  It’s something we associate with African warlord dictators and banana republics.  But coups don’t always involve the military and can be accomplished without bloodshed.

If you’re shaky on what, exactly, a coup is, here’s the Merriam-Webster definition.

Coup d'état: a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics; especially: the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group

Bannon was not elected to the presidency, but make no mistake, he’s the one in charge.  He’s consolidating power in a small inner circle of the executive branch and dismantling the checks and balances that would limit his control.  Trump is merely the showman sent out to whip up the crowds and divert our attention from what’s happening behind closed doors.  While Trump incites fear of immigrants, Bannon quietly grabs more power.  It’s not the terrorists who are the greatest threat to the nation.  It’s Steve Bannon. 

Does it sound farfetched?  Maybe.  But consider his own words.

He told The Hollywood Reporter,

"Darkness is good... Dick Cheney.  Darth Vader.  Satan.  That's power.  It only helps us when they (liberals) ... get it wrong.  When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."

We can’t afford to be blind.  We need to pay attention. What we’ve seen this past week is just the beginning.