The American dream is white. There is no need to glorify it anymore.



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Donald Trump will forever be remembered as the president who set fire to American racial hatred.

– A racist red thread runs through the presidency of Donald Trump, writes Frode Bjerkestrand. Photo: Carlos Barria / REUTERS

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Friday January 20 In 2017, I was in Sacramento, California, where I was an exchange student in the early 1980s. It was one of the strangest days of my life.

That day we headed to the crematorium where my American host mother was to be buried. The campaign took place exactly at the same time that Donald Trump delivered his inaugural address in Washington DC.

We hear it on the car radio. – I’m glad you don’t have to experience this. Everything will be uglier from now on, said my American brother.

Today it’s easy to see that the brother was right.

He justified the assumption with his own experiences the previous year, when Donald Trump campaigned and became the new president of the United States. More and more often my brother was yelled at as “black”.

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All my five The American host brothers are descendants of Florida slaves and Philadelphia ghetto workers. They all told similar stories when we drank vigorously after the memorial service.

Before long, it was as if someone had opened the locks for the old lumps many thought were buried in the 1970s.

My brothers had no doubt that the Trump campaign helped legitimize entrenched racial hatred.

We know the state now. A racist red thread runs through the presidency of Donald Trump.

From the comment on “the good people on both sides” of the Charlottesville riots, to the evasive answer to the question of whether he wants to condemn “white power” groups in American society.

Trump behaves this way because he is white and he himself is privileged. But also because he knows that skin color or ethnic origin are among the most important criteria from which his voters define their political position.

Triumph Period It has seemed like a frantic quest for revenge for eight years with Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States.

If you want to be president of the United States, you must be born there. In the summer of 2016, in the middle of the last election campaign, the majority of Republican voters continued to believe that Obama was not born in the United States and, therefore, had cheated the presidential title.

The conspiracy theory and the “birth” campaign were led by one man: Donald Trump.

Implicit in it was the notion of white supremacy that those of color were unfit to lead, an idea with long roots, dating back to the days of slavery. Clearly racist, in other words.

How could this What happens in a country where the words “all men are created equal” are engraved on the country’s own declaration of independence?

Many have tried to describe the rebirth of racial hatred and hypocrisy of the last four years. One of those who does it more thoroughly is the African-American author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

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A year after that Trump was elected, Coates wrote the essay “The First White President” in The Atlantic magazine.

“It is often said that Trump has no ideology, which is not true. His ideology is white supremacy, in all its aggression and hypocrisy,” he writes.

This was posted when all liberal America and Europe tried to understand the poor, white working class, or “the curve of contempt” as Hillary Clinton had called them.

Even radical Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, believed that Trump’s surprising victory had to do with the economy and political blind spots.

The Charlottesville riots in August 2017 made American racism visible to all. Photo: Joshua Roberts / Scanpix

Coates thinks this The wave of class sympathy was misinterpreted, because the racism that prompted Trump’s involvement was never addressed. It remains the case that people of color are the losers in most American statistics, from unemployment to incarceration.

The misunderstanding lasted until most people discovered that it was not just the poor and unemployed whites who voted for Trump.

It also received surprisingly large support from middle-class white men and women.

A more recent measure from the Pew Research Center shows that many Americans have woken up. At least more Democratic voters now acknowledge that it has become much more difficult to be of color in the United States than before.

Killings, demonstrations and riots by the police have probably contributed to a greater awareness of this fact. Black Lives Matter isn’t just a riot, it could become one of America’s biggest political movements for decades.

My american mother was tough, wise, generous and proud. She herself met Obama once, calling him “my sixth child.” She called me “my Norwegian son”. She never referred to the color of my skin.

She left the Philadelphia ghetto in the 1950s. She used the “Green Book” map book to get safely to nursing school in Texas, when it was dangerous for people of color to drive badly in the southern states. And many decades before the movie of the same name became an Oscar winner.

She married, she lost her husband in the Vietnam War and raised five children alone.

She always believed that skin color shouldn’t influence where you are in society. Hard work, decency, humility and dignity were the most important values.

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Today it mixes grief over his death stems from desperation that the ideals he fought for his entire life will be torpedoed by a hateful, childish narcissist who is incredibly president of his own nation.

Then yes. I am also glad that he did not experience the presidency of Donald Trump.

What’s left after Donald Trump, it is a nation that is again divided by color codes. The structural racism of the United States is now so evident that it cannot be ignored, not even in the 51st state of the United States, Norway.

However, the American dream was not for everyone. Trump has repainted it white.

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