In 2018, I wrote an Op-Ed for this paper under the headline “We’re All in the Ghetto Now.” I criticized Donald Trump’s flagrant disregard of constituents and constituencies he didn’t like or consider allies.
Back then, I used “the ghetto” to describe the impact of Mr. Trump’s tendency to demonize his perceived enemies and then cast them into a permanent irrelevance that justified his ignoring of their concerns, to put them over there. I was exploring the connections between a white authoritarian politician’s dangerous worldview and the most demonized of American spaces, the black ghetto.
When I wrote in 2018, “the ghetto” was a metaphor. It feels more real all the time.
Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, a majority of us are living in a ghetto of Mr. Trump’s creation, physically and politically. The ghetto is a large majority of America, confined at home and in neighborhoods that went from being sanctuaries to stagnant, stressful places whose prospects have vanished overnight.
Like generations of black people who’ve lived in segregation everywhere in country, people of all colors from California to Maine are frustrated, anxious and significantly jobless. They are being ignored and dismissed by top leadership that is indifferent about whether they live or die.
This is life in the ghetto that Mr. Trump’s inept and heartless handling of the coronavirus pandemic has created.
The president has said the enemy is the virus, but that’s too abstract for him; the real enemy is anyone who acknowledges the seriousness of the coronavirus crisis, which continues to upstage and overshadow him.
This means that people obeying lockdown orders, sheltering at home, demanding tests, getting sick or dying all disturb Mr. Trump’s embattled sense of superiority and control. They have all been relegated to the enemy list — the ghetto — and in his mind deserve not just irrelevance but also contempt.
Of course this was preceded by his ghettoizing of the governors of states who have ordered lockdowns and other measures, like Jay Inslee of Washington, Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California. (The fact that these are blue states made Mr. Trump’s dismissal of the well-being of their residents that much easier. You might say that blue is the new black.)
This would all be absurd it were not so tragically real. The more the death toll rises and the clearer it becomes that Mr. Trump is totally unsuited for the moment, the more he rails and divides, taking the conservative phenomenon of “blaming the victim” to shameless new heights. This time the victims are not just protesters or poor, black urban dwellers; they are all of us living everywhere, because the virus lives everywhere.
At least now we have confirmation of what many of us have known for a long time — Trumpism is not a new political philosophy or coherent agenda, but simply him versus us. And in his mind he always wins, even if he’s actually losing, as he certainly is now. Yet — this bears repeating — Mr. Trump’s outrageous stance tracks with the American view of ghettos, projecting them as failures deserving indifference at best, even though the failure is all ours. As a country, we have a long and sordid history of not taking responsibility for the most vulnerable among us.
Mr. Trump’s relentless ghettoizing confirms something else that has been obvious for a long time, long before he became president: The United States is not united, especially when the chips are down. The most resources-rich country in the world could not find the wherewithal to warn its people about what was coming, and it continues to bumble basic things like administering tests and acquiring enough ventilators. This is because Republicans have been vilifying the federal government, embedded with the ideal of a common good for a common American people, for the past 40 years. The fact that the most conscientious response to this historic crisis is coming from individual governors, not the White House, may be appalling, but it’s not surprising.
It was inevitable that the group suffering the highest fatality rate from the virus would be black. Instead of putting that statistic over there, per usual, other Americans have to see themselves within it, because they are at risk, too.
Can we save ourselves? I would like to think so, but the fact that traditional ghettos have not been able to do so — it has been structurally impossible — does not bode well for our future. I have occasionally been heartened to see all the messages and images of people heroically coming together in very tough times. Americans are good, almost instinctual, at campaigns like this.
But the campaigns are not enough. They are a reaction to the forces of separation, alienation and devaluation that Mr. Trump did not create but that he expands at will, with little pushback. He puts us in ghettos whenever and however he feels like it. The question is when, and how, we will break out of them.
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