Former President Donald Trump and his campaign threw an event at Madison Square Garden over the weekend with tens of thousands of attendees. What we heard from the speakers about Black people, Latinos, Puerto Ricans, and Palestinians was utterly racist and bigoted. I would say I’m stunned, but I’m not. Unfortunately, it’s to be expected from those at the front of the MAGA movement. It was so vile it seemed to elicit groans from the crowd; even the MAGA faithful weren’t feeling the overt nature of the racism.
Even before the rally, there were some calling this rally a fascist, even “Nazi rally.” Yet as a Black liberationist and a former professor of African American History, the accusation troubled me. Bigotry, white supremacy, and white Christian nationalism are as American as apple pie. It is this aspect of America’s formation we cannot escape.
Calling Trump a Nazi or a fascist is giving our own history a pass.
Fascism is a populist political movement which advocates putting the nation first through a centralized, autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader who controls the economy and suppresses opposition. I do believe former President Trump is a fascist. He fits the description. Yet that does not make Donald Trump and his movement “Nazis” as a whole.
America’s history is dark enough that we do not have to export our comparisons to Nazi Germany. At the MAGA rally in New York, the bigotry and white supremacy spewed was American through and through.
My concern is that calling him a Nazi erases the American nature of his movement and makes it a foreign concept. It’s not foreign. The bigotry is not foreign, the white supremacy is not foreign, this movement is not foreign, it’s American and we must address it head-on to defeat it.
Moreover, the Nazi label diminishes the fact that millions of Jewish people and other ethnic groups, including people with disabilities, were mass murdered. And it completely erases the vile impact of the American slave system on Africans and their American descendants. Crimes against humanity happened on this soil.
Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Chattel slavery has taken up more of this land’s modern history than it has not. Black Americans were owned, enslaved, raped, and killed in this country—legally. Then, after abolition, Black Americans were lynched, discriminated against, denied opportunities, and so much more simply because we were Black.
The entire history of this country is ripe with horrifying examples of white terrorism on this soil.
During many lynchings of Black people, entire communities of white men, women, and children assembled to watch bodies burn or swing from trees. This happened in America.
Angry white mobs assembled in front of schools in the South to stop Black children from desegregating those schools is American. This happened in America.
Black people marching for voters’ rights and dignity were sprayed by firefighters with high-pressure water hoses and attacked by police dogs. This happened in America.
George Floyd was killed by a police officer’s knee to his neck. This happened in America.
This is who we are.
In 1962, author James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I reflect on that quote at this moment. I feel as though, in calling these rallies “Nazi rallies,” many are trying to wash their hands of our history in a way to say, “This is not who we are.”
Unfortunately, the truth is, this is who we are, and if we want to address it, we must face it. We gain nothing and lose everything if we cannot acknowledge our past.
When former President Trump says he wants to round up immigrants and put them in camps, he cites the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
It is not foreign. This is who we are.
There are always riveting reminders century after century calling on us to not forget our past sins and to atone for them. Unfortunately, we have neither learned from or atoned for White Supremacy and bigotry. You see, the same energy that empowered that white comedian to spew hate all out in the open without fear of consequence flows throughout the contours of this nation.
Our past is bloody and immoral. We must take responsibility for our own racialized mess and not attribute it to any other nation.
As the late Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan said, “What the people want is simple: They want an America as good as its promise—that as a nation, we live up to our historical promise of equality of opportunity.”
But a promise is not a reality. We can find hope in America’s promise, but America has yet to live up to it. Both are true at the same time.
The way to defeat this movement that endangers Americans who are working class and who aren’t insulated by wealth, power, and privilege is to confront our issues with real solutions. We must have a counter-movement that promises economic empowerment of the people, not the ultra-wealthy, with the promise of trickle-down economics.
Acknowledging our reality and addressing that reality with progressive populism is the antidote to fascism, not neoliberalism and fear-mongering.
We must acknowledge where we have been to get where we want to go.
Nina Turner is a former Ohio state senator, a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at the New School, and the founder of We Are Somebody.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
