Another day, another tweet from President Donald Trump. It doesn’t quite come as a surprise to anyone anymore, does it? Our president has desensitized many of us to his cruelty and ignorance by exposing us to his repulsive words on a daily, or sometimes hourly, basis.
But let us not avert our eyes from one of his latest ventures: calling for the firing of ESPN host Jemele Hill, who characterized the president as a white supremacist on Twitter. Last Friday, Trump took to Twitter to write the following, directed at Hill: “ESPN is paying a really big price for its politics (and bad programming). People are dumping it in RECORD numbers. Apologize for untruth!”
Hill’s tweets, which she posted last Monday, had even drawn the attention of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders during a press briefing Wednesday. Sanders, demonstrating her immense capability for incompetence, said Hill’s tweets constituted a “fireable offense.”
A fireable offense? Really? Since when does the press secretary for a right-wing administration, or any administration, for that matter, suggest a citizen in the private sector be fired for expressing an opinion on Twitter? Hill did not call for violence, and frankly, she didn’t say anything others hadn’t already. Why exactly should ESPN fire her?
I read her tweets, which largely focused on Trump’s fitness for office (or, rather, lack thereof) and his empowerment of white supremacists. She emphasized how our president has surrounded himself with members of the “alt-right,” a faction of the right wing that touts white nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism.
Lest we forget, Trump himself blamed “both sides” after white nationalist groups confronted Black Lives Matter activists in Charlottesville, Virginia, just a few weeks ago. Our president essentially compared members of the Ku Klux Klan to members of social justice groups, even after footage came out of white nationalists chanting “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us” as they marched across the University of Virginia campus.
And before you get too comfortable thinking perhaps Trump has pivoted (Can you even pivot from something like this? My gut says no.) from that stance, don’t hold your breath: Just this past Thursday, our president repeated his notorious “both sides” claim after a reporter asked about his meeting with Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. Trump has sure distanced himself from the ideology of his favorite racist gremlin, Steve Bannon, huh?
Plain and simple, we have a man in the Oval Office who refuses to denounce racism and the agents of racism. We have a president waltzing around the West Wing suggesting, on multiple occasions, that Black Lives Matter activists are just as bad as neo-Nazis and the KKK. He has had more than one chance to walk these statements back, to reflect on the blatant malice of his words. But Trump is an ignorant, prejudiced coward, and he has continuously indicated he is not willing to denounce racism.
If you refuse to denounce racism, you are racist. That is how prejudice works. If you are comfortable enough to stay silent when you hear prejudiced remarks — whether they are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic or anything else — your silence highlights your complicity. You are complicit in that prejudice. Prejudice does not allow for innocent bystanders.
So, you know what? Not only should Hill keep her job, or any job she wants for that matter, but we should listen to her closely. Because she is right, and she said it best herself in fewer than 140 characters: “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself (with) other white supremacists.”
Mia Gettenberg is a UF criminology and philosophy senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
