God's Antidote for Racial Ignorance Ephesians 2:14

If you had not seen it with your own eyes, you’d swear you had just awakened from a bad dream, one in which a sitting president of the United States of America shared on his official White House account a meme depicting a former president and his wife as apes. You may have wanted to pinch yourself. But, as the seconds faded into minutes, you knew it was real.

Such were the sullen aftereffects of a symbolic American racial apocalypse in the twenty-first century in the form a trope.

America just had another racial awakening and another instance of racial ignorance.

But this moment is different, it’s insidiously different.

Donald Trump, in the aftermath of his post, has refused to apologize and has drawn both ire and lukewarm support in the aftermath. But the damage is incalculable, especially for Black people, and it spans the millennia.

“The work of historian Anne Lafont reveals how since the 17th century, the Western imagination has been shaped by an aesthetic and ideology of White supremacy over Black bodies”, writes Christelle Lozère for the publication Manifest.

As contact between Europeans deepened, and as the reach of “technology” widened, the fascination with black bodies continued unabated. Trump’s depiction of the Obamas echoes those wicked instincts to brand Africans as “savage” and thus better suited for uncivilized living.

Lozère continues, “A veritable industry emerged, led by private entrepreneurs who took advantage of Western enthusiasm for exhibitions to make a business and profit in such activities. In these spectacles, the so-called “primitive” was presented as an uncivilized being, with wild instincts, and natural, child-like mores.”

Pandora’s Box is an artefact in Greek Mythology connected with the myth of Pandora in Hesiod’s 700 B.C. poem. According to the myth, Pandora’s curiosity led her to open a container left in the care of her husband, thus releasing curses upon humanity. Later depictions of the story have varied, but the main takeaway is that to open a “Pandora's box” is to release or start something that will cause many unforeseen problems.

Such is our lot because of this egregious gambit on the part of Donald Trump. It’s a dangerous and despicable era he has ushered in; it could very well signal a racial apocalypse at worst, a new form of intimidation and violence at best. This is not a political assessment; it’s a human one. Racism has consequences.

Why have white people constantly played this card over the centuries?

In “The Other America”, delivered one year before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. diagnosed a condition afflicting American polity many had not realized was bubbling at the surface of public consciousness. He writes:

“In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide. Hitler was a sick and tragic man who carried racism to its logical conclusion. He ended up leading a nation to the point of killing about 6 million Jews. This is the tragedy of racism because its ultimate logic is genocide. If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him; if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.”

Donald Trump’s deplorable trope not only conjures the colonial and imperial invectives of the first contact of Europeans with Africans, but, in our twenty-first century reality of militia, the resurgence of the KKK through rogue, armed ICE officers and a base all too willing to join him in his ethnic cleansing, it also, as King opines, carries racism to its logical conclusion.

It places blackness at an “either-or” intersection by linking it to a condition that needs little to no recognition of being human. We are apes. Apes do not belong in this new ideological prism of whiteness. Therefore, round up the apes.

It was, by definition, a coming attraction of the second phase of the “America First” (read: Project 2025) initiative, the first phased being carried out as I write, that is, the extirpation of “illegals” (read: Brown peoples).

King continues:

”To use a philosophical analogy here, racism is not based on some empirical generalization; it is based rather on an ontological affirmation. It is not the assertion that certain people are behind culturally or otherwise because of environmental conditions. It is the affirmation that the very being of a people is inferior. And this is the great tragedy of it.”

Our ontological entanglement as Africans in America has always been subject to the whims of American policy, dictated most by the party in charge. We have been able to garner huge wins regardless, owing mostly to the work of people like Dr. King, Dr. Abernathy, Andrew Young, Fannie Lou Hamer, and other stalwarts of the Civil Rights Movement. But when the leader of the free world brazenly posts his real feelings about Black skin, our existence is no longer subject to philosophical leanings.

In this America, our ontological reality as Black people are pitted against the voices of prominent Evangelical white (and black!) pastors joining in the chorus to purge America of those whose bloodline cannot be traced to American beginnings.

In this latest version of America’s racial awakening, I am reminded of words written by James Baldwin, “The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind.”

I do not know what will come of this. I can only mourn prophetically as I stand for peace and justice. I believe God’s plan for salvation is built on the presumption of human equality and freedom. St. Paul encapsulates it thusly: For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility…” (Ephesians 2:14) What Christ did for Jews and Gentiles, he has done for all people whereupon walls of division exist.

But I know this: We are at a sad state when the president of the United States of America sees Black people the same way Europeans saw Africans over many past centuries. In a single act, progress is juxtaposed between reality and the longing of every Black voice that ever cried out for freedom in this strange land we call America.

Pastor C. can be reached at: info@pastorwericcroomes.com