ABSTRACT
Following the presidential elections of 2016, Americans reflected a global sense of betrayal, and danger to any sense of personal and international stability. These dreads were, importantly, derived from the campaign rhetoric of the winner, in which he promoted nationalist propaganda, which valued Otherist, isolationist, ideals. Central to this American political position, and skirting with authoritarianism, is the open, unchallenged, validation of White supremacist ideology and action. While most Americans suffer the consequences of a system of castes determined by place on the economic ladder, the impact of class is, traditionally, cleverly downplayed by the power elite, who stridently identify the non-White Other as the source of discord and economic want among White citizens. A master of manipulation, Donald Trump tapped into these long-existing, cultural “truths,” and convinced those who voted for him that their ticket to whiteness centered upon their public projection of blame, and rage, into the readily identified, Black, Brown, and Immigrant Other. Historical antecedents to our current, chaotic, fear-inducing, political zeitgeist are explored along with discussing how whiteness serves as cover for the economic Otherness of disenfranchised White citizens. The perpetual suffering of African Americans under newly designed Jim Crow laws (the Prison Industrial Complex) is taken up as a critical area of interrogation.
