Sadly, my main source of news these past few weeks has been Twitter. If you’ve played around with Twitter, you know that it is intended to grab audience attention with short statements and hashtags. After scrolling through my own feed, I’ve just begun to browse hashtags that are “trending”, meaning lots of people are using them in their own posts. Today, I was struck by one hashtag in specific- “PABPOTUS”.
At first glance, I was uninterested. After grazing over the remaining hashtags, though, I realized that I knew what all of them meant except for this one, in specific. As I did, you may be wondering what PAB stands for, and, unfortunately, it is quite explicit – “P**sy A*s B**ch President of the United States”. And, even more unfortunately, I, as do a vast majority of people in our nation, agree with what is underlying this sentiment: our president is a racist coward.
I believe that a person who leads is a person who also serves his or her country. President Trump has been notoriously, explicitly, racist during his term thus far. This is leading to a country that thinks being a racist is commonplace – our leader accepts, encourages, and IS racist! He is leading by example, and, sadly, other countries are seeing this. I chose one tweet in specific from his page to take a closer look at:
This tweet, posted a few years back, poses a serious question to our country – how are we letting this consistently racist man lead our country? What can we do to stop him? Are our marches and protests getting anywhere? This blatant racism in his generalizations shows his implicit biases and how so very strong they are. People in both the Democratic and Republican parties are seeing his horrible personality, but something needs to be done.
In this tweet, Trump makes a massive assumption about major crimes in cities. Without posting statistics or where he discovered this information, Trump throws out an entirely racist statement about two enormous groups of people in our country.
Though this tweet was posted 6 years ago, Trump’s obvious racist rampages have remained a common occurrence throughout this time. When, and how, are we going to take action that will stop this behavior, once and for all?
This more recent tweet builds on the views Trump presented as his own earlier, in 2013. Though this tweet is (arguably) not as blatantly racist, the statement made may have had an even more harmful affect on those who reside in our country and are a part of the minority groups Trump targets regularly. Tweets like this make some question whether or not the comment was racist – the words sting, but are they actually a source of racism?** This confusion leads to more harm. Trump is our current president – he represents our country in times of conflict and peace. But, as shown, he cannot maintain the peace within his own country. How can we fight back and promote in-country peace and pride, without crowding the streets with violence and white supremacy?
** Yes, the tweet is racist. Among other things, the elected congressional representatives to which the tweet refers are all U.S. Citizens; they are, however, not White. Ayanna Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York — about 20 miles from where Trump was born. Ilhan Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia; her family fled the country amid civil war when she was a child, and she became a U.S. citizen as a teenager. source